Like most writers, I like to think that I know everything there is to know about the relationships between people and the way they interact  when, like most writers, I just make it up and really know nothing about the way it actually works.
We always want to show the characters that we create as completely independent entities but we can never create someone who isn’t inherently us, or a version of someone that we know. I cannot write a heartfelt male that doesn’t struggle with his own morality or fear or self-doubt because that is what I know; it’s who I am, and it’s who my characters always emulate. My own worst enemy and my greatest companion.
I watched my mother chase after my father for 24 or so years. All she wanted was his love. His attention. She just wanted to be his friend. And I watched my father grow more distant with every “Please,” more interested in his hobbies or his career. In himself. But she never stopped, and I don’t think she ever would have if he hadn’t found in someone else what my mom was looking for him to find in her.
These are the people who taught me my first lessons about love. They showed me that love is not give-and-take, not a two-way street and never equal. Love is an unbalanced scale, a one-way lane, where one person gives everything while someone else takes even more.
And, try as we might, we all become our parents. My relationships are one twisted form of this or the other. Trying too hard to win the affection of someone who takes or selfishly ignoring the adoration of someone who gives.
I don’t know how to tell the truth. I have grown up hearing that honesty is the best policy and that lies are the Devil’s gate inside, but people have never truly shown me what it is to tell the truth. My father never once, in all those years, said “I am not happy.” Instead, he showed me how to repress. To push the truth down and cover it over with gravel and cement. A foundation built on un-truth is a foundation built on lies. My mother never told me that she was unhappy with herself, insecure and depressed. Instead, it was all clichés and self-diluted hope through unexplained tears. Rose-colored glasses over watering eyes.
So now, I am able to see the beauty of the world in the mundane or the tragic, but I am also very untouched by it. I don’t know how to feel happy. I don’t know how to be angry. I don’t know how to grieve. I don’t know how to ask for help when I need it because I almost never know when I need it. I spend my time telling myself that everything is alright and it is just my perspective that is flawed.
I am bound by my fears. My mother left my father to try and start a new life for herself. My father left my mother and did start a new life for himself. But my mother hasn’t found anyone else and my father is miserable. One made no decision and the other decided and went for it and neither one have found any more happiness than they had when they were miserable. I don’t see how I can avoid that fate. So I continue to make choices (or make none) that leave me continually unhappy.
I have a daughter that I cannot have. She lives on the other side of the country with her mommy and a man who is not her father but is her daddy. While here, on my side of the country, I am daddy to a little girl who is not my daughter. I love her but I resent her for something that she knows nothing about. And as much as I dream of being her daddy, I cannot commit to her for fear that I will leave her without me.
I am constantly plagued by my morality. I want to do things (or not do things), but the morals that were instilled tell me that those things are wrong (or that I need to do them whether I want to or not). So, I try to live piously, holding firm to the ideals that my heart was founded on, and fail. Because I am a human, and humans were beasts before they were civilized. I live a life that is torn, tortured by wants and desires and captive to what is right. It has made me cynical, and I doubt very much that it is possible to exist happily as an optimistic cynic.
I know it sounds like I am trying to blame my parents for the way that I have turned out, and by rites, I guess I am. At the same time, I haven’t mentioned any of the things that make me, in spite of all of this, a pretty great person. But those aren’t the things that I have qualms with right now…
I am uneasy with what I know. And even more-so with what I do not. Knowing may be half the battle, but not knowing how to win is the harder half…

I’m from rearranged furniture
I’m from “asleep in the bathtub”
I’m from biting hands over
store-bought candy.

I’m from vinyl-white-siding,
No better at keeping in heat
Than keeping out punks,
Four guinea pigs named
“Gamber,”
And a spotted rabbit.

From searching for answers
At the bottom of a bottle,
And not stopping, to think “maybe,”
When the answers aren’t there.

I’m from thrown phones, and
Broken Home,
And diseases they have
Yet to cure.
From layoffs, to layovers, to
A car, that careened
Down the street that I lay in,
And broke the door off its frame,
Leaving an impression on
Unshakable wood.

A Golden Orb-Weaver
On a storm-door handle,
Painted purple and black,
And a blood-curdling scream.
From a run to the backyard
And irrational fears
And the accidental rhyme
Of your mask-haunted dreams

I’m from people who loved me,
Without knowing how,
And people who couldn’t,
Without saying why.

I’m from loving her, a
Little too hard, that when we finally
Broke, We both emerged.
Scarred, and scared.
Groundhogs, and rabbits, and
Cats that weren’t mine.
Being told, at times,
Simultaneous, that I’m
Less than, yet
“Above grade level.”

I’m from baring the blunt-force,
To numbing it all out.
I’m from jazz, chess, and
Tonic water. I’m from
The Wolftones classy sound.
I’m from turning up the
Music so loud, that when
The world covered its ears,
I tried my best
To listen
.
I’m deciding to recreate the world
As I see fit.

I’m going to do something important,
 special,
Before I die. 


I want to invent. An

Existence I feel more content, in.

There’s no wagon to fall off.

Just looming things,

And avoidance. 


I’m deserving of the option to keep

Calling it as I see it. 

Advocating character development,
And suppressing my own hamartia.

Experimenting with sobriety,
And the ending of days.
Fighting off the Great Greyness, unstoppable,
Laying down land-mines, and
Bear-traps, on the
Terrain of Winter.

*I’m going to turn the music up
Louder still,
Until protest, drowned out,
Is inseparable, from
Cheering.

And I want to tell her that I understand
what it feels like to be fake, insignificant,
and a shadow on the sidewalk of society.

And I want to tell her that I also borrow
the experiences of others --
that I, too, learn feelings
by stopping and staring at personal wreckage,
like a tourist of emotions,
like an inevitable wish of a human being.

Let's return to where I was when my tongue wasn't so hollow. Where the pills weren't nearly as hard to swallow. To think so deeply is both a curse and a blessing, and there's no wound dressing for nostalgia in negative space. But when I scrape my knee again can you lend an ear? I think I feel it coming. I feel the past flowing through my veins like a sharp shot of dope under a dimly-lit causeway. The grass of the lawn that I used to play on is starting to grow on my back and seep into my scarce serotonin, and I really need someone to regularly attend to it. Mow it on an altruistic sunny day with the kids running around you and laughing. Pull the weeds out when I end up staying past midnight working on the file reports for all the others that can't seem to find their authentic reflection either.

I'm back there in the woods. There was something about the fragile, half-broken branches lying on the ground that made me feel understood. I don't know if it was the demeanor or the distance. I couldn't hear the angry screech of an eighteen pack or decipher the blue from the black. It was the furthest thing from my favorite noose or the truth of the love around me cut loose.

It was the days that my brother and I would congruently comply. We'd go into the backyard and have no foreshadowing of tissues scarred. We'd run and we'd laugh and we never looked back. We'd continue into the night because we didn't care that we couldn't see the grass stains anymore. The obscurity of the look on my face could perhaps explain why I have always blended into the background with such effective camouflage. When mom did call us in to shower of the dirt, there wasn't yet blood on her shirt. She smiled, and I remember her smile so well. So little to say and so much to tell.

The funny thing is that he wasn't around back then either. He was trapped in a time long before the doctors detected my first pulse. Somewhere in this streak of gray hair and emotional despair was a feeling so strong that it was drinking itself to death to reveal its true colors and stillborn brothers. But oh God, how I loved Christmas morning. Under the array of strings of lights and the daytime not seeming as lonely as the nights, there was not a hostile bone in the human body. There was simply a long forgotten innocence filled with cinnamon buns, coffee that stayed a little warmer than usual in the Kureg, and the cats rolling around in the piles of wrapping paper like they were the ball-pits at the McDonald's both ways down the street. It was the clack of a controller. My favorite friends beating games in one night and sleeping over. It was wiffleball  games right after the nights where I'd two whole boxes of Mac and Cheese. It was sledding down the tallest hill in town on the days where the ice held your head up high and didn't need any praise, or even a reply. It cared nothing for the size of the nails on my feet, my favorite band on repeat, or the broken wooden bridge between my amygdala and frontal cortex. r

But then I remembered that those days exists only in two places: my memory and my dreams. Was I in a hopeless daze in the middle of the street or did I have my favorite fleece blanket for heat? As the crust in my eyes slowly broke away at the seams, I received my answer. It was a fate that seemed equal to a vicious and malignant cancer.

I was awake for another day. The humidity of my dorm room danced across my skin like a bead of sweat anxiously running down the back of my neck and spine. I remembered the concrete line drawn between this world and the one in my head, turned my body so that the morbid did not seem fully dead, and connected my foot with the frigid ground and didn't make a sound. I had two grocery carts and a porcelain tub full of responsibility, yet I found myself frozen and void of mental mobility.

I didn't know what to say when I started my days anymore. So I brushed my teeth, remained mute, and walked out the door.