Retrospective

I kept at it.  I immersed my trowel in a vat of mortar, then spread a thin layer of the viscous stuff atop a line of newly-fired bricks.  I built the wall progressively higher, wishing all the while that I was on the other side.

I spent the spring months in a daze, in a vivid fever dream, both monstrous and terrible.  I spent autumn in my bedroom, laying half-finished poems and dozed-off hours at the altar I’d built to acedia.  A man in his hermitage, watching the beeswax candles swallow hours and spit out ash.  I marked the pages with dogears and fragments of gossamer, the remnants of iridescent wings ripped off of a once-pinned social butterfly.  I spent more time than I had to spend, but that’s always been the case.  I rode the circle tighter and tighter, having forgotten my right from my left.

I learned that time heals all wounds, but only if you keep the infection out.  I also learned that slapping a band-aid on the wound slows or stops the regeneration.  I pissed, shit, and puked blood in the same twelve months.  I stayed five days in the hospital for internal bleeding, and I found the diagnosis ironic and strangely vindicating.  I took up ornithology, but began to envy the birds their flight.  I tried catch-and-release fishing, but began to resent the lack of meaningful consequence.

I stopped drinking so much and the insomnia returned.  As each hour of moonlight painted fresh coats of silver on the snowy fields, the documentaries on the History Channel and the National Geographic Channel refreshed distant events in my slice of the collective memory.  Some friends began to fade in my own personal memory.  I grew weary, hopeful, apathetic, and feral as heartbeat bumped into heartbeat.  I grew inwardly, and now there’s not enough room inside.  I dispensed with my heart to make room for my now idling liver.  I discarded my zeppelin lungs in favor of the bombs they’d dropped.

I began to understand these notions of circularity, of cycles, of closure as catharsis.  I loved, I lost, I refused to love at all.  I read my old writing and felt like I was reading about someone else, someone who was happier but didn’t know it, braver but afraid to find out, more hopeful but too distracted to realize it.  I became stolid in my gathering years, I became a lightning rod in the gathering storm.  I became and then un-became, disintegrating and coalescing and moving on like a creeping fog before a cold front.

I threw punch after blindly flung punch at the bricks, feeling the fragile bones in my hands crunch into smaller pieces.  The wall was too tall, now, and I knew the world on the other side had changed into something unrecognizable, anyway.

I got pulled over three times and administered field sobriety tests all three times.  My record is still clean, but my demeanor grew more and more intractable and recalcitrant with each successive episode.  A professor praised my midterm as the best he’d seen in seven years of teaching two months before I failed his class.  I didn’t care, because it still doesn’t matter to me.  People matter to me, and I want to spend my time making them happy.  When I don’t vehemently hate them, that is.

I broke a glass lamp my grandma painted amidst an awful nightmare, unable to discern the edges of consciousness.  It all has started to bleed into a brownish-black mess, hued and scented like dried blood or diseased bile.  My parents paid a financially wide swath of my bills, and saying thank you became harder each time.  Not out of ingratitude or complacency, but out of heavy-mantled shame.  Being erstwhile has become impossible, and every genre of existence knows exactly where to find me–asleep at the wheel or wide-eyed in bed.

I know now that life is a series of endless compromises, a serial barterine.  Forgoing something to gain something, forgetting something to learn something, something after something and often for nothing.  I had a three hundred dollar MP3 player stolen from me during my birthday party, a party on which I’d already spend hundreds to insure everyone’s enjoyment.  People can be cruel, and kindness can be the most poignant counterpoint.

I realized that my anger has become more difficult to bite back on, and every disrespect paid me I itch to repay with interest.  I redecorated my room, filling it with timepieces and light fixtures until I lost interest.  I did place a recliner from my youth before my computer, however, and the thing oozes comfort.  I have grown tired as the world demands more and more of me.

My hands broken, I began to walk alongside the length of the brick wall.  No wall is so tall that it can’t be walked around.

Team Beard at Thanksgiving: Myself, my uncle, and my brother, with my mother in the background.