Hüzün

 A friend asked me the other day: “Hey man, how’s life?” I gave him my typically vague and non-committal response: “life is great” and “I can’t complain.” However, truthfully, it’s not great. I wouldn’t describe life as being bad either.

Life as of late is simply… there.

I would describe it as a state of non-existence. I mean, I’m here – I interact with other people around me. I move through this 3-dimensional space as an inhabitant of this world. But at the same time, I feel as though the “me” that is here is an echo of me. A shadow or perhaps the reflection I used to see of myself years ago gazing back at me in the mirror.

Because I know the real me died 2 summers ago in a motorcycle accident on a Montana highway when I collided head-on with an SUV while attempting a tricky pass.

I really started to notice this state of quasi-existence roughly 3 weeks ago when I looked up at the sky and stopped seeing chemtrails. The sudden and unexplained absence of perpetual and constant smoky trails across the sky which have plagued our atmosphere for the last few years at first seemed unusual. Now I credit it as an indicator of a reality jump onto a distinctly different timeline. An alternate timeline where I narrowly missed that SUV. An alternate reality where my buddy rolled up alongside me on his roaring Harley Davidson and did a pinching sign with his fingers in the air as I hyperventilated underneath my helmet and almost shit my pants.

Other tell-tale signs I’ve observed are a very real disconnect with family and friends. They are both familiar to me but at the same time strangers – except for my daughter. She is the only anchor I have remaining between this world and the one I left. The alternate world where she likely cried about losing her dad at a closed casket funeral.

And here I stay at the “Dolphin Hotel,” perhaps the only guest within its empty and old walls. I blankly stare out thru the smoky window and watch the final throes of summer as the city prepares its metamorphosis into Autumn. The room is still and quiet, the only sound is the occasional hum of the hvac unit kicking on and the distant sounds of honking cars. And I have no desire to leave. I have no desire to engage with people because I know those interactions aren’t real – not real to the “real” me that is. And I can sense the slowly deteriorating gebbeth meatsuit I occupy is starting to run low on power, it’s own operating limits reaching an end. The borrowed time I’m on marked by a morose ennui and sadness.

I do try, the best I can, to be there for my daughter. Even though she is THIS realities’ version of my daughter, she is still mine. She is still my greatest joy and proudest achievement whether in this timeline or the previous.  

And soon I will find myself boarding a plane and flying to Constantinople, the oldest city in the world, to sip çay, pet cats, and attempt to make peace with and reconcile with this version of myself ..to make peace with the man whose life I inherited.

I remember you.

The wind blows incessantly whipping a worn US flag in a wild psychedelic flip-flapping dance. I sit on a bench eating cheap gas station pizza listening to the weathered taut cord the flag is attached to ding ding ding against the rusted metal pole in irregular intervals - a lovely song. The sun is hidden behind a synthetic chem trail blanket, the hard work of sociopathic pilots zig zagging back and forth beneath the firmament. I’m heading south, to red rocked Indian country, to take pictures and be alone with my thoughts.

My cousin, Angel, is dead at 46 years old. He is the first among the old gang to clock out… and in a spectacular fashion too. Mounds of cocaine and booze and fine stripper ass and a deteriorating mind and an empty bank account and an abused heart created a straight shot to a satin lined coffin in a low-budget funeral parlor where he is surrounded by his family and friends who cared about him, and a group of strangers who didn’t, but loved to partake in the substances he provided them. I found myself in neither of these groups. I stand beside his coffin, my daughter’s hand in mine, looking at his face again after a 15-year span of not seeing his face. Sitting next to me his mother weeps and his father stoically chokes back emotion. My only thought is to fix Angel’s hair, it wasn’t prepared the way he’d like it to be and I reach out with my hand and straighten the stiff fibers and attempt to style it in the fashion he always insisted on keeping it. My daughter gently asks me if I am ok, and I nod and tell her I’m fine.

I munch on my pizza and gaze out at the vast barren emptiness of the southern landscape as I sit underneath a tree, in a little area designated to resemble a small park with a picnic table and a small child outdoor playset. A tiny artificial oasis where travelers can stretch their legs as they consume their goyslop gas station chips and cookies, allow their kids to play and their dogs to relieve themselves, before tiredly clambering back into their van or SUV and making the abysmal 1 hour drive to the next nearest gas station oasis. I’m not in any particular hurry to continue, so I simply sit here prolonging the moment. My intention with this trip was not to arrive at my destination, but rather to be alone in stillness conversing with the unseen specters of my past. And so I slowly traverse the countryside taking photographs and recording irrelevant thoughts into my notebook and engaging in small talk when prompted with single-serving sometimes strange characters I encounter along the way. I needed the journey to process the loss of my friend.

It was Angel who taught me to ride motorcycles and to be confident, and it was Angel who taught me to always speak my truth and to savor every living moment of my youth – the thrill of chasing women out of my league and those who weren’t, the thrill of drunkenly fighting strangers under streetlamps over perceived slights. It was he who'd sit and drink with me as I suffered heartbreak from bitches who's names I've now forgotten. He taught me the nuances of good street tacos and tequilas as well as the importance of loyalty to family and friends, a quality I lacked growing up but later developed.

I think about all of these things among other unrelated thoughts that drift by me like clouds passing by a lonesome hilltop. In silence, I sit alone, as around me travelers continue on to wherever it is they're headed.