On Ghosts - A Review

Date: 4/12/19

Subject: Life

Mood Today: All Business

I’ve been stepping through my life in reverse this past week. Which really just amounts to reliving and remembering memories that hang in the air of places I used to know. There was some new too, sprinkled in with the old. A marriage. A child. But the weirdest thing to me was how green everything was.

I put my best logic to figuring out why. It was raining in the Carolinas before I came, so that was easy enough. And California is entering its first summer without a drought in quite some time, so the poppies were blooming, the chaparral hills were covered in leafing shrubs, and the sparse trees were doubling down on their leaves that probably never fell.

Their environment provided them the opportunity for change. And so, they did.

And on the subject of change, my long term experiment is finally coming to an end. See, I wrote a blog a while back about being vulnerable. But now, now I’ve come to the realization that I let myself be affected too easily. That vulnerability, like most things, is a virtue and a vice.

I’m coming to terms with the fact that I allow myself to be consumed easily. By someone or something. Like a song I hear on the radio. I’ll let it loop through the tape deck of my mind over and over again until its thoughts are the only ones in my head, and I become its putty.

And it molds me and shapes me, and I decide that this is exactly what I am.

But it turns out people are more complicated than sixteen lines that rhyme, even if it sounds nice. And the same goes for people. I constantly let someone else define who I am. I let my entire existence become contingent on their approval. I let someone move in after showing the smallest fleck of affection. I let someone take over with a couple of sweet nothings whispered behind a platonic protection. It’s not such a bad gig, sure there’s no room for me. But that means I don’t have to deal with my problems any more. Just theirs.

And other people’s problems? Those are easy. Because other people are easy to figure out. But no one has an easy time turning that scrying eye on themself. But I guess I’ve always had trouble looking in the mirror.

My mom said its because I never learned to like myself before I liked someone else. She’s right.

She usually is.

I’m finally home after six months. It’s weird to call it home. This is where I grew up, mostly. On these hills, and these streets. If I wanted to get lost, I couldn’t. I know which mountain marks the north, which one is in the south. I know the roads by heart. I can retell certain streets in order because the map is etched into the wrinkles of my gray matter.

I couldn’t get lost if I tried. And I want to, I want to get lost. I’m not sure why, I just have this romantic impression of it. Of how finding my way back would be finding me too. I thought I was over this bullshit. I thought I skipped that phase of growing up and playing guess who with myself. But I guess I have just slowly been consumed by identity. Someone asked what kind of man I am and I was speechless.

But oh boy, what if someone asks what they mean to me. Get ready for some impassioned Byronic speech. Then watch me retreat and hide the second it comes back to me.

Because my mom’s right. I don’t like myself. I don’t trust myself. I don’t want me. I just want everyone else. I want their happiness, their wellbeing. I want their smile, their thoughts. I want to know what they know. I want to see what they see. I want everything that I don’t have.

I guess these past couple of years have hit me harder than I thought.

But wait. Can we go back for a second? How come no one is talking about how green everything is? How come no one is mentioning the flowers? How come no one is screaming at the top of their lungs as they look out the plane’s window, saying “look! Look how bright it is!”

Maybe its because it hasn’t changed at all. Sure, I thought that it was the rain storms in the Carolinas and the lack of drought in California. But no. No, it’s just spring. This is how it always is. The problem is that I’ve been stuck in grayscale. The only colors I see at home are the hushed tones of brown on the large buildings that replaced the mountains of my horizon and the bright red letters on garbage bags that populate the sky. Things don’t look green now, they always have been, I just finally have perspective.

I came home, looking for change. Looking for it in myself, in my friends and family, in the town, in the hills. And I convinced myself that I found it.

But I didn’t. I just saw what I wanted to. See, there is no great change necessary. I don’t need to become someone else. I don’t need anything to become anything. I just need to accept what I’ve got. Learning to do that is the biggest change I could make. And I’m excited to see if I’m up for the challenge.