Focus Fire

I've started writing a bit again.

It is slow.

It is fickle.

Hopefully, it lasts.

Prose Poem

You are the sea.  My mind can no longer process the vast blue water without your intrusion.  Everything, the salty air, the push and pull of the tide, the Sun's reflected rays, every aspect is infected with you. I want to bathe in the sea.

Coins

I sat at dinner with an old friend. Old friends are unique. They know you, the real you, the you that doesn't feel the need to impress. Old friends talk. They don't bring up daily events, gossip, or inane politics. Old friends cut to the core of issues, listen to responses, and reply with pertinent input.

I realized a new truth while I sat at dinner with an old friend. You weren't happy in our marriage, not for a very long time. That isn't the new truth. That is a known truth. The new truth was coming to terms with the fact that you were so unhappy that you sought to make me feel as unhappy as you did.

Often, you talk about how you haven't been angry through this entire ordeal. Though I've seen you hurt and angry, I will choose to imagine you are capable of understanding the world as it is. You have been more capable of moving on, less capable of pain, because your pain has long passed. Having freely admitted that you never forgave me fully after our first separation, I have realized again and again that you never truly tried after you came back. You had a twofold mission: hurt me as deeply as you felt you had been hurt; get a child. You pushed me to the brink so many times. Each time you were so ready to leave. After all, you had achieved your mission after the little one came into the world. I fought so hard to keep us together. I was fighting for ash. You were already gone. When finally I fell, made my most terrible mistake, you were primed and ready.

I will never forgive you for your great lies. I will never forget the fallacy that was our final years. I will always love you deeply. I will always be proud of my ability to do so in the face of such opposition. Now, if only the coin could reconcile it's sides.

Fresh

I want you to grow up with a father. I want you to understand the love that I feel for you without the need for me to tell you. I want you to look at me with pride and respect.

You are the thing that drives me. Every choice I make has meaning because you are in the world.

I love you, little one. Never forget that.

Fear

Be what you were meant to be, demonstrate virtue.
Eliminate fear, strive for worthy goals.
Assert yourself, disregard negativity.
Trust your instincts, seek challenge.

Train your mind, become greater than the sum.
Have faith in others, allow them to surprise.
Erase what you made yourself to be, begin again.

Organize your life, learn anew.
Discover importance, forget what you knew.
Do not give in, gain strength through perseverance.
Solidify changes, make it impossible to fail.

Finally, Something Worth Writing

Interesting thing to write about, but my current situation has caused me to take a step back and take a hard look at myself. Maybe it's because I am living in Spokane for the moment, or maybe it was just time that I realized it, but I am realizing that the one thing I thought I had going for me is just self-deception. I am a mediocre writer at the very best, and I have serious doubts that mediocre is accurate.

It started when I remembered what I was like in high school. A while ago, I found some old poems I wrote. They were bad, embarrassingly bad. Then I thought of this chance encounter I had months ago with the teacher that caused me to believe that I had a talent, she basically asked me if I had finally put aside my ridiculous hope of writing a novel. The meeting always irked me. I mean, my wife said I was good, my friends said I was good, my mommy said I was good. Why would they lie...?

After going over all of these seemingly insignificant details of my life, proving exactly how self absorbed I am in the process, I had an epiphany. I didn't start valuing intelligence until college, more accurately, I didn't start valuing intelligence until after I stopped performing competitively athletically. It was as if I realized that I had nothing going for me, so I latched onto the one thing someone had told me I was good at. The tragedy is that I was never actually good at it. It was just a teacher trying to make a difference in a kid's life. It was a teacher trying to get a kid engaged in academics.

After being rejected by a few writing positions during my hunt for work, as well as having freelance articles rejected, I have finally begun to open my eyes. Of course people that love me are going to say they like what I write, I care about writing and they want to be supportive. It makes sense that a teacher is going to try and focus a student that doesn't have any interest in school. No doubt, someone with nothing left is going to attempt to find something of value within himself. These points do not make a good writer, though. They might imply a good support system, which is in itself valuable... for someone who stumbles all the time.

So anyway, to me, this post is valuable. It means I can explore other avenues. It means that the focus of my life's endeavors for the past nine years has amounted to the same as most of the rest of my focuses. Not a lot. It means that I am wandering further into the wilds, more lost than ever.

Knowing you're lost is better than imagining a destination that doesn't exist, though, right?

Thanks for reading.

Self Awareness

Can you imagine what its like to feel like you need to get over your child because she won't be in your life every day? The only way to evade self-destruction is to eliminate the cause of pain. Why is it that for me to succeed at becoming a better father, I need to distance my emotions from the only person in the world I want to be near?