Somethings and Nothing

I can remember moments from my other life. They drift drearily into my mind, softly sliding back to me from the bowels of my subconscious. They belong to the man who died the first death, the man that birthed the man I am and murdered the man I was.

I can remember a classroom in the Abraham Lincoln wing of my college's humanities building. I can remember old wooden desks, old wooden chairs, and an old wooden professor at the front of the class. I can remember something about Rousseau. Jack Rousseau? Jacques Rousseau? "Something" Rousseau. I can remember something.

Something about poverty. Something about the the freedom of the first men, wandering about the jungles and the forests before there was property and war and death. I remember something about that. The old wooden professor said something about the "naked personality," the human being brought to nothing--stripped of its somethings. He told us--the students sitting on the old wooden chairs behind the old wooden desks--that a man can only know what he is when he becomes nothing. Alone, isolated, bereft of every other person and every other thing. That would be the condition in which men could discover their true selves. I think he said that that's what Rousseau thought. Jacques Rousseau.

I've lived like that for too long. I know what it's like to be nothing.

I sit on a step or a curb. I sleep on cement or the road. I wake up without. I live without. I sleep without. I have nothing.

I see the people that have something. They walk past me. They have things. Suits, briefcases, hats, gloves, jobs, kids, places to go. They have personalities. Some look busy, they're defined by what they have to do, what they have to accomplish. Others have children, they're defined by fatherhood or motherhood, by the love that they share with their loved ones. They're fashionable because of what they wear, cultured because of the restaurants that they eat at and the shows that they go to. Their somethings give them an identity. Their somethings make them something.

I have nothing. I am nothing. I don't have a family, so I cannot love. I don't have a job, so I cannot be busy. I don't have money, so I cannot be fashionable or cultured. I don't have a home, so I can't retreat from the world to a place that is my own. Having nothing hasn't made me something, it hasn't shown me anything. Except, perhaps, the cold reality of nothing.

The man that I used to be--you should have seen him--was something. He had a home and a family and a favorite restaurant on 22nd Street. He'd go there in a dark brown suit with a friend and have two eggs with toast and a coffee. I miss that man. I miss being something. But nothing comes from nothing, and I'll be nothing till the end of my days.