Moving Inward

There is a growing part of me that wishes someone could have told me that by twenty-eight I would be spent, hollow and bent low, low, low to the earth. How is it that I feel like an old man already? Creativity, gone. Curiosity, banished to some dark corner of my being. Some dark corner of the soul that I cannot find a light bright enough to illuminate.

I wept hard the other night. The small room I inhabit absorbed the sobs and threw them back at me, bringing me no solace, only a sad ringing in my ears.

A recent phone conversation with my beloved mother found me saying into the receiver, “if this country wanted to break me it has”. Here stands one broken citizen of the crumbling empire with nowhere to turn. You can leave this country one of three ways: by throwing large sums of money at whatever country you want to inhabit, holding a degree in something “in demand” (a lot of money is needed to obtain this education as well), or marriage.

What about the penniless wanderers? Is there a place for them? When my great grandfather came to America he held no degree, had little money and was not marrying anyone in this country (but would eventually do so). My, how the world has changed in less then a hundred years. For most of the world’s population they are effectively “trapped” in whatever shit hole they happen to be born into.

I’ll stop there. I’ll climb down off this horse and hitch it to the old worn out post for a while. I’ll give you the reader a break. I’ve been talking in circles, feeling very much like a caged animal. I did not ask to be born into this zoo and as a result have found myself feeling infinitely embittered by the cage that is the United States of America.

The utter lack of anyone to seriously converse with about my perspective of this country has been the final blow, the one that’s really taken the wind out of my sails. I wish, for my own sake, that I could say I had a group of others who felt the same way I did about this place, a group who saw the writing on the wall and were making serious plans to escape. For reasons beyond my understanding this is not the case. It’s as if the whole populace has been lulled into some sort of collective lie that “this is all there is”.

Sure life is kind of crappy here in the States, they say to themselves, but it’s much worse everywhere else. Right?

Wrong.

I am beyond appalled at the lack of any sincere foresight for the future of this country by my fellow countrypersons. I am broken and absolutely devastated by it. It makes me sick to the point that I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it.

How can I feel so alone in something that seems so apparent?

This has struck too close to the soul, too close to the core of my being, for me to speak on it much more. A silence will soon be necessary. I’ll plug away internally, finding strength from a place within I still have yet to tap in to. The Titanic is sinking and I am not going down with it.