Reflecting on 2010 (my raw thoughts)

This year was wonderful for me, probably one of the best years of my life, but not for the reasons you'd think..

My parents finally split up, my summer wasn't the best. I still had to do another semester of school. I'm no closer to finding love (at least not in the way I used to expect it). I have no job and to top it off I got a shit load of stress 'cause school is over and I'm trying to figure out the next step, I also lost my religion. Yet..it was still probably the best year I've had in a while.

Why, you ask?

Because I came one step closer to finding myself. This was the year I found out what happiness means to me and I gained it after years of depression. I'm still stuck with some issues and I'm not perfect by any standards nor have I truly mastered the lessons I began to learn this year but I feel like I've started..

I grew a little bit.

Even amidst my struggle and turmoil, I rediscovered what it means to love myself and it has profoundly altered my life. Happiness, contentment, resolve, purpose have become internal themes for me. I began to accept and love myself the way I am and that gave me a peace that out shone any fleeting feeling of gratification that I could find in another.

This was they year I began looking for me...

A Familial Sojourn

“Hail one and all.” My usual greeting, as I entered the gates to my aunt’s homestead. No sooner had I closed the gate than three pairs of eager hands pulled me every which way, fighting to be the first to hug me. I turn on my heel and gather them all into a tight bear hug, the onlookers, my aunt and their baby sister Paige, in a fit of giggles at the awkward exchange.

“Weh yuh bring fi mi?” Danielle, her direct manner more humorous than irksome, looked up at me expectantly.

“Nutten, mi poor like church mouse. Weh u hav’ u can gi mi?” a toothy grin spread across her face. She walked off with the shiny twenty dollar coin clutched in her fist, her older sisters following behind to return to previously abandoned mischief. I walked over to my aunt, Paige feeding from her bottle, the picture of contentment.

“What’s up Tas? You alright?” her smile belied her evident worry, and I knew she was thinking of him and his deceit. I feel instantly guilty that my male presence is causing her distress. I nod, mumbling my usual incoherent ‘mhmm’. I sit by her and we stare ahead in silence. Having finished her meal, Paige begins to scrutinize me from her cot. She advances tentatively. I reach toward her and she recoils, a look of mild mistrust on her face. I then remember that she hasn’t seen me in close to a month, herself being now five months old, would barely recognize me. I feel guilt at my prolonged avoidance as I feign ignorance to the baby’s fresh attempts to advance. She crawls over to me, and, confident I am not a threat, begins to systematically bang me over the head with a doll saying repeatedly, ‘Hi’, the multipurpose word for greeting, feeding and pain from teething. I smile down at her, and her dimpled chuckle, so knowing, radiates a brilliant innocence that makes me feel lighter than air. I pick her up, twirling her and laughing as she squeals in infantile delight at cousin T’s puerile display, pulling at my lips, marvelling that she can stop the rocket sounds by clutching them…

One of those days

It’s just one of those days where I just want to lie here in my bed and cry. Today is one of those days where I feel like so much is going wrong in my life, and so little is going right. I would love to be one of the happy people, free of care... but I have bills to pay and I’m broke and there is no joy in that.

I love my mother but we fight sometimes. Every day I watch the worry in her face grow as we face other obstacles, trying to survive as a family. She’s getting older, and I am impatient with her sometimes and I don’t know why. I wish I could ease her pain, give her the happiness that I lack. I pray to God at night that he’ll make things better if only for her sake and as the years go by I beg him to protect her and keep her with me. She’s the only thing that I have in this world…at the same time I pray that God will keep me so that she is not hurt by losing me; I’d rather be the one that has to bear the suffering of losing her. Then as I get older myself, I realize that I cannot abandon her, when she has no one.

My father is gone…he and my mom fought for all the years that they were together and I am glad they parted cause I always feared that the worst would happen if they remained…I remember nights as a child crying as I parted them. I begged daddy to put back the knife….I begged Mom to stop shouting those hurtful words. ..

Well it’s over between them, and I couldn’t be more mentally conflicted. I mean I am happy, but I can’t lie and say that I don’t miss him and I know she misses him. My father has become a stranger in this short period of time, we were once so close. I will always love him and I will always love her no matter the mental scars that they have inflicted on me.

Today I wanted to call him, I have been ignoring this desire for close to a month now because I felt that he should be the one to make the effort to communicate with me…but then something happened that broke my spirit. I started searching for his cell number in my phonebook (he had changed it recently) only to discover that I couldn’t find it. I had lost the contact of my own father.  I wanted so much to cry, I felt so embarrassed. I started to wonder, when did this happen to me?  When did my life become so dysfunctional? I mean it was always dysfunctional, with years of watching my parents get into verbal and physical altercations almost daily, living in poverty in my younger days, loneliness…but when did I reach the point where I lost touch with my father?

Was he trying to forget me? Trying to move on and leave me and her behind? I don’t know why he hasn’t called and I don’t know how I could have fucked up this badly, been so careless. I just know that I feel sick in my stomach and I can’t ignore the sadness that’s growing inside. I love him…. I love her, if no one else, if nothing else.

Then I’m jobless and each day I see a new bill, something I can’t afford, another burden for my mother. I want to fix things; I want her to be happy. When did my life become this? I am broken but still acting whole. I could never express my inner pain to a soul... It’s too much, even in the words I have said, that I refuse to say here. Still, I look for positivity. I tell myself that it will get better once I make the effort. One day these tears will be a distant memory, when I am overwhelmed with happiness. I am hopeful… ‘till that day I must carry-on..

All my life

All my life I’ve walked a path, a path I fear will never end, with twisting roads and sudden turns with broken asphalt and rigid lanes.

All my life I’ve known this road, so incomplete, so desolate...
I thought I passed this way before. You can be sure I’ll pass once more.

All my life I’ve longed for this, but star-crossed trails and solitude.
The wind it howls, I shiver so. My shadow fades and betrays me so.

All my life I’ve heard the call of fleeting visions and echoing haunts.
I see a stranger up ahead, another stranger to plunder and leave me dead.

All my life I’ve ran away, I’ve ran away, I’ll run away....

Contemplations at a funeral

*stream of consciousness at the pall of an ornate casket…

What is valour? This word, so overused it has become a cliché, so often called upon its meaning has been warped, changed to a vile thing that glorifies bloodlust, anathema yet applied to the once noble concept of ‘nationalism’. It has become the crazed need for self preservation in a soldier who had no fight to pick who war has scarred forever, at the whim of a man who sits aloof, watching as if the ones he deploys are of no more significance than toy soldiers for his leisurely amusement. It has become the wreath of the ‘erudite’ for the headstones of those who died for someone else’s stupidity, relegated to defending the ‘respectability’ of a corpse…Valour, once the epitome of chivalrous bravery, that selfless sense of the dependence of others on you and what you have to offer in sacrifice for their survival, so it is not a deadweight, but spurs you on, their need not imbibing but arming, encouraging…sad that it has become now the tool of hypocrites declaiming on the hitherto non-existent values of the freshly deceased…

Summer Daze

There's something magical about these sunny days...hauntingly magical.
Now in September I remember the echoes of careless laughter and the thrill of temporary ever after.
We were together for those moments in time. Beer soaked romances taking risks taking chances.

Then there were days that ended too soon but the the nights were filled with blue moons. I made a wish
on the summer sun that that these days would never be done.

Sweltering heat, and the impending New England cold, through it all we chose to be bold. 'Cause its heaven and hell in the summer time; the sum of risks, the summer lyme.

The world spins dizzingly faster, and sometimes, you may find yourself giving in to summer highs.
Wake up the next morning and realize, that you must face the porcelain and spew your spirit of summer lies.

She opened up and gave in to Rager and now that the deed is done, she awaits the hangover.
He told her he loved her as they straddled in the couch of a stranger.
But summer love is often forgotten when the dawn meets the sober

It is a season of carelessness, when one is tempted to love with all his heart, so we whisper to each other that we wont forget and we'll never part.

But we cried as the summer days faded away and I knew you could never stay. You told me you loved me, now you're too busy running away.

Packing bags, moving on with lives, checking for school, reevaluating summer ties. Making love for one last time, she thinks to herself maybe we'll survive.

We embrace best friends and tell ourselves that our love transcends.
Parting is pain but one day we'll be back again

Its a pity that summer days often set.
Looking back I have no regrets.
'Cause If I could I'd live my life in summer daze
Life is so vivid in the summer sun's rays