4

W___ is accomplished. I’m not, at least not on paper, I knew this was the price of being real, of being an undocumented American, with a true history instead of an American’s.
It sometimes bows me, their papers’ assuredness can be that intimidating, other times I see the folly of their papers and prefer my tumultuous life to their glamorous one.
I keep trying to write the past but it keeps changing. A chapter or so for each year of my adult life. It doesn’t work; no papers for me. It turns out the question I should be asking myself is not: who are you? with its answer in the papers. And it’s not: what’s going on with you? with its answer the current story in my life. But instead it’s become: be honest.
The story becomes unknown, un-judge-able, indefinable. The story loses its glamour, and gains something else instead. Whenever I think of honesty, I can feel my ancestors, the realness of them, the lives led, them looking at me, seeing right through me, wondering when I’m going to meet someone and have children.
I was watching this show Entourage for awhile, seeing the contrast; how I would rather be an honest working man, grounded, Real, than the American ideal.
There’s a shame in having a past like mine; someone accomplished like W___ can highlight it.
Thing is, once you’ve been to the unnatural world, you’re always connected to it by the path you used to leave there. You’re never truly free of Hell.
When W___ and I talk, I can see the question in his eyes, like he wants to ask me: What have you been doing with your life? I seem to have no accomplishments to show for. In that way, it’s as if I’m in the same place I was when he left. Except that I’m not.
When I think on my accomplishments, I feel the sadness of how little was in my control. Of how I never accomplished a goal, I simply survived, and the accomplishments were simply forced upon me.
Turns out the Abuse I knew was tantamount to cutting a kid’s limb off, or setting the child on fire. That’s how the Abuse could decide the child’s life, its story, its experience. All those difficult C’s instead of A’s.
Plus, what did W__ really know about accomplishments? Lately I’ve been nostalgic for a vehicle, a road trip. I remember the first time I had a real set of wheels, not just a way to get to work but something that could be trusted past more than one county line. I was twenty three.
W___ doesn’t know about the money, it’s not something someone on the Grift like me would allude to. Money is freedom. That last word’s been the focus of my life since I was born.
The savings weren’t accidental, it was a solace. Forced to learn how to live instead of living my life, my only accessible accomplishment was a growing savings account that caused the listener to gape when I finally acquiesced them with a number. I didn’t eat out, I kept a tight grocery bill, I kept the house chilly in winter and slightly warm in summer, I did what I could.
It was done as a silent promise, an investment, an insistence that I hadn’t given up on my life, or the accomplishments I still desired, despite myself and what I know of the world.

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I’ve been reading the book Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. A person with ambiguous sexual organs narrates the novel, which won a Pulitzer. A Christian character in it said this:
_The Church doesn’t want people not to think, The Church believes that thinking will take a person only so far. Where thinking ends, revelation begins._
I thought it a nice touch, after my religion-soaked abusive childhood has been on my mind, for the priest in the book to say something so true.
I relate to the main character, having grown up in Abuse where my gender was the culprit, a gender that had to be hidden, its power always downplayed, despite the stubbornly bulging muscles.
I relate to learning to be the Real me, all the arbitrary changes, down to forcing my vocal cords to allow the sound of my true voice.

__________

　
Lately I’ve been okay on my own. I don’t feel a pull or need for my friends, I don’t see myself in relation to them -- which would cause me to inventory a mental list of our value -- I just enjoy their company -- nor do I see myself in relation to this deployment, and the story of it, (not to mention the Scandal); I’m just here.
Lately, I don’t feel like my life is anybody’s fault, I don’t feel bitterness about it. I was just there. It just is what it is, as if that part isn’t important, as if it can be experienced and then left behind just as simply as walking into a room and later walking out.
Instead of reminding myself the insanity of the world around me, lately I can feel it instead. A world of insanity, like in my sleep how I step in and out of one dream after another, one situation after another, everything passing away, the experience real, but little else. Scenes at work, scenes in the evenings dealing with people who aren’t quite my friends, the memories, the dreams. The world seems more like dice casting itself, over and over; what’s cast isn’t important, but the fact of the casting itself, because that’s what keeps the dice alive, that’s what keeps the world going round, moving forward.
There’s a certain authority now, that I was lacking before, to consciously make out crazy and not-crazy. Before I found it difficult to tell the two apart, same as I found it difficult to tell the two of me apart, the one conditioned by Abuse and the Real one.
Things keep feeling simpler, more in-the-moment. It seems more like it’s about attitude. It’s a choice, to not be distracted, to be honest, to be Real.
Sometimes, in the night, or first thing in the morning, I lay back and allow the awe of it to soak in: I can feel on the other side of my skin now; I can feel on the other side of my skin now .. down to my fingertips. The impossible has happened.
I woke from a dream, where the post-deployment back-packing trip, the deployment, and J___’s house and family rolled into one. It seemed strange, the three story lines merging; I began to feel confused and desperate, I couldn’t find K__ or W__ anywhere, and I didn’t understand.
It was a nightmare, reminding me of what it felt like, that-prone-to-desperation I once knew, that confusion and pounding in the chest, after those eighteen years of Abuse in the House -- I once knew what it was like to be truly exhausted.
And I hate it. I hate that it is possible for me to be that exhausted. I hate that after so much time I can close my eyes and it’s right there, threatening me with its sheer possibility.

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