In most ways I am unconventional. I am unconventionally short compared to other men my age, and shorter, even, than those younger than myself. With wayward facial hair and thick, bearlike jowls I am not conventionally handsome either, though that hasn’t denied me the strange but enjoyable opportunities in courting a handful of beautiful women in my life (leading up to my current relationship with a wonderful Italian girl who is as of this writing pursuing her Masters in Film Production). English majors like myself are far from few and far between, but they don’t come into the academy in the same manner as I; and considering the Hemingways and the Faulkners and the Bukowskis who’ve gone on before with lifestyles and stories mad as haywire, what was I to figure but that my own beginnings as a writer were not only unconventional, but also wholly inadequate?
People cross my path from time to time, and they’ve made it known in no uncertain terms that I am completely off my head. To fall into such depressive states is to waste time in hyperbolic patterns based in non-reality, and everyone, from my own parents, to my best friends, to the wonderful woman I am seeing as of this writing, tells me that I am crazy to continue pursuing this hack dream of encouraging death. They all mean well, but I cannot help holding them in contempt and with grave suspicion.
There is nothing to be gained by this line of thinking, but there it persists all the same, festering and eating away at every nourishing molecule inside my head, molecules which in turn could sustain the building blocks for constructing a healthy and pleasant ego. For all the friends and neighbors who have along the way shared encouragement and select versions of the truth regarding my character, I am still lost as to the version I see in the mirror, consisting of a diminished and demolished man who should probably just go home before he falls behind the curve. Such is a depressing and self-fulfilling prophecy of doom, but I own it as my own version of the truth.
Walking most places as I am wont to do, when the waves of self-pity come knocking upon my shore (especially late at night along the sidewalks lining the campus of the college at which I now attend), I find myself sky watching in order to pass the time. Black lines of twilight skies, salted by clusters of stars that form the constellations, offering to me hypnotic suggestions of gargantuan comfort as I try and contemplate the peculiarities of my being. From stardust we come into this world, and as I watch the grand theatrics display their nightly stories before the universe I must confess that I often wish to return to the dust of the cosmos.
But what prompts this insane wanderlust within me, when the impetus of these casual twilight walks came from such a dark and near-suicidal brink? (And yes I said near-suicidal; I have written before on the six—count them, six—suicide attempts I have notched on my belt of shame. I wear that belt proudly, however, for the sheer stubborn will of still breathing.)
The answer lies within the totality of mankind. We are emotional beings, with hearts and souls as far flung and flamboyant as the furthest reaches of the galaxy. The muse that drove us to land on the moon is the same deathbed in which we lay when we stockpile armaments against our communist neighbors overseas. It is a savage lot, the human race, but out of that savagery there is still nobility to be etched out in the stones orbiting our solar system. I am but a cog in the engine that creates this chaotic tapestry, but a cog I am willing to be, for there is something wonderful about being part of an ultimate artistic expression, told through the eyes of an unseeing but forever feeling universe.
I am more than likely the most emotional man in the known universe. How I wish it weren’t so, but there it is, for all to see and remark on in negative fashion. The sheer volume of depressive thoughts within me would be enough, but counteract that with flights of childish fancy, a few teardrops of hysterical laughter, and a punch or two of severe love, and you’ve got yourself a Victorian novel plotted out with vagabond feelings. This cannot be changed, for at twenty-five years of age I am fairly set in my ways. However I can be taught to modify certain tangents of wayward emotion.
Charles Bukowski often said that he was a borderline suicide, and we all know how Hemingway and Plath ended their lives after arguing with the demons clawing away at their worn-out heads. Perhaps if they had the inclination towards counting the stars they would have stopped themselves from continuing down the path towards the slaughter; as it stands they were forced to vacate their bodies in the most forlorn and needless ways imaginable. And as for me, I cannot help but to wonder if I can stop myself, or if I am destined to through myself out among the cosmos.
The weight of the world lies within its capacity to love, and I must remember to give myself over to it if I am to survive those depressive states.
As I walk along the sidewalks of Virginia Beach, wandering about the nighttime hours without much to consider, I begin to restructure my feelings of inadequacy. I may not feel like much of a man, but I am a man nonetheless; I have dreams and ambitions and feelings and hopes, and I have visions placed in between the stars as they cross the path laid out above and over my head. There is beauty in this line of reasoning, and too often I ignore sights such as these in favor of sideshows far more grotesque and unsatisfying.
I am an artist and college student in the middle of his twenties as I write down these words. While I may not possess the charismatic good looks of Johnny Depp of Ryan Gosling, still I somehow pull of random feats of charm whenever my girlfriend comes to see me for date night. And throughout the course of history and discovery, there is a principle of unconventional specks changing the trajectory of where we are going; I may not be of the same mold as the starlets and the great ones in the fields of literature, science and thought, but I am still of the same stardust flung out from the furthest reaches of known space. When God breathed life into Adam and Eve, there was set into motion the full scope and potential of human growth, development and ability—I come from that forward motion, as unconventional as I am.
From the dust we come, and to the dust we are returned. The great men who come before have the same spirit of the stars as I do, and that for the time being gives me hope. Neither death nor inadequacy possess any hold over me, for in my creation there is a miracle of biology and chemical consequence; I am and will always be a man of importance, regardless of my unremarkable trail record. The jowls of my bearlike face do not make me as I am, but rather the desires and fears and dreams and visions that go on behind that face. And for that I am grateful.
After all, what else there to find when one seeks to walk about his college campus, in the twilight hours of the night? Only in the stars can one find that he is never alone. I’ll just have to make my peace with that.
