Converge

Today was a day. If this ends up being a jumbled mess, I’m sorry. In case you’re counting, which you’re not but I am, I haven’t really slept much, at all, since Sunday into Monday. Maybe 10 hours of actual, restful sleep, all week. Between waking up early for work and Six Flags, and the dreams that won’t let me rest, I’m far past the point of exhaustion, into a state where everything is funny and depressing at the same time, where I don’t know really know what I’m saying or doing and I don’t really care. Everything hurts, but I barely feel anything. I’m so exhausted, so drained physically but far more mentally. It’s beginning to hurt to stay awake, yet I’m scared to sleep, and dream.

so here I am, typing this past 3am in the morning.

I’m starting to worry, but I shouldn’t complain, so I won’t.  

Tonight, after work, I attended the card shop, as will be my ritual for now on, on Fridays. I love seeing my friends, especially when we can drink together behind the cardshop, outside near the dumpster. Yeah, we’re classy. Actually, we sort of are; we’re a very intelligent and witty and knowledgeable group of people. Besides, being classy and proper and mature is entirely overrated.

Tonight, more than usual, I’m realizing how life is about having fun and finding pleasure in it more than anything else. Life is about being happy; it’s how you find that happiness that may be the hard part.

Everything converged on me tonight. It was…insane. I don’t even know where to begin. I’m smiling so much right now, and I don’t know why because I’m not even happy. I just feel like I know something, or maybe I’m getting better after so much made me feel bad. I don’t know.

Maybe I’m just far too tired.

I think everything came together at a very, very strange point tonight.

There was a handful of us left in the cardshop. Someone mentioned food. I was about to leave, to go home and try to sleep, but then Jake, my friend, convinced me to go with him to Taco Bell and pick up food. Jake is seventeen, and I’m twenty-four, but he’s a good friend of mine. I have an uncanny ability to get along and friend almost anyone. I don’t mean to sound arrogant, but people just tend to like me. People always come to me with their problems, and so many people tell me everything, and dump everything onto me, revealing so many secrets. I don’t mind. I love talking to people. More so, I love helping my friends.

But I’m getting off topic.

Jake was driving to Taco Bell, me in the passenger seat, and he says, I hope you like Taylor Swift because that’s all I’ve been listening to lately. Turns out I actually love Taylor Swift. This could be embarrassing to admit, but I don’t give a fuck. As you know, I love depressing music, and if you listen to her lyrics, she’s extremely depressing. Jake asks which song I want to listen to, and of course I choose Enchanted, and he flips out because this is his favorite song.

At this point I completely lose it. I’m so tired, and it’s near 2am, I haven’t slept in forever, I’m going to Taco Bell for some reason, listening to Taylor Swift in a car that my seventeen year old friend is driving through Norwich. I begin to laugh manically, insisting that I both hate and love my life. So true. I really realized how happy I am that I lack any and all maturity in some facets of my life, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The moment you consider yourself mature and an “adult” is the moment you truly lose part of yourself, part of you that makes you whole. We really don’t change as much as some of us like to admit. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I thought of this on Wednesday, too, at Six Flags, when my friends and I, some thirty years old, acted like moronic kids and even commented, together, how we’ll never get old, how we’ll be like this forever, and how we really and utterly believe this. It was beautiful, reminding me that I’m at least entirely happy with who I am and how I act, how I’m ashamed of nothing and how I know exactly who I am, how I will say and do almost anything as long as its not cruel or absurdly stupid or falsely macho; there’s a fine line for everything, of course. I have no inhibitions, no modesty, I’m mature in some ways but a child in others, and I live one day at a time, savoring everything, every moment, every one, using every hour to my advantage. I really love who I am, even if I don’t like where I am in life at this time or what’s been happening in my life lately.

Tonight I laid on the ground in the parking lot outside the cardshop and studied the few stars in the sky, and just talked, and it was good.

Converge. We’re back to that again, because today, somehow, everything converged. It began at work, I think.

We had a tasting for two rather awful beers. The tasting lady was an extremely attractive, smart, and interesting person. I ended up talking to her for well over an hour, probably closer to two, doing absolutely zero work in that time. She was very easy to talk to, despite my exhaustion, and I had a good time “working”.

Two things stand out. This happens a lot to me; I pick out details and think about them. I dissect everything. I remember everything I deem important and forget everything else. I have an amazing memory for the things I want to remember, a horrible memory for everything else.

If you, reader, were to ask me everything we discussed, I could go on and on and on, listing everything, down the tinniest detail, the first words, the last words, because these are things I deem important, the things that change me and shape me, the things I want to remember. You, reader, may even know who you are. Everything else I forget, perhaps intentionally. I must save room for what’s important.

Anyway, back to the beer tasting lady. At some point we started discussing books, and how I write, and she said she would like to be able to read fiction, but she’s just so involved in her own job, that she can’t get her mind out of it (she has a masters in some sort of therapy and works with mentally ill and disabled patients in a hospital). My response was, of course, that I’m the complete opposite. My problem is that I can’t get my mind inside this world. I’m always thinking about somewhere and something else, existences that only exist in my mind and on paper. I’m happier in a world of fiction. I am an escapist in so many ways.

There’s something magical and tragic about that. I’ll figure it out, eventually.

She also mentioned how her father founded and built Bobcat from the ground up. If you don’t know what Bobcat is, look it up. Anyway, she went on to say how no matter how much money you’re making, no matter how successful you are, no matter how popular or praised and whatnot, none of it matters if you don’t love what you’re doing. That’s the only thing that matters in life. You have to love what you’re doing, and to a greater extent, love the people you’re with, and love who you are. You must live with love, or else you have nothing, and you are nothing more than a husk.