February 19th, 2010 Essay for the Blog
Who's gonna come to your funeral? Why are they gonna be there? What are they gonna say? Think? Feel? For real?
Will they celebrate your life? The things you've accomplished, lives you've touched? It's important to me only because my answers suck. Most of the guys I know who've died in the last fifteen years or so? I doubt they had much of a memorial service. Especially since they don't give convicts furloughs to attend homeboys' funerals.
Only the good die young, so my body's gonna be a wrinkly bag of bones, believe me. I always thought I'd die young. Once I hit twenty-five, I figured longevity was part of the punishment.
The part that tears me is that my life, leading up to now, has left me with a bunch of awareness of what I'm not. All the things I don't have, haven't achieved, or lost the chance at forever.
Stress is a way of life for me. Insecurity, doubt, fear, self, whatever . . . I wasn't always this way. I used to be good at meeting people, comfortable with my own skin. In other words, if I'd have died before the age of eleven, I'd have been all good. Standing room only at the 'planting,' ya know?
Thirty five is too old to try and learn how to live. Too old to have nothing. To realize there won't be many people going through changes to get to my funeral.
It's not that it matters in the grand scheme, I suppose. It's that, for so many years I saw no good in myself, and only after total immersion in pain & torture did I glimpse some [good in myself], finally. Finally.
Yet here I sit, in jail, awaiting transfer to a mental hospital, no less. Six months to life reads the penal code. Beaths the hell outta prison.
I have a circle though. Tiny, but tight. Real. It's not common, or easy to make friend in this life. The ones you often think are, or will be, turn out to have no concept of the word, or its value.
Technology makes it another degree of separation. Why put in the work when you can just delete someone & make no more with the touch of a button?
I don't know. I do know that it's a double-blessing to make friends with someone you're related to. Probably more & more uncommon, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment