i pulled off the highway somewhere in indiana. twas an hour before darkness and i needed a place to rest for the night. i had driven around the country roads for about twenty minutes through half-harvested fields of parched corn, farm house properties submersed in miles of open skies and patches of hardwood clusters. i found my oasis far and away from humanity and life was good.
i unhitched the trailer from my new used ride to relieve the stress on my rear suspension, made myself comfortable and tried to remain invisible. a few cars drove slowly by. a few folks stopped to see if i were okay, if i needed help. in two cases, i was pretty sure that behind the tinted windows of their farm trucks, there were guns pointed in my direction. regardless, i played it cool.
just after darkness, i met the property owner whose land i had chosen as home base for the night. i was hesitant, anxious and high as an afghani drone on a surveillance op. i kept telling myself to make a good first impression, be cool and calm down. his name is matt. Matt wasn’t sure what to make of me, as is usually the case, as i am a rather animated character but after short deliberation, decided that i was harmless enough to allow me to stay the night. really cool Matt.
animated… that’s one way of putting it. i had been told a while back that in this state, it was as if i were awake and dreaming… to an extent. i remain unable to fly of my own accord, i have yet to harness the ability to disintegrate people at will and i remain a prisoner of the socio-economic system that binds 97% of our nation’s inhabitants. regardless of what the diagnosis is, i remain conscious of the stigma and often find myself in a manic dialogue with newcomers.
years ago, at the powerhouse gym in tempe, arizona a very attractive woman, who i had seen there several times before with her boyfriend had approached me with a personal question. her approach was sincere and her curiousity honest. she asked me if when i left the gym i were exhausted. what a silly question beautiful lady! of course, i come to the gym to work my man meat, to swoll my masculine prowess as to be the incarnation of god’s gift to women. why would i not be exhausted?!
this is not what she meant. she had proceeded to tell me how she had been watching me over the past few weeks, my interactions with people. she had noticed my enthusiasm with my presentation, my passionate zest to share and a charismatic caricature in my verse. she also noticed the lack of reciprocity from my single-use friends. i would find myself describing in detail the aerodynamics of the human body while falling from ten thousand feet and my dialogue partner at the time responding with ‘cool’ or some other variant of polite apathy.
what she had described to me, she said, was that of the psychic vampire. she explained that people like me will crawl through shards of broken molten glass to mesh with another and regardless of effort on my part, most people have little to offer in return… and rarely share if they do. replies usually consist of generic vague responses, mostly polite, but never consisting of mass with substance. this she said, was why i’d leave exhausted. it’s all give, no take.
a few hours later, as darkness consumes the land around me, my eyes adjusting to the ambient light of the near full moon just before i’d chosen to settle down for the evening, headlights appear slowly encroaching in the distance. matt had returned with a friend. my guess is that my first impression may have been hard to fathom and his friend had to see this circus side-show with his own eyes.
i am usually rather sedate. i keep to myself. maybe it was the anxiety from being on someone else’s property, i’m not certain, but the floodgates of my being had been opened and the banter, once again, came gushing out. this time… the difference was blatantly obvious. matt and his friend jeff were… they were listening to me! they were clinging to each consecutive word as if i had been carrying tablets containing the commandments. it’s absurd to think that this simple by-default function could have such a profound effect, yet being absent it’s presence over the course of such a long duration, i felt as if i were, in that moment in time… worthy.
my new friends drove off after an hour of storytelling. i realized that i was at peace. the previous six or so months had been an experiment in breaking a man’s will. i had learned that worrying about what could happen is a waste of limited human resources. i made a conscious effort to disallow the onslaught beset on all sides to affect my will to persevere. a conscious effort to disavow the negativity. a conscious effort. i see the changes taking place in real time. i catch myself pausing before agitation. i catch myself at times, overwhelmed by emotion… mostly from the realization that my existence is truly a beautiful blessing.
as they drove off, i said out loud to myself… i miss good friends. thank you matt and jeff for sharing your time with me. thanks for being good and honest people.
throughout the duration of my stay here, i had been enduring moments of auditory hallucinations. not quite music… a subtle cacophony, somewhat structured yet not quite a symphony. i kept this to myself… i kept hearing in the distance what i thought could be music, paused whatever i was doing at the moment to maybe capture a chorus. each time, the sounds overcome by the highway traffic in the distance until i realized… it was the traffic making the music the whole time.