Today I was talking to some friends whom I haven’t seen much of over the summer. I shared with them a bit of the details of the roller coaster of our last few weeks.
You know, just your average roller coaster of life.
When I finished rolling out the 4-11, the friend circle was just quiet and looking at me. Nobody said anything, so I just kinda chuckled and shrugged it off with a laugh and a “well, five years ago when I was sitting at the pub drinking beers and having the easy life, I’d never had believed someone if they told me this is where I’d be five years, heh heh.”
And the crickets continued to chirp their response.
Relationships are a trick of the mind. Everyday we get up alone and spend the entire course of the day, alone, inside our singular minds. It takes a cold-mirror moment like the one I had today to remind me that what we need and get from other people is valuable and limited. And yet that which we mine from ourselves is skewed and often without perspective.
I am pretty sure that in the last 18 months or so, in the process of building one part of my life, I haven’t been as capable or as good at making my friends happy, answering calls for help, or greasing the wheels of relationships in life that make spontaneous conversation meaning-full.
The ground I walk on is unfamiliar and I feel cast away on an island of ill-terrain, where the natives aren’t unfriendly– they just aren’t that interested. So, in the midst of carrying the weight of life, I have mostly put aside trying to integrate.
I go the well myself. It’s a well I dug myself. I sit at the well alone and sing about tin roofs, Roman ghosts and the battlement of my fears.
I sleep heavy in sweat and dream of a well gone dry.
In my “Fantasy Island,” de plane carries me away to the mainland… whatever that may be.
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