We view the world through a narrow lens. We only see what we are capable of seeing, or give ourselves permission to see. I sit here at this new hipster coffee shop in Burlington and I ordered the most expensive cup of coffee I had perhaps ever paid for and they had only one size and let’s just say it was not quite what I had expected for five dollar and I look around me and see people looking at screens or staring into their own imaginations while reading a novel or talking- - -yes, perhaps talking, to friends—this is what I see as I sit here and sip my drink. So I wonder: What do they see? I could ask someone but that would seem creepy. Hey, what are you looking at? I mean, who does that? I remember walking in my hometown when I was much younger and I passed some tough, angry older boy and I was spaced out and I must have been looking at him but I didn’t realize it and he turned to me and was like: The hell you lookin at? I snapped back to the presence, shook my head, and stumbled away. So I’m here at this new coffee shop called Vivid Coffee although the inside doesn’t look too vivid to me. More like a wide atrium with beat-up, wooden tables and chairs and the one worn couch I’m sitting on and the scruffy hardwood floor and the station in the middle where one can order their expensive coffees. People minding their own businesses. Hipster, I’d call them. Minding their own businesses. But I would like to mind someone else’s business and find out what it must be like. Like, the other day, a Facebook friend wrote: BEING A DUDE SUCKS. Two comments under said that, basically, it’s worse to be a woman. I wrote: BEING A LIVING, BREATHING HUMAN BEING SUCKS. And it does. Everyone has their own reasons to be depressed, their own struggles. Mine happens to be life—that’s my struggle: the fact that I hate being alive and growing older and blah blah blah, you know, the boring shit that most people do and take for granted, but for me, I can’t because I’m not that vapid. I think about these things. Like the kid who puts the block in the hole again and again, or the dog that hurries after the stick and brings it back to its caretaker and then scurries off to collect the stick again. I don’t really have too much of a routine but sometimes I feel like I’m flogging a dead horse. Trying to be something more, and I feel like every day it’s the same old same old. Wake up to a gray sky and scour the sheets for my e-cig and take a few drags and then work up the strength and energy to rise out of bed, already dressed for the day, and lumber over to my medication and take a dose and fall back into bed and pass out again. Every day it’s the same old same old. Once, I woke up in the passenger seat of my own car in the middle of nowhere, with no recollection of how I had gotten there or who had been driving my car—if it was even me. I hope not, for I must have been way beyond poisoned that night. I found out later that I did not in fact drive that night—well, not really- - -thank God. I got a call from some dude—the only thing I remember about him is that he had blond, shaggy hair—who I had met in jail or something and he asked me to come pick him up and let’s smoke some weed. I was so drunk when I got the call and I might have already taken some sleeping pills to go to sleep but I said hey, why not? He drove and I fell asleep and the next day I woke up on some strange side street, late for work. Of course, I don’t have mornings like that anymore. I’m just grateful that I don’t have to search for my own mind anymore after waking up and facing the ugly morning. Today I wake up and all I have to search for is my e-cig so I can suck nicotine into my lungs, and then I feel somewhat better. Have a coffee and feel even better. No messy face full of vomit, no heavy, nasty hangovers, no cold sweats or finding out my body had been ripped apart by barbed wire. So I guess it isn’t that bad. We all have our struggles. All day I sit in front of my computer and listen to my headphones and I hate my life because I’m still alive. Does that make sense? A few weeks ago my old best friend died of a drug overdose. I wish it could have been me. I was the one who had brought him his first line of cocaine. Maybe there’s a reason I’m still here. Remember my old girlfriend Samantha? I wonder if she’s still around. When she started drinking again, she was so suicidal. But we always fought every time we talked. Last encounter with her was her messaging me on Facebook after she first got an account because I kept showing up in her friend suggestions. I ignored her. She said she didn’t mean to message me; it was an accident. After Andrew had died, though, I searched for her Facebook page to let her know—because she might have cared, she might have wanted to know———but I couldn’t find her anywhere. Maybe she blocked me so she could move on. She once admitted to Facebook stalking me when we weren’t together for a period. Maybe it was too hard for her to see mine and Michelle’s life flourishing. We’re happy together, most the time, and maybe it was too difficult so she had to, essentially, hide my page from her so she’d stop seeing me in her friend suggestions. Or, maybe she’s dead.. That’s a possibility too, I’ll admit,,,, and it makes me very sad to think about it. Everyone dies as they get older, it’s inevitable. Some people die young, and others grow into it. But we all die in the end. It’s the only way one’s life can lead. So maybe I am an important person if I’ve outlived everyone. Maybe my story must be told. This is my story and it seems to be dragging on longer than it should have. I’ve expired. Cut the cord and let me go. Everyone feels like the star of their own story, we all have a different way of viewing things, and we are all our own protagonists. It’s why it kills me. I want to be in a different story. This one sucks and has gone on for much too long. That’s all from me now. Till the next time.
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