It will get better

I think about packing up whatever belongings I would value in the situation and just leave, drive off, pick a place on a map and leave. Fuck everything else and anyone who would have to pick up after me. But I know I would never do it. I can move every six months and change jobs every year. That's no problem, because the constraints are built out of necessity and provision for the things I cannot seem to forget long enough to fancy such an ultimately rebellious thought: my parents and my college loans. It seems awfully small minded to believe that you're never going to know what true comfort is because of $35,000, but it has for me. That figure haunts me almost daily.

I think that if I finally, after years of deliberation and excuses (usually involving money), get a tattoo that somehow my life will change for the better. That by sitting in some chair after perhaps weeks of artistic rendering at my expense and being willfully subjected to a pain those with tattoos describe as otherworldly and addictive, I will become automatically more selfish with my dreams and therefore fight harder to attain them. Even though they're as common as toe rings and wedgie sandals nowadays, I still want to believe they're something magical.

I think that if I can find some elusive apartment whose walls actually allow me to insert nails that will support something heavier than key rack (not that I'd need one, as I am not important enough to have more than one keychain), one with central air and heat, washer and dryer, a tub and a shower all within my current financial ability and still pay all my bills and debts off on time monthly, that this will mean I've moved up in the world, that I'm not some aspiriing adult still living like I'm in the dorms. If I could somehow buy into some kind of image that makes me feel grown up and due for a gilded future before my 30's, well, then I'd have accomplished something.

One of the problems with people in general, and I'd venture a guess to say Americans, is that we tend to get too self-absorbed. We so often need a distraction. For me, it can be a movie, a book, or a conversation, some experience that forces me to pay attention to something besides my own problems that, for all my obsessing, I've yet to fix or improve. Or so I think.

I guess that's one reason I write here and on my website and smile everytime I get an email about it or a postcard. It reminds me that I am not just the sum of my own problems and feelings of hopelessness. But it can never be enough, and it wasn't built to end up that way, it just wasn't.

The human animal needs something to tie into, a constant. (Henry Rollins)

I'm getting to that point where I'm going to start striking up conversations with people I see in the common areas I frequent. I'm going to start getting brave. I think I'm going to scare the shit out of some people, but I'm also getting to the point where I don't care. Sure, I am cemented into place by elusive numbers and dollar signs, yet I consider the former act brave. My constants are not comforting anymore.

The idea that it will get better is the kind of thing you stupidly say to someone when the grieving process has just begun or has just materialized out of long space of internal silence. I try not to use that line on myself because I think other people like saying it. They're also likely saying it to themselves and they often don't believe it either way. The runner up is "It's going to be allright."