Levick Avenue

This was a lonely weekend.  Friday was filled with love and laughter, but Saturday and this morning have been filled with sadness.  Yesterday I was scribbling and wasn't paying much attention to what I was scribbling.  Today I looked at the pad of paper and realized that I scribbled a bunch of balloons with sad faces on them.

I woke up early this morning and my whole jaw hurt.  Bruxism.  Happens when I'm having issues coping with life.

I got in my car and brought it to the car wash.  I left and it was still pretty dirty.  (Haven't washed it in a year or so, so the dirt is sort of embedded into my vehicle's soul).  I cruised through northeast Philly.  I ate my breakfast in a parking lot off of Frankford Avenue and observed the people around me walking on the sidewalk and looking busy.

I came home to my messy room.  (If there's one thing that my best friends know about me, it's that when my room is a mess.. it's merely a direct reflection of my brain.  I'm a disaster these days.)  There's poetry sprawled out all over my unvaccummed carpet.  My hands are covered in dirt from the car wash.  I smell like grease.

Last night I said to Alex, "I'm so fed up."  And I am.  I am just so fucking fed up.  I'm trying to see the sunshine in the cave that is my current life, but caves are caves and sunshine doesn't adventure through those.  I need to bust through the rock and head out to a beautiful meadow, but it's so hard.  I'm starting to realize that some things are just out of my control.

And I'm just so discouraged.  It's been letdown after letdown after letdown for over a year now.  I just want to be happy.  I want to look out my window at the leaves blowing in the wind and I want that to be enough.  When I drive down Boyer Avenue and talk through my window to the friendly biker riding his bicycle down the road, I want his smile to engrave itself into my mind and bring me happiness that lasts longer than a millisecond.

It's hard.  Life is hard.  Doesn't matter what your struggle is.  You're undatable.  You can't find a job.  Your dad is in the hospital.  You have nobody.  You are in debt.  Every struggle is a struggle, and every struggle hurts.  And I wonder, is this just the tip of the iceberg.  I'm 26 years old and I've cried more in the last past six months than I've cried in my entire life.  I'm apathetic but I'm also hurting.  I'm jaded and I pretty much give up.  I feel scared to know that it could get worse.  There may be years where it's harder than this.  There may be days where I'll feel even more worthless than I do right now.

That hurts so much.  I want to enjoy this beautiful earth.  I want to feel the cool summer breeze on my pale skin and I want that to make me smile.  Is that so much to ask for?  I'm trying with everything that's inside of me, but I'm starting to realize that this is not in my hands.  Happiness isn't something that you can just take whenever you want.  Sometimes, even if you have the most positive attitude in the whole entire world, nothing heals your wounds and nothing changes anything.  You look around and everything is still dark and empty.

I want to fill up the hole in my heart.  I want to run to Home Depot, pick up some cement, mix it up and pour it into the large empty hole.  But that in itself hurts.  I don't want to have a hard cement heart.  I don't want to feel desensitized or broken.  I want to find someone worth loving and I want them to have a nice, beautiful healthy heart that's free of cement and holes.  I want it to be sensitive, and I want them to be careful with it.

So how do you heal a heart?  Time isn't doing a thing.  It's making me colder and colder and, in general, just so careless.  It's a "if you can't beat them, join them" mentality that's growing inside of me.  If the world is going to give me a cold, empty heart.. at some point I am just going to have to be a cold, empty person just to get by.  You can't be a happy person with a ruined heart.

I don't even have any dreams anymore.  Where did they go?  Even two weeks ago I had a few dreams left and they seemed to have fallen into the black hole that lives in my chest.  I don't want a black hole, I don't want an empty heart, I don't want to feel jaded, I don't want to be discouraged, I don't want to feel unimpressed with this beautiful world, I don't want to hate myself, I don't want to be dreamless...

But some things, as I now have learned, are the way that they are. Like dad once told me.