The Reluctant Narcissist
I’d be lying to you if I said that the porthole into my past wasn’t dirty and smudged from the thousand or so times I’d pressed my face up against it to relive where I’ve been and watch the person I used to be. I cling tightly to anything I once was. And everything I once understood. It is an activity I have spent far too much time at. Something I’ve become far too good at. Dare I say prolific?
Seeing how I was then, with the knowledge I have now, is torture.
Every moment can give as much as it wants unto itself, but alas here I am in the future, constantly trying to suck the juice from an otherwise dried fruit.
Once I knew nothing, now I know some things. Few, to be sure, but enough to always know how little I knew the moment before now. Once I didn’t know enough to care what people thought. Now I care far too much. Once I acted on instinct, and that instinct was true. Now, well, I am getting back to that. Remembering how to be who you really are can be a challenge. Once I was fearless, and playful, and god incarnate. But somewhere along the line jaded realism sat down and put its feet up in my mind. In theory he has been evicted, but it is all I can do now to keep him from coming over to borrow a cup of sugar.
As a child I wanted the world, the big world. On long summer days I would lie on my back in the park and look up at the sky. It was the first place I got the impression that the world was endless. I would lay there until that purple vastness pushed down on me with tickled beauty. God you are so big world. Wherever will I find you?
My parents love me for sure. And they paved a smooth road for me that ran time infinitum. Run they said. Run as far and as fast as you dare. Dad said have a plan, Mom knew I’d do something bigger than planning. It makes sense that my father writes in print, capital block letters with tremendous gravitas. My mother writes in script, cursive. Elegant turns that spin their ways around lines like a white gloved ice skater, tracing the music with her hands.
I was afraid to fail, afraid to be laughed at, afraid to be made fun of. But I was anyway, back when being called gay was the worst insult in the world. I worried I was too different to be anything. Repetitive chopping fells even the thickest of trees. What tree deserves a blade to its knee? Memories of that axe.
But so what. Any excuse I over used.
In order to be a success I knew I would have to find my path. I bought machetes and chopped a hugger mugger of bamboo from the woods of preconceived notions, and hazy options. I will find my way out of this. Chop, grow back, turn. Chop, grow back, turn. Chop, grow back, turn.
They say you can never go home. They say time heals all wounds. They say everything happens for a reason. True, false, undecided. I say my wounds will never really heal, and neither will yours. I say I took my home with me the day I left it, if indeed that makes any sense. I say I am the reason, and I am happening to everything. I am happening to you.
And I need not close my port hole to set my sights on the future, but I need not stand so close to it either.
