Lessons on...Fucking Up

27 years later, and this is how it all ends up; People trying their best with the people who are best for them. But nothing can hide the tears, aching, or shrapnel straight to the heart that we childishly covered with Band-Aids, beer, and casual sex; not once permitting the world to see the destruction that was laid across our bodies before our minds were developed enough to understand.  It is a strange occurrence to look back at your own life.

I don’t write often anymore, not as much as I once did. I feel tired, played out. I have nothing to say to nobody listening. Today I feel damaged, walking around bleeding out of my eyes for everyone to see. This isn’t a plea for help, just one of those days.  Unlike the youth of today, who off themselves at every negative comment and sideways glance, I grew up in a time and with a family, where bullies existed, but we were taught to grow a pair. Insensitive, probably, but it’s how I feel.

Did I come away undamaged? Most certainly not. I don’t know a single person who did. But here is the thing, we are still alive. We haven’t given into death, not yet, we have just begun. Even though we feel weary, never good enough, and like a generation of fuck ups…we survived. We pushed the boundaries of who we were and what we wanted and found ourselves on plenty of dead end streets comforted with blow up mattresses and cheap bottles of wine.

You feel okay most days, but that is when it hits the hardest. Something takes you back (a song lyrics, a certain time, the smell of cologne, the touch of a hand) and you realize ,perhaps, you aren’t as strong as you wish to believe or faked yourself into thinking. Turns out, in the right situation, under the right circumstances everything is more than willing to fall apart.

It all takes you back, to that time when you let yourself go, lost parts of you…had someone repair what you never knew was broken or needed fixing. But letting someone get that close was the problem, because while they were inside tinkering with the pieces that made you, they revamped the parts of you they didn’t like, but doing so left the other pieces to fall to the wayside. And now we are walking around, some kind of Frankenstein monsters, with our mouths stitched shut and our hearts mended with superglue and epoxy.

You could classify us as a collage of sorts, pieces and parts. Trust issues, a smile, abuse, laugh lines, tear ducts, and all the information we could gather to protect ourselves from ever letting it happen again. Nobody at this point is looking to be ‘whole’ again, we have let that dream fade into background noise. We want someone to come along with matching baggage, to look us in the eyes…and say, ‘I see you are broken, but I like broken.’ That is until something shiny and new comes into our eyesight.

I rest assured, knowing there are still good people out there. I have met them. And I have chosen to keep those people in my life. It takes a lot of ‘weeding’ out and going from a full garden to a row of seeds. But with growth comes new possibilities, new promises, and the chance at happy. And every single person deserves the chance at that.

And once time has healed us and led us down a different road, once we have put the past to rest, we can start to become the people we were always meant to be. People too big for this small town, for this god forsaken state, too much to be held back by all our ‘fuck-ups’, too big for anyone to even realize everything that is coming. Don’t close your eyes just yet, we are witnessing our own ‘becoming’ and just starting to take bloom in the dead of night.

Peace and Love,
And Dinosaurs and Robots,
Jonathan