6

21JUL2009
　
Something’s been happening to me. The Focus coming in without me absolutely forcing it.
I enjoy my moments because I’m me. One moment happened today, I was just stepping out of the connex, then I had to deal with H___ and Mace__ and the moment was over. Just a moment, an instant of Clarity, before interruption.
The memories are stronger, more assertive, in their constant stream. Flowing through my mind, the words: _the gym, the gym_ (the only place I felt safe back then, an abandoned basketball gym down the street from the House.)
I could’ve capitalized on my childhood, I could’ve made it work. But it would’ve been wrong. I had to not accept, and get the hell out of there, even if it did take eighteen years.

(evening) The contrast with K____ is sharp just now. Sharp sharp sharp. K____’s had a whole lifetime from the time he was born til he was eighteen, and then it just kept going. I lost a whole lifetime.
Life is a two-sided coin, but it’s all life. I experienced violence, pain, isolation, loss, tragedy. He experienced the good that life had to offer, and with ease. Good medical care kept him attractive, not malnourished like me, not victim to whatever ailment of scarring might come along in God’s creation.
He had love. Loved by not just one person but two parents, and then siblings, and then relatives, acceptance by a community He tells stories like the ski trips, the parties in high school, the dating, the sex, the family trips, the moments. Cuts me to the bone.
Those years I worked sixty hours weeks, then eighty, then a hundred. And when I wasn’t working I was enduring that House, those people. I experienced what I experienced. And it was Life. It hurts like Hell.

(night) Can’t sleep, been watching bootleg 30Rock. Can’t sleep because of the past. The Why of it. I have to remind myself what a harsh place the world is. What K____ lived was ridiculously humane. Unrealistically humane.
I’m living Real life, god -damn-it. It feels like a battle between me and K__. Who’s Reality is Real. Obviously it’s K__’s.
How can that be? There’s no going back, there’s no saving it. Always trying to save it, to compensate for it, to fix it, to balance it out somehow.
It won’t work. All that’s left is the present moment, and the horrific past that came before it .. These thoughts keep me awake.
__________
　
23JUL2009
　
Last night K____ and I rested outside, after the workout, him smoking cigarettes and me laying on 3^rd platoon’s lock box, looking at the stars.
Though I knew it was gonna hurt, I asked him about his high school friends, about his high school. There was something I wanted to know somewhere in there, but I didn’t know what it was, so I got him to tell all.
He told about Jo____, the one whose Mom saw the joint on his bed sheet beside an ink stain, and went off about the ink stain.
He said Jo___ moved around a lot, always coming back to Bis__, then moving away again, then coming back again. Jo___ kept getting into drug trouble, and trouble in general.
Then he told about De___, who always tried to act a little extra cool around others, but acted normal when it was just him and K____. He had a grandpa who was always drinking, always sitting in a recliner. (_What, was his bladder made of steel?_ K____ said.) They would get drunk and high on his front porch, never getting caught, because the guy would never get up.
De___’s family had an old, dilapidating house 20 miles from Bis__ out in the middle of some farmland. From about sixteen years old to graduation, his age group in Bis__ partied there regularly.
(_Didn’t you have curfews?_ I asked.
_We just played them off each other. De___ would tell his parents he was spending the night with me, I would tell my mom I was spending the night with him._ )
_I was definitely doing drugs by seventh grade,_ K____ said, then laughs, _I was twelve? A twelve year old druggie._
_Was everybody at your high school into drugs?_ I asked.
_No, man, I mean there were the bookish ones and the prep kids and the rednecks – oh my god there were so many rednecks – and then there were the ones not as well off .. _
He told about C___ and S____, De___’s little and older brothers, who completed the group.
He told about the first time they went up to Green___ to visit him in his first apartment, and the wild night they had, skull-f-cking the fat girl and all, then the wild day he and Sh___ had, trying to get high off psychodelics, and the wild night following it -- Sh___ at the street corner, saying over and over _I got this corner, I got this corner,_ after chasing the homeless man away.