Jay Avenue

When you have nothing left to burn you have to set yourself on fire.

The Writer’s Advantage

I think one of the greatest advantages of writing is the seemingly unending supply of old notebooks, diaries, and journals you steadily accumulate over the years.

It’s somewhat strange at first, flipping through the pages of a long lost friend, and it’s like you’re reading through someone else’s life.  You can’t remember the dates at the corners of the papers and you can hardly recall what the writing was about on those particular days, but it’s there.  That’s you—your handwriting, your feelings, your thought processes, your barely admissible standard for grammar and spelling.  It’s all you.

It’s weird reading the entries out loud, like you can’t seem to recognize the voice speaking to you off the pieces of paper.  Your unremarkable past seems exactly that—unremarkable.  With a day  flipping by as fast as the turn of a page, you find yourself jumping from chapter to chapter in your life, and you start to hear yourself say, “Wow, how stupid was I?”; or, “I can’t believe I did that!”; or, “Lesson learned.”         

And that’s when you realize it.  You’ve grown.  You’ve changed.  You’re this better version of yourself, like you just received the universe’s latest version of “You 2.0”.  The progress is there, you can trace it with your fingertips.  The mistakes you’ve learned from, the promises you’ve made to yourself, the feelings you swore to the highest heavens you’d never surrender to again.  The evidence is undeniable. 

I think the best part is that these written relics are all around you, neatly tucked away into empty dressers, or hidden underneath your bed, or lost in the caves and canyons of your closet.  Like most days, you just carelessly seem to misplace them. 

But once again, here’s the best part:

You sleep surrounded by your favorite memories, the best days of your life, your most colorful and vibrant dreams. 

Your worst mistakes and most guilt-laden feelings are locked away on the highest shelf of your closet, doomed to never again see the light of day. 

You casually undress in front of your most shameful and embarrassing moments, naked in front of a past you couldn’t bear to face again.

Your long lost friends and the people you miss all silently greet you as you walk through your bedroom door.

You wake up every morning next to the pages of a love-long-gone, next to the bindings of the girl-that-got-away.

This is the greatest advantage to being a writer.  With all these old notebooks and diaries and journals, your past is literally littered all around you, waiting to be shifted and sorted into an essay, a story, a lesson, a character, a plotline, a scenario.  Your memories wait to be relived through once again, recreated not for you the writer, but for your readers.

So if you write, then you already know this advantage, and all I can tell you is don’t stop.  Don’t ever stop.  And if you don’t write, then why wait any longer?  Days slip past you faster than you know it.  With writing, at least you’ll have some way to catch them.

By the end of this week, I need to make a new friend.

Being stranded from home, 2000 miles away from the friends and social niche I got so accustomed to, really puts a damper on the social scene.  Having a sporadic allergy attack to new social situations doesn’t help either. =/     

I need to see a new face, hear a new voice, listen to a new opinion.  I can’t keep staring at this white, lined paper and expect something different.  My journal’s been my most loyal compadre for as long as I could hold a pencil and paper straight, but it’s also never bought me a beer.  Cheap bastard.

Hmm… Maybe that’s just it.  Maybe I just need a drink.  

Well, more than that, I need a drinking buddy first.

Worst People

wewritewespeak:

Backstory: There was a girl I used to date for almost a year. Like the beginning of most relationships, this girl seemed perfect at first. But eventually the spark left, and towards the end it felt as though I was the only one who fought to keep the relationship going. It felt like I was the…

An Honest Lesson on Love

For the last several years, I’ve celebrated a New Year’s Kiss, birthday cake blowout, and Valentine’s Day Dinner with a different girl each year.  Cue the typical boyish high-fives and hoorahs of approval, right?  But don’t get me wrong; I don’t mean to be smug about it.  It’s something no one should be content with, even more so conceited about—losing in love several years in a row.  I’m not exactly ready to put that accomplishment up on my wall of achievements.

Truth is, my problem is that I’ve always associated the word “girlfriend” with “happiness”.  To me, the only way I could truly ever be happy was if I found that one girl I could fall in love with over and over and over again, and I’ve been in pursuit of this ideal and this ideal girl for quite a while now.  But with every potential hookup and casual date and long-term relationship, it meant I had changed myself in some way, it meant I had sacrificed a part of me in order to appease whoever I was courting at the end of the day.    

After years of tweaks and readjustments and some constant fine-tuning, what I learned is that I am this leftover mess of ex-girlfriend expectations and self-imposed letdowns.  With no polite way of stating this, I am fundamentally fucked up.  I lost myself somewhere in those past relationships, always latching myself onto the nearest pair of XX chromosomes, never feeling satisfied if my facebook relationship status read “single” for a prolonged period of time.  Love was a drug, an addiction, a bad habit I couldn’t break myself away from.

Granted, whenever I was in love, it could be argued I was at my most “happiest”.  I was productive, motivated, inspired.  But when that relationship ends… well let’s just say that some scars run so deep that it’d make the Grand Canyon look like a simple knee-scrape. 

So after all that time spent searching for contentment with that special someone else, I’m going to try something different.  I’m going to search for me.  And after I find me, then I’m going to find happiness.      

From now on, if there’s ever a letdown or a harsh disappointment, it will be by my own mistake and it will be my own burden.  If there’s ever a decision to be made or a shot to be called, it will be by my own judgment and it will be my own responsibility.  And if there’s ever any kind of love-making to be made, it will be by own right hand, and possibly the left if I’m feeling particularly frisky. 

;P

You know what else?  For now, I think I’m happy with that—I’m learning to love the company of myself, someone I’ve forgotten to be in a long time. 

So… here’s to all the lovers who no longer love; to the once “my-one-and-only’s” who’ve become the now “alone-but-not-lonely’s”; to those who aren’t actually bitter towards love, but aren’t necessarily better because of it either.  You’ve learned how to be happy and content with the one person it matters to the most:  yourself.  And that?   Now that’s true happiness.

Why do I have such a love/hate relationship with writing?  

And why can we only reconcile on these sleepless nights?

Ha.  Whatever the reason, might as well say hello to my old Muse again…

Lover’s Edge

So, standing at the bottom looking up against Lovers’ Edge, my feet turn to ice and my body begins to shiver; cause once upon a time ago, I made this journey once before, only to find that if it’s not the fall that winds up killing you, it’s the climb to the top that warns you’re past the point-of-no-return. But there’s only one direction when it comes to reaching someone else’s heart, so whether by balloon, by plane, or by one single big jump, just make sure that that one direction is UP.

And so once again, I find myself in the middle of an ascent into open atmosphere, past the thick fog and dense clouds and heavy smog that pollute my head and make it so unclear, and into a space where the fakeness of the city and the loneliness of the country seem to simply disappear. And when I finally reach the summit of Lovers’ Edge, I’ll take a step and take a peek right over that fateful ledge and realize that the rest of the world seems so small when you’re on the edge of falling in love.

So, if love is truly blind than so will be my leap; and stepping out from the top of the world, I’ll breathe in, breathe deep, and release… 

…and with the world rushing past me and the sky all-around, the only thing left to do is smile, cause falling is the same thing as flying if your feet never touch the ground.

All I can seem to think about lately is how much I screwed up things.  With family.  With friends.  With love.  All the stupid little things that just refuse to leave my head.  Ughhh. 

…When is this storm going to pass? 

“Hi”

That’s all it takes. 

“Hello”

Really, it’s as simple as that.

“What’s it going up?”  And there it is… that instant, awkward moment. 

Fuck.

A simple greeting, and yet I still can’t find the right words.  What the hell is wrong with me lately?

The last couple weeks I feel like I’m losing touch with the outside world.  I’ve grown out of the social niche that I’ve conveniently dug myself into, and now I can’t seem to fit back into the scheme of things.  I’ve become this over-thinking, awkwardness-inducing, slightly-depressed hermit who plays scrabble against his Optimus Prime action figure all day (so far, I’m leading the series 13-4).  Hah.   

So I guess it’s a trade-off maybe?  I lose touch with the outside world, but I get to find myself again.  My outside voice becomes this tongue-tied, self-conscious stuttering lil’ kid, but my inner voice has never been louder or more definite than it is right now, even if it is just on paper.  Even with friends, people who once meant everything in the world to me, it feels like I’m losing that connection we once had; it sucks, but I’m finding it difficult to even talk to them. 

I guess it’s fair.  I think the world will manage somehow without me while I take a little hiatus from public affairs.  Sides, this sojourn into solitude is one that is probably long overdue.

Sigh… Maybe I’m just going crazy….  But at the very least, it will be well-documented and neatly organized when I finally slip into my eventual schizophrenia… 

Hah.

So I learned that love isn’t about finding that one girl in a sea of a million faces. It’s about falling in love with one girl in a million different ways.