I used to listen to Tupac’s “Changes” every morning.

I would lay in my bed in the early hours of the morning envisioning what I could be if only I could change. Nowadays, it seems, I haven’t been listening to anything but the inner-workings of my own mind. I want to feel good about everything without a dead rapper reminding me that I need to treat another like a brother instead being two distant strangers. That’s how it’s supposed to be, anyway.

My stumbling block is my inability to move on and let go – to let everything that has been pass away and continue down the road with a will to do better, to be better than I am. Sometimes comfort comes in the form of distractions and schedules. Sometimes, though, it’s gardening.

It’s a tepid relapse from the sweltering past, when the sun retreats to the opposite end of the sky and the day is dying. I’m in small garden in front of a house owned by man I’ve never met. With my little red trimming sheers in hand, I slice the heads off of a plant I’ve never seen before. Something clever comes to mind. I deem myself a botanical barber, and I’m finishing the job Mother Nature started. It’s peaceful in this patch of the natural, where the grass is a breezy dancer and the orange glow of the heavens reflects on my skin, moist and scattered with bits of vines and leaves. It is here in this garden that the past and the future mean nothing to me, and even now, in my head, these moments remain in the present. I step back from my work, glancing down at what I can only assume is a community of tiny creatures that stir and linger without my touch. At the bottom of a stalk are round little parcels of budding life, containing what I hope are future butterflies. Honey bees land and take flight atop beautiful summer flowers; the pollen collection feverishly continues with the turn of the planet until all is laid to rest. Everything here makes sense. Everything here is exactly where it’s supposed to be: everything except me.

The night brings on silence and darkness, yet I lay awake with my thoughts. Usually I succumb to the weariness that pervades hours later, but not always. Some nights I drive through back roads that branch and loop through a vein of forested remains in a town that was once my whole world. What seemed to stretch on for eternity years before is now a five-mile drive in a starless night; the light pollution from the nearing city washes out the sky in a sickly yellow. It is as though God himself had poked holes in the night sky for even the smallest remnants of light to peer through, only to be eradicated by the devices of His own people for the sake of convenience and safety. As I slowly snake around the roads where I spent most of my life, I desperately cling to memories and experiences that fall upon cloudy eyes. It is here, in my most sensitive moments, that I find myself unable to digest a very real, very human realization. Like scrambling to come to terms with one’s own mortality, the stark reality of the passage of time comes to a head:

Nothing is like it used to be and will never be that way again for the rest of our lives.

I once asked a friend how he spent his teen years. He spoke of carefree nights at local diners and late-night walks through schoolyards and abandoned buildings – nights when nothing mattered but exploration and companionship. The names of his companions were lost on me; these were people I’d never heard of, much less been acquainted with. They were long gone, he said. I then asked him if he missed those people, those experiences, and that feeling of being able to do anything and everything. And if he did, would he invite those same experiences back into his life, albeit at a later point in life.

After a long drag of a cigarette and a flicker of thought in his eyes, he said:

“Those days are gone. They are gone and they can never come back. Even if we were to assemble the same people and do the same things, it would be in vain. We’ve had those experiences – the ones that will remain in my memory for a long time – but to repeat them would be lying to ourselves.”

For the life of me, I can’t handle that. I only hope I’m not alone in entering adulthood not in a prideful march, but kicking and screaming.

A tree, if left unstirred for its infancy and adulthood then after, grows from beneath the ground and rises upwards. This tree, not unlike human beings, has everything it needs to sustain itself – it is created containing every single factor that ties into the development and maintenance of life. Trees don’t have worries, though, save for overzealous lumberjacks.

Sometimes I just want to be. I want to rise up and stay up. Unfortunately, something is always trying to cut me down, to lower me and defeat me.

A stagnant lifestyle seems counterproductive to existence, yet essentially this is a just a “sweatpants” mode of living. Sure, it’s comfortable, familiar and has deep pockets, but everyone thinks you’re a goddamn bum and you’re not really doing anything for yourself. Not surprisingly, that was also a really awful analogy – and more than that, a ridiculous paragraph.

A week ago I found myself driving around, just like I always end up doing when my bedroom seems an unbearable isolationist resort. During this particular drive, I realized that if I were to be an exceptionally wasteful and independently wealthy individual, I would continue to drive my car until either the car broke down or I did. Unfortunately, the night only lasts eight hours in the summer – nine, if you’re lucky – and there’s no way in hell I’m going to wage through D.C. -metropolitan-area-traffic in the heat during the advent of global warming. Eventually I wound up in the living room of a man who had once been a boy, whose sole aspirations had deteriorated into promiscuity and frequent binge drinking. Three people in attendance that night – maybe four, if I’m not mistaken – had received hastily delivered blowjobs from his sister in the months and years prior, and all three (the fourth, if there was one, kept silent) proudly noted this fact throughout various points in the conversation, most notably to her brother, even. After watching overweight teenagers become even more overweight, I answered a phone call from a girl I happen to love and made my escape through the front door – not a single person stirred and I was all the happier in this regard. When the conversation ended, which had transpired over fancy satellites I’ll never see, I returned to my car and made use of the empty roads and darkened sky. Eventually I deemed my journey a worthless endeavor and ended up listless in my bed until the thoughts in my head subsided and the next moment in my consciousness was a bitter awakening.

It was on this day that I decided to make a seemingly tedious trek through several highways south of my own and visit a landscape I hadn’t been familiar with in nearly a decade, I calculated. Yes, it’s true; I haven’t been to a beach in almost ten years. In an attempt to clear my head with fresh air and corrode my car with the same fresh air (which happens to contain large amounts of salt, wouldn’t you know), I packed a meal of bread and a single apple, three bottles of water and some track pants (although I ended up wearing those rather than eating them) and made my escape to the sea. Mother Nature being the bitch she often is, she greeted my arrival on our nation’s interstate sprawl with Noah’s Arc-esque rains, a convoy of reckless tractor trailers and electricity that spanned the sky for what seemed like miles. I brushed aside the fact that I was driving in severely dangerous weather and welcomed the cold, stale breath of the reaper at a moment’s notice. If I couldn’t have the past, I figured, I didn’t want a future. Truth to be told, my arrival in North Carolina – be it within the safety of my vehicle, eatin’ an apple, or dead on a stretcher in the back of a frantic ambulance – didn’t mean a whole to me, really.

Believe it or not, I survived and ended up at the North Carolina border nearing the conclusion of Abbey Road. Whilst gorging on a delicious slice of this wonderful bread that I had packed, I encountered a tollbooth. Tollbooths will kill a rocking mood and a delicious feast in seconds flat if you’re not expecting them. Shirtless and in mid-snack, I approached what I assumed would be a disgruntled tollbooth worker with a lousy sense of fashion and disdain for all living creatures; I was right.

Oh yeah, all right
are you gonna be in my dreams

“Two dollars.”

tonight

“Aren’t you excited? This may very well be the highlight of your night! Aren’t you completely pumped?”

Love you, love you
love you, love you

“What?”

“It’s the very end of Abbey Road! We’re almost at the best part!”

“What’s Abbey Road?”

“The classic Beatles album… ?”

As I mentioned before, I had taken my shirt off three hours prior in the wake of my steamy voyage; my bare chest was probably covered in breadcrumbs and my hair, once bound neatly in a ponytail, now hung from my head like vines; basically, I looked like, well, someone you’d encounter at a tollbooth at three a.m. Still, this is hardly an excuse not to be completely psyched for the epitaph of The Beatles. Phyllis, a portly tollbooth attendant with a signature, “I fucking hate my job and everything about you because of it,” tollbooth attendant look on her face, denounced perhaps the most significant moment in the history of rock’n’roll – nay, the entire history of mankind up until this point and forever afterwards – in exchange for twenty dimes.

In the midst of a badass guitar solo, Phyllis and I had a showdown of sorts. I stood my ground, digging quietly for quarters in the recesses of my unused ashtray while she stared into the vacuum of my eyes in stark protest – her faltering and lazy glare the effects of either many a sleepless night, an inbred gene pool, or a decade of doing little else than smoking pot for a majority of her teenage and early adulthood – perhaps all three. And then, like clockwork, Paul gently cooed:

And, in the end

I slowly extended my hand towards the booth, the joint in between my forearm and bicep – my elbow, I guess – popping ever so slightly from hours of atrophy.

the love you take

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and ol’ FDR sailed through the air as they departed from my unclasped fist – flashed for half of a second and vanished into the darkness amongst the clutches of a sinister women and her sinister hands.

is equal to the love

I hit the gas as hard as I could, venturing further into the blackness and uncertainty that lay before me.

you make.

After passing the first fifty or so bar-b-que restaurants, I realized that the Outer Banks (please note that I did not refer to it as the OBX) was nearing ever closer. After navigating the clusterfuck of twists and turns I’d encountered up until this point, MapQuest informed me that my destination was now a straight shot for 90 miles. I didn’t quite know what to expect, I’ll be perfectly honest, but I just needed a change of scenery. I needed a change of mind. I needed to change.

I hadn’t even realized I’d passed through Kitty Hawk and whatever the hell identical touristy town sandwiched in between Kitty Hawk and Nags Head when I arrived in Nags Head. I didn’t care much for the taste of pig, surfing or hermit crabs, so I didn’t really understand why I found myself in Nags Head that night, but I put my vehicle to rest in a patch of sand and walked down the beach and into the tide with this girl I happen to love. I guess I forgot to mention that she was at the beach for some reason. Well, she was. I’m telling you now, alright? My entire body now in a seemingly permanent hunched stance, I did my best to awaken my muscles and bones down that long stretch of beach, all the while avoiding busy crabs which scuttled along the sandy floor awaiting the nearing tide. It was here by the ocean that I let my mind wander and expire. Here, where the horizon and sea overlap and blend into an indistinguishable black, I began to leave the past where it ought to stay. While the motivation behind my trip was still an uncertainty even to me, this special girl aside, I knew now the full potential behind everything and all things. I thought, if I were a completely unrealistic human being, I would have wanted nothing more than to sleep peacefully by the mouth of the ocean that night. However, I understood that the tide, sand, sun, crabs and early-rising beach tourists would make this an unwise decision. And given my history with the sun, I probably would have just died. There aren’t a whole lot of things I can think of that would embarrass me, but having a small group of Coppertone-doused children poke me with sticks like some helpless, beached jellyfish – even if I were to be dead – is not the kind of romanticized image of my death I want to imagine. That final breath is reserved for battling jungle cats while skydiving, I’m proud to say.

I didn’t even stay for 24 hours. The following evening I found myself behind the wheel of my car fiddling with printed MapQuest directions and putting a lot of thought into what I didn’t like about myself, what I did like about myself and how I would react to the savory thought of time travel. I often find myself thinking about time travel, I’ve realized. I’m not even going to try to sound sophisticated or intellectual about this: I pray to the heavens on a nightly basis that I may be granted a chance-meeting with a wild-eyed, crazy-haired scientist named Emmett Brown who would fulfill my boyhood wish of permeating the tunnels of time via a laughably conceived device constructed out of the haul of a doomed Delorean. Every damned night. Unfortunately, until the creator deems such a meeting necessary, I am left with the only options a human being is granted during one’s lifetime: to live or to die. In a hundred years or less, I will have left very little of myself on this Earth, so it’s all just a matter of living out a life that trillions before me have already. That sounds terribly depressing, doesn’t it? I didn’t mean for it to sound so morose, honest. In reality, I think I’m beginning to understand. It’s a shame, then, that I won’t fully understand until I find myself a feeble old man on my deathbed, clinging to my sheets, clinging to my life. What I meant to say was, I won’t fully understand until I’m gutting dozens of jungle cats in a heated midair battle while skydiving to my death.

I’m going to change in ways I want to and ways I don’t. Maybe it’s true, though. Maybe all this love, you know, that I’m taking… maybe it’s equal to the love I’m making. No matter how you want to wrap Lennon/McCartney into a hectic prose, it all comes down to letting go in order to keep goin’. Sure, you could argue that time is merely a cosmic convenience that keeps everything from happening at the same time, or whatever pseudo-intellectual what-ifs you can conjure up from a bumper sticker you once saw. I wake up every single day and realize that everything I’ve ever done with my life is another day farther away. These memories I have, the ones that populate my empty moments and that place you go in between being awake and asleep, that’s all they’re ever going to be for the rest of our lives. Sometimes I don’t know how to handle that and I hold out in naïve defiance that someday, maybe, everything will be just like it used to be. These words that I write will be ten years old, twenty years old, a hundred years old – and maybe they won’t even exist then – they echo as long as they are read and then they are gone. I’m constantly trimming and pulling at aspects of myself that I don’t like or understand instead of just letting go. The person I see in the mirror will be a completely different person by the time I wake up in the morning: always older. I’m going to change, goddammit, or at least I’m going to try my, well, my damndest.

Those days are gone, a friend once told me, they are gone and they can never come back. For the first time in my life, I’m beginning to wonder if that’s not such a bad thing after all.