An Attempt to Tip the Scales

Career. Professionalism. Propriety. Financial security. Respectability. Success? Relative.

My brother wants to be a lawyer. A prosecutor. He is more than smart enough and well on his way. It’ll happen; I know it will. Ten years from how he’ll be passionately prosecuting a human-trafficking case of Supreme Court levels. He’ll pace slowly back and forth before a jury or judge, ask them questions they already know the answer to, just to make his point.

He’ll wear suits all the time and keep his embossed business cards in an engraved brass case. He’ll hand them out to wealthy clients, but there’s a waiting list so until it’s their turn he’ll have someone else deal with them; maybe a pretty blond secretary who tries and fails to get his attention by showing too much cleavage, or an intelligent but nervous intern who tries and fails to get his attention by quoting famous dead men.

They fail to get my brother’s attention because he is thinking about his cases, and when he isn’t, he is thinking about his wife and children to whom he goes home every evening.

I am fairly certain that this is his future. His success. I’ve known it for years; since we were children. Years ago, my mom mentioned that Evan would make a good lawyer. At that moment I knew with strangely strong certainty what lay ahead for him.
Even when he was an English major, even when he considered medical school. I knew it would be law. And I know he will be good at it. I know he will be successful. Check back with me in ten years; I’ll be right. You’ll see.

I am not so certain about my own future. I have gone far, far from any childhood inklings of a niche.

My very first aspiration was to be a pony, but the horrid process of growing up rendered even that unattractive; gave me the maturity to realize that ponies live outside in all weather, eat grass, and are sometimes abused and neglected.

I don’t want to be a pony anymore.

So I’m lost. My visions of success are so varied and so many doors have closed that I’m not sure what is even safe to dream anymore.
I have one—a dream, that is--one so unrealistic I know it is dangerous to think about. I know it will only send me after ghosts and I will catch those ghosts because I am stubborn but when I do, I’ll fall through their evanescence and land rock-bottom. I know it’ll bruise.

But tonight I am too tired for caution; too tired to suppress all thought of the future I’d wish for if there was anything trustworthy to wish on.

An apartment that allows dogs, in Chicago or maybe Portland. An art gallery where I spend most of my free time. Not my own gallery--I'll be too busy with my position at the FBI as a Criminal Investigative Analyst--but my art will be there, pieces of myself hung up on the walls, and in some dim-lit room I'll play my songs, though no one will know they're mine. A few independent albums that are loved by the bohemian underground, but my face never shows up on any kind of screen.

Mission work in South Africa; maybe some with children in Uganda or Kenya. I'll document with camera and pen between adventures that cause me to forget myself completely.
Night falls but we don’t make a fire. Deep in the balmy jungle, we just unroll our blankets and curl up under a makeshift tent. The calls of howler monkeys, the panting of some cunning hunter in the dark, the drip drip drip of the tropics and the air thrums with some morbidly eloquent magic so intense I can feel it vibrating against my skin. Goosebumps rise everywhere and I breathe deep to calm the erratic spasms of my heart as it pounds with the night—not afraid but trembling with life and exhilaration fueled by danger and mystery and beauty. Maybe a little afraid. But the fear is like a drug when combined with the thaumaturgic, nearly sacred rite of what it is to spend a night in the bush.

And I'll chase the animals, for a week or two, when my work with the children is done for the year. I will have special photography permission from Kruger National Game Reserve and they’ll send a bush-guide out with me. By this time, though, I’ll have had plenty of bush experience and won’t really need him, so I’ll just make him carry my tripod.
I’ll chase the wild animals. I’ll stalk elephants and hunt lions, and when I hear the bloodcurdling snarl of a leopard on the kopje my heart will leap—but from excitement, not fear. I would risk much for a dynamic close-shot of this scathingly beautiful monster, baring her huge fangs and funneling all of her fury directly at me through green eyes so intense I can feel their burn, scalding and far more penetrating than the glare of the African sun. The glare that no longer sends me to bed for days, cause by then maybe, in this dream world, I'll have had a miraculous remission of my disease.

Yes, these dreams are dangerous to think about. And they’re on my mind too much lately, so much I can’t tell if I’m living in a past I can’t get back or a future that doesn’t exist.

Something else has been happening to me lately, or maybe it’s already happened and I’m just now noticing it. My brain is rusty—the wheels catch on each other as they turn and I think something is seriously wrong with the connection to my tongue. I know what I want to say. Give me a pen and paper, give me a keyboard and I’ll say it. It’ll be in purple prose and metaphor; run-on sentences and grammar purposely skewed in attempt at creative style, but I’ll say it and you’ll probably understand, mostly.

I can’t talk anymore, though. I say things but they are simply-spoken; there are no synonyms in my mind and the words I do speak never reach anyone. They get lost, blown back by the wind; dangling from my earrings or something so that I hear their jingle and to me the rhythm makes sense enough to dance to, but I stay still cause no one else knows what I mean. Every other beat they hear, maybe, and some extra pauses; mistake-notes. I sound incompetent; I sound awkward and it makes me want to end every conversation by begging whomever to believe that I really am not as ignorant as I seem.

Yes, there’s something broken in my brain. And it makes me wonder if I’ll ever be anything more than a dip in and back out of anyone’s life. The character-part to your hero.
I wouldn’t mind it, I suppose, remaining the character-part. The only time I was successful as an actress in was in a character role; one that didn’t really matter but the audience remembered her.

And that’s really what I want, I guess—to be remembered.
Ultimately what else is there to want, when you consider the alternative? Forgotten. You meet people, go in and out of their lives like they do yours, and it goes on until you die and if they don’t really remember you then what’s the point?

I’m fairly certain of some who will remember me. I’m also fairly certain of some who will forget.
Some who have already forgotten. Given up on me and I don’t blame them cause I have a fair amount of preoccupation and I’m so tired that I just don’t have the strength in me to be memorable.
To be particularly funny or intelligent or a good friend-—to attempt the regaining of qualities I once had. Too complicated, too messy—-so I understand the forgetting.

I want to wear a sign. One that says, 'You should've known me Before--I was once so much better than this.'

Every day is a new opportunity to make my mark on someone’s mind though, I suppose; tuck a little bit of myself in between the wrinkles of their brain and make sure it’s stuck fast so that if I never get another chance, at least there’s something.

I’m not as good at that as I used to be. It used to be easy for me to leave an impression. These days I’m lucky just to remind those who already know. To keep time from eroding my fingerprints. It’s exhausting.

So that’s mostly what I work on now—keeping defined what I’ve already stamped. I’ve been too full for anything else. Full of the thoughts belonging to us Romantics, full of Guilt, full of Anger, full of Tired. Angry because I'm Tired; Guilty because I'm Angry and I really have no right to be.

The overflow manifests itself as so many things, but mostly obviously as static in my connections with others. Hermit that I am, when a connection ceases to be an option I grow claustrophobic in the feeling of emptiness around me.

I saw an episode of “The Twilight Zone” when I was a kid, and I only remember two parts. I think about those parts fairly often, though. I remember how the protagonist liked peanut butter on cheeseburgers, and I remember when he went Nowhere.
He stood in a big white blank, with only the occasional misty shadow to hint at some sort of dimension. But instead of that depth providing some comfort—some sense of perspective and normalcy in terrestrial space—it only emphasized the vast nothingness surrounding him.

I feel like that sometimes, usually when I’m driving and its morning and cloudy. There are cars all around me on the highway, traffic traffic traffic showing too many signs of life and yet, somehow, I feel Nowhere anyway.
A feeling of flatline; a deep-set sense of being lost, dull ache muffled by the fog.

I listen to Edgar, my iPod, but he doesn’t help then, as beautiful as the music is that he’ll play for me. No, Edgar doesn’t help cause I know it’s just a recording; false voices stuck up against the same wall that separates my mind from the world at times.

So I turn on the radio, to remind me that there’s life out there. Not just beating hearts pumping blood encased in epidermis, but working minds that are thinking at this very moment and trying to do something—anything. Sell toothpaste, explain how Swiss cheese can explode, accepting callers for these pendant keychains; I don’t care. People thinking and talking right now, right as I am and ones who aren’t on autopilot. Who aren't so stuck in their own heads they forget that life is for living. Or at least ones who seem that way.

I like the concept of radio. I like NPR for what it can tell me about the rest of the world and I like music stations for the DJ’s laughing between songs and I like them all for how they help me to not feel so alone; how they break up the isolation that threatens to suffocate me--while at the same time keeping a safe distance.

Was it just yesterday that I lost me? No, it was months—years—ago, but I guess withdraw never really ends.

I’m tired of it. I’m so tired all the time but I can still be as explosive as anyone else. There are times when I am so tired I can feel the dark circles under my eyes; I can feel the way they’ve sunken deeper into my skull and if there wasn’t so much flammable substance inside me I could easily fall asleep, but something’s lit my fuse so rest isn’t an option at the moment. Even though my muscles are shaking visibly with exhaustion from the day while my fingers twitch, missing the keys as I type, I can’t stop. I can’t be still at times like these.

I’m stuck at the moment, though; stuck inside the dorms, otherwise I would go out walking.
And if it was just half an hour later, when hallmates' guests are gone and doors are shut, I might even run up and down the halls just because I feel like I need to.

But doors are open; laughter, music floating out to warn me of eyes to see and minds to wonder at my strange behavior.

Someone would ask, I'm sure. What are you doing, what the hell is wrong with you. And I don’t want to explain.

Because it was never supposed to mature like this. It's not even supposed to crawl out of my fingertips, into these pages.

It’s like a gremlin, or like that pet that looks so adorable and harmless so you bring it home even though you know deep down you can’t contain it forever.
It grows up quick and turns on you, baring its fangs, watching you all the time with its black-bead eyes and it drives you insane, this thing you brought home.
And you know it knows. You know it’s laughing at you inside; mocking you and all you want to do is get rid of it, but some nonsensical guilt keeps you feeding it table scraps right from your hand. Your fingers start to bleed from the bites, then scar, then bleed again.
The Thing grows fat while you starve and you know this mess is all your fault.

Knowledge of the problem does nothing to change the fact.

See? Look--it’s admitted; realized.

Now what do I do about it?