The Second of the Short Stories I Wrote Last Night
You should never take my advice, little one. Can you not see where life has left me? I believe it was Hemingway who said, “Happiness in intelligent people is one of the rarest things I’ve seen.”
You are young, I don’t know you very well and I will never send you this letter, because if I was going to send it I wouldn’t make some of the admittances I will now make.
The beauty of youth is mostly held in the ability to be naïve, and in being so naïve you are able to love freely with your whole heart. Being naïve is something that fades throughout life, but the ability to not be ignorant to the awareness of the various layers of life, both socially, romantically and also on a day to day basis, is not something I believe that you that posses and I have my doubts that you will ever move from the spot of awareness which I currently believe you are at.
Don’t feel bad, very few posses this awareness and I can honestly tell you that it is no walk in the park to have it. I would have far preferred to have not been jostled and scarred and bumped out of position by other people thought life in the way that I have been. Still, I cannot lie and say that I regret the pain I went through in order to live the times in my life that I believe few people get to experience; but I can tell you that the bigger your heart is, the harder it will break.
On the other hand, as I have already stated I do not know you. You might be a fucking genius for all I know. I could most definitely be judging you completely inaccurately. Which would spurn the question of why you want guidance, advice or the involvement in your life of a character such as myself. Why you would seek the opinion of the person in our fucked up family who has spent years walking in shadows and peering out from behind dark corners only to jump into the flood lights and show themselves as the anomaly that I am and have become. I am our family’s Missing Link; Big Foot, or the Loch Ness Monster. No one should take advice from a monster.
But am I ‘a monster’ or the man behind the monster I’ve been made out to be because I ask people to ask questions?
Am I a monster for asking people to ask themselves things? Should no one ask themselves whether or not they are happy? Is life worth living if you are unhappy?
There are things about this world that you would live easier not questioning. Life is always easier when you don’t question things. It always seems safer to sweep things under the rug.
Don’t think that even from the pedestal of bullshit that I have raised myself onto that I don’t still sweep things under the rug. I might not do so much sweeping once something has appeared on the floor, but there is definitely an avalanche of skeletons hiding in my closet. This avalanche of skeletons have become ghosts at night, and they dance around me as I sleep, penetrating my subconscious to be reborn as what seems like fucked up details of the ever playing reels of my waking life.
Want to know a secret? When I am sad, I live in my dreams.
I sleep all day and all night because my dreams are better than reality.
I believe it was Dr. Suess who once said “You know you are in love when you cannot sleep, because your reality is finally better than your dreams.”
You may not know this, because even my mom and my dad and my sister don’t know this, but when I was nine or ten I wrote an entire novel; complete with illustrations constructed out of pictures cut out from the newspaper of men’s swim trunks, and TVs, and glorious meals, and people that I didn’t know, depicted in catalogs fun and being together in a way that I could not be with my peers at that time in my life. Funny how real the fake people in fake situations in fake advertisements can seem so real to a child who is so alone.
That’s why I wrote that novel, and that is why I still write now; because in the middle of the night I am drunk and alone. When I am drunk and alone the only thing that could even halfway comfort me is the dialogue bouncing around back and forth in my head between me and myself. This dialogue almost seems comforting when it starts, until my often immediate realization that this pseudo-dialogue it is the most lonely thing in the whole world, and I begin to wonder if it makes me human or if it makes me crazy.
I hope this feeling is one that you never meet or become companions with in the way that I have.
If you are still reading this letter I hope you have realized that I am either an asshole, or ambivalently pretentious, or completely off my rocker; because if you haven’t I feel so terrible for you.
If you are sitting there nodding your head and understanding these words that I am writing to you, then I feel worse for you than any other person in the whole world because you are plagued by the awareness that I realize on a day to day basis.
Do you know that what I have wanted most in life, since always, is to fall in love and live my own happily ever after? Even though it goes against everything that is me, all I really want is to fall in love and then marry the shit out of that woman and make a life together. I want the chance to pretend that I’m just like everything else, everything that was promised to us in the 90s.
I know you are younger than I am and that extremely few (or any) of your memories are in the 90s, but back then they promised all of us that we would grow up and be rock stars, and politicians that saved the world with Captain Planet. They promised we would solve mysteries with Scooby and the gang. That we would be brilliant little child movie stars like Lindsay Lohan in ‘The Parent Trap’. Look at poor Lindsay Lohan now, getting mistaken for Debbie Harry, who is at least thirty years her senior.
Such an unfortunate product of the 90s Lindsay was. It’s not fun to watch the aftermath of the 90s crash around you when all of a sudden the economy has flopped, we are in a recession and everyone is additionally even poorer from getting divorced. Meanwhile, the offspring of these pour souls are left to walk the earth wondering what happened to all the promises that were made to them fifteen years ago before you were even born.
Soon enough you’re going to come to an unfortunate understanding of the world around you. I shudder for where the world may be when you graduate from high school. I shudder for the realizations you will make about the world once it is forcibly set upon you by the course of your life.
I come back again to the question of why in the hell you would seek out an individual such as myself to gather advice or experience from. In the context that you know me, I am nothing less than the last person you should seek advice or guidance from, because even at over a decade your senior, I’m quite sure I am still just as lost you are, just a little less naïve and therefore less able to love than you are; and the ability to blindly love other people is, and continues to be, a quality in a person which should be held sacred and will always be rare to find.
