Before and After Christmas

These days it is endless suspensions around the phrase (so-to-speak) “You look beautifully healthy, so healthy. Healthy.” Today a year ago, I would have been mortified and disappointed with myself. I would have irrationally translated the comment and believed that it was an alternative way of saying I looked full-figured, voluptuous and simply heavy. Despite this being the case (actually being rather curvy) or not—now, it doesn’t seem to matter. I smile, concentrate on what is really being said to me, nod and say, “I have to be. I really need the energy.” Then after my open appreciation and/or recognition of the subject, others want to proceed—“It looks like New York must really be it. Keepin’ yah healthy.” I overly agree, saying, “There can be no other way. Thank goodness, it’s keeping me alive, would never imagine going back to how it was, what it was, what I was, I couldn’t be that now.” Tonight it was a cousin that chimed in, breaking the intimacy or honesty of the conversation and laughingly said, “So you’ve gained some weight.” Yes, pounds. And I thank everything today and along the way, that has inspired me not to judge the play of perception but to go back to just “workin’ whatca got.” Of course, it has been more than just these simple and rather, superficial terms. As on the surface it seems/seemed/and was seen to be, it wasn’t. And because of that, I can look back and grow distant from the experience but always have had it and even as terrible as an experience as it was for me and everyone else, I appreciate, understand and never deny a moment. This was the first Christmas where I didn’t fall asleep wishing or wake up expecting that this would be the chance for something new, that this would be the day things changed. Today, nothing needs to.

Last night even reiterated, for myself (and this is my own way of living), that the end was and is decided for a reason. I cannot return to that moment of feeling in time—it will only be a re-experience of the past, but it will never be what it was in the past. Nor would I like it to be. I feel like the bulk of others remain at a distance because they assume I have become too serious, that I’m not “giving myself up to every experience”, or that maybe I am just simply exaggerating my assertiveness and thus, will readjust my behavior to compliment their flimsy mental states and behavioral inadequacies. The way I behave and the commentary that ensues in response to the deficient personalities I unfortunately encounter (at times too intimately, even if it just be in a locked car) is no joke. I keep pressing for others to grow up, level/ground themselves in reality (and by reality, I mean, at this age the here-and-now is no long a sugar coated existence of Candy Land board games and childhood reliance, dreamlands or wishy-washy attitudes towards others and life). It overly frustrates me; I want everyone I interact with to take “it” seriously, but they won’t—can’t—can’t even let themselves and are fearful of the reality (seen clear only after the guise and disfigurement of drugs and maybe even worse than drugs, self-denial, wears off). One must become sober to the actuality of the world. Perceive, judge and understand the events of the world the way you wish (these are the gifts we are given) but you must accept the fundamental facts—otherwise, goodbye success and goodbye successful relationships. Most suffer so severely from any commitment to the reality of life past four to twenty-two years of age, that it scares me for them. Less and less “adults” will move away from home, face their future without a team holding their hand and wiping their ass and/or brow. Denial of oneself, denial of what it means to grow—what in the world is becoming of our generation? Hungry for their past and ending up starving in their future.