It begins, as it so often does, on the coattails of a breakup.
I thought this one would be different, for reasons still unclear to me. I thought this would be the one where I worked through the tendencies that so often end up becoming my undoing, and they through their own, for a glorious culmination of coming together and helping each other’s dreams come true. Alas, old habits die hard, and humans like to do what’s comfortable and easy. For him, that meant becoming distant. For me, that meant being demanding. A classic combination doomed for failure.
Surely it was never meant to work out, but I had convinced myself that this was fate. A friendship that had taken me all over the world with a man who frequented my dreams and whose smile always makes my heart melt. The soul connection there is undeniable, a force strong enough to change the course of a raging river- or at the very least, the course of my life. That doesn’t mean it should have been turned into a romantic relationship.
It careened too quickly into something too big to handle, with talk of visas and immigration. It didn’t feel completely right, but I kept pushing, and pushing, and pushing, applying pressure from all directions until it finally imploded.
Thus, here I am, in the place where many of us often go when the rest of it falls apart: staying with my parents, figuring out what to do next.
The last time this happened was in 2015, when I came back to the US following my first extended excursion abroad and attempted to resume my life in Michigan. As anybody who has travelled can tell you, it’s challenging to fit back into your old shoes when the world has changed your feet.
After months of trying (and failing) to make that work, working dead-end minimum wage jobs to get by, my parents finally decided that enough was enough and bought me a plane ticket to stay with them in Florida. It was nice, at first. It didn’t take long for the reality to set in: that I was an adult who had failed at life, living with my parents.
Many would argue that this does not imply failure on its own, and that I should be grateful to have parents who live together and are willing/able to host me. They would be right, of course. That still doesn’t stop my mind from playing all sorts of tricks, knowing I had fallen short of all the lofty goals I set for myself as a child who knew nothing of myself or the world.
In any case, I took the bait and relocated my struggle to South Florida during the beginning of the dry season; and by that I mean, the time of year when the tourists and snowbirds migrate back north. There’s nothing dry about it. The Sunshine State was an image sold in a packaged lie. Once tourist season ends, thunderstorm season begins, with the scheduled torrential downpour arriving every day between the hours of noon and 3pm.
Nobody was hiring. Every local company was in the process of culling the extra staff leftover from the holidays. So much for that fresh start.
I was a junebug banging against the window screen, with no particular aim or intention besides making money to spend. Maybe I should be taking the advice that everyone had been giving to me, which I had been ignoring for years, and follow my passion. What was my passion? I had to ask myself.
The answer was loud and clear: I want to be a writer.
I hopped on Craigslist and typed in “writing” under the jobs section. Almost immediately, I came across an ad seeking someone to write a biography. Boom. I wrote up a moving cover letter and sent it his way.
Days later, I received a phone call from Peter Langone, a photographer who had reached worldwide fame in the commercial advertising realm back when photography was a form of alchemy involving darkrooms and secret formulas. Peter had just been diagnosed with liver cancer, and wanted his story to be shared before it was too late.
For the next six months of my life, and the last five months of his, Peter paid me $300 a week to visit him every Tuesday and transform his memories into pages. We laughed, we cried, he regaled me with tales of his glory days and unsavory recollections of things better left forgotten. It was those recollections that were our undoing, in the end. He wanted his story told, with nothing left out. His surviving family felt otherwise.
Peter passed away in his own living room, a nurse sitting patiently on a chair next to the hospital bed that had been wedged next to his black leather couch. I spoke to him one last time under the eagle-eyed glare of his older brother, biting back my emotions as he gasped for air like a cross-eyed fish on dry land. It was nothing like the movies had promised it would be. There were no final words of wisdom, no squeezes of the hand. He was a vegetable, and I was a robot, too paralyzed by the shock of it all to let my guard down. I mumbled some empty words in a metered monotone before being escorted outside by the brother, who fixed me with his signature blue-eyed stare that had earned him the nickname “Ice Man” in his time as the CEO of a fortune 500 company.
I didn’t stand a chance.
The book was never published. They couldn’t risk having their reputation damaged. I signed the documents, they paid me what I was due, and I was dismissed forever.
I stopped writing for a long time after that.
So here I find myself, 7 years later, back in South Florida under the same premise. Don’t know where my life is headed, don’t have much going on. I want to write, so that I may be a writer. So that I can claim it as my title, as my lifestyle. I want to be able to say with certainty, every time I’m asked what it is that I do, that yes, I am, in fact, a writer. And a damn good one at that, despite my overt love of commas and run-on sentences.
I want to write. I’m terrified to do so.
I want to write. It’s what I have to do.
I want to write. It’s time to take the steps needed to better my life and grow as a person.
I want to write. So I’m doing it.
Day 2 of 365. Onwards we go.
