Is it time? Time to leave? Time to surrender the dream?
Maybe it’s juts time to continue the journey elsewhere.
I have so little left. For years I have been discarding possessions, getting lighter. I only have a few things that keep meaning, a couple of boxes with sentiments stored in the form of pictures, personal papers, a memory stick crammed with story ideas, half finished novels and screenplays, a massive volume containing all of Shakespeare’s plays that I promised myself I’d read before I died. I retain nothing that can’t be stored in a friend’s dusty garage and forgotten.
Won’t take up much room at all. I promise. I’ll be back someday to get them. I promise.
Maybe all that I have left, distilled to their simplest essence, are promises unfulfilled. Stories that no one will ever read, movies that no one will ever see, photos of my past never to be shared with a loving wife, children I’ll never bounce on my knee.
I wonder what vapor feels like. And I wonder if that is what I am becoming.
I stare at five simple documents. My driver’s license for the car I no longer have. A California ID for a place I no longer live. A Social Security card for the job I can’t find. An unused US passport for places I’ve never been. And my birth certificate. Maybe that is the thing that I should pay the most attention to.
My life began as a lie. My birth certificate was forged to show my adoptive mother as my birth mother denying me a heritage, a human legacy. From the very beginning I was a promise unfulfilled.
If I walk toward the shimmering horizon will I disappear like a mirage that never was?
I stare at my boxes of memories, a few pounds of matter, yet they have attained the gravitational mass of a black hole, impossibly heavy, anchoring me to a place I wish to escape. Maybe it is time to discard memories as well. Can I truly become vapor, able to vanish into thin air?
I sigh as I think about disappearing into that shimmering horizon.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Time to let my spirit go…
…Walkabout.