Approximately Adam: Day Thirty-Eight

August 26, 2004
Day Thirty-Eight

I sat there in my car, low-beams lighting up the gardens and fence that made up her grandmother's front yard. We had just hugged for a moment, and I watched her walk down the stone walk to the door. It was at that moment, just sitting there and taking it all in, that I realized that I had accumulated something of value in my life that was worth appreciating, that the sum of my driftings was something worth holding onto, in some form, and that there is enough of me that I'll be fine in whatever I do, so no worries. Most of all, I realized, perhaps consciously for the first time, that I'm a worthwhile human being and I shouldn't be embarrassed to express myself openly and finally fucking connect with another human being. For too long I've shied away from intimate contact in all of its forms. Too long I've avoided exposing myself, letting the currents of humanity flow around me without allowing myself to see what it's all really about. I've been afraid, I guess, that the awkward self-concious overly sentimental idealist with his many faults and biases and simplifications wasn't worth the time of day it deserved. So I created this obnoxious shell that manipulated situations in order to avoid having emotional evolution. I relieved my emotional needs through the safety of fictional mediums like books and movies. In the meantime, I accumulated a menagerie of people around me who either see through the shell to what's deeper or take solace in the shell for its consistency, using the safety that I build from it like an umbrella under which they can mask their own insecurities. Some are wise enough to grab onto whatever connections that can make in this beautiful, sad little world. Recently, I haven't found what I've been looking for in my parents. I blamed them a bit for it, but now, finally I realize that the fault was mine. How must it be having a son that is easy to love but so difficult to understand? My father can't always penetrate and my mother accepts the shell when it suits her needs and digs deeper when what she's looking for is harder to find. Occassionally, like ships passing in the night, our thoughts and feelings align by coincidence for brief perfect moments. I am at home with them, because there is so much of me in them. When you're operating at roughly the same pitch, the circumstances occasionally align such that there is resonance. But these were moments that we both understood instinctually, seeing your thoughts like a mirror in the other's eyes, but none of us knew what caused it or how it should be maintained. Perhaps they did but I avoided it, retreating as always into a safe place in the murkier recesses of my own skull. How sad the posers; what happiness will they find? At least when I faked it, my disguise was an original one. How insecure must those who must take another's identity to hide behind be?

Every night, I am up to all hours of the night, searching for something that I don't understand. The movie Garden State tonight made me understand, struck me in a very real place. How surreal that a movie would tell me to get out of my chair and go live my life, already. Tonight I found what I was searching for, the key to letting me just be me already. I can only hope that force of habit does not force me back into my shell.

P.S. I'm really pissed that I couldn't finish this entry before midnight, just for my own silly goals, but I think the end product was worth it.

^{posted by Adam at 12:07 |}

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