Echos of Existence

...wtf. The guitar rests unused in the fifty-year-old boat bought on borrowed student funds. These words are typed from inside a VA homeless shelter....

Walking away remains possible. The belief that a path could be made has thinned. Memory pulls backward to the starting point—depressed, repressed—wandering the chambers of what was left behind. Blame settles first on the obvious: the partners chosen to share breath and days. Yet the circle always returns to the personal decision to stay, to share, to keep the channel open.

Recollection of the earlier life returns with its ordinary pleasantness, the sun falling across ordinary days—beautiful, until a single event altered the light. Even that moment. 2005. A place only half-known from a few high-school years. From that year forward everything turned strange.

Twenty-one years. One full cycle, then another. In the first, the guitar was chosen. In the second the life itself shifted, the change registered only later. Waiting continues for the next blow, the gut tightening with each fresh turn of shame. Family was let down; romanticize the struggle, monetize it, capitalize on the human condition while the actual pursuit of happiness remains least examined (theater must go on?)—unless, of course, one person’s happiness requires another’s fall. Insecurity, perhaps.