I woke today realizing I had yet to fall asleep. In fact I'd been laying here, curled up with the woman about to be my wife watching a movie, exhausted from a night of drinking, working, and playing the parts needed for both, and I just suddenly was... awake. Not that I'm not exhausted, in fact I should be sleeping right now. At 10am. However I'm not, I'm picking up a clever title I came up with eons ago in another form of my life and writing.... a book? An essay? Garbage? Time, and surely those who read it, will tell.
What am I writing about? I'll never tell. You figure it out on your own... I believe in you. I'm not even 100% sure myself, maybe we'll figure it out together one day.
- This was the year I actually bothered to become a real person. I was neat, there was cake. It wasn't the year of my birth, thankfully. I'd hate to consider that I was just now about the same age I was then. Not that being that age then was horrid, in fact it was one of the highlights of my life. I discovered many things in my 17th year of occupying planetary space... pot, hangovers, despair, uncertainty, blowjobs, that suffocating 90mph heartbeat feeling the first time the super hormones tell you you're in love, camaraderie, the stillness of being completely alone in a field on a moonless midnight just feeling like you exist and challenging the universe to dare try and prove that you don't.
And no one cared.
I had friends, and they liked me and I them, my family loved me, however had I never existed in the first place how could they have known to miss me. This realization was powerful to my still tenderly fresh mind, and I reveled in the blissfulness of that shock.
That sudden self awareness. I was a person. A real life not on TV not make of gingerbread or wood person. And no one cared. They all found it to be completely predictable that I existed (though to be fair, the had had plenty of warning) and seemed to take the fact somewhat for granted.
Sometimes... like now... my heart goes back to that year and I smile and think about the power of fresh new emotions on such a young mind. It's exhausting just to think about, but there's certainly a touch of envy that trickles in there as well. It's now 17 years later and I still feel like I probably exist, but my mind has become callused by experience.