A List of Beliefs for No Real Reason.

I believe in being honest. Through your actions, words, and thoughts. Clarity and acceptance of the situation around you, and yourself. I believe shame is healthy and pride only in small doses. Humility and self analysis is just as important to the idea of honesty as not directly lying.

I believe it is okay to be proud of where you came from, though it is equally important to understand it is no more different or special than anywhere else. I believe facts should build pride and nostalgia is poison.

I believe you need destruction to grow. I believe you must pick yourself apart and discover your cancers in order to eradicate them and build yourself stronger. A lack of destruction stagnates growth. Ask any forest. This is impossible without real honesty. Everything comes back to honesty.

I believe in love as a magic in the world and I also believe in love as a full time career. Glamour fades and in youth we shy from the terrible work of maintaining love, despite it's long term value to our happiness and satisfaction. However, you need growth and of course honesty.

I believe there is no truth worth knowing. I have never been satisfied or pleased in any sense discovering truth.

I believe the bottom is a real place inside all of us and it requires more bravery to reach it than to get better. I believe in the strength of suicide and self destruction. I believe that those who call suicides cowards do not occupy the same emotional or spiritual spectrum. Further, that those who condemn suicides are slightly subhuman.

I believe that learning yourself should be a constant wheel turning inside you. Always questioning, always searching. I believe that once you stop and you "know" who you are, you become quicker to fail to see other perspectives, as well as failing to understand new emotions or struggles within yourself.

I believe that without authoritarian systems in place humans would continue to co-operate and grow, and that maintaining these systems only holds people back.

I believe disposable people exist and I believe most of us are among them. I believe we are bred to feed a minute portion of the population and I believe that if you don't see it, you deserve to be eaten by that minute portion.

I believe people who reach adulthood without passions are not real. I believe that I have loved many of them and that breaks my heart, because I'm not sure they were ever capable of loving in return.

I believe art is the pinnacle of human potential. The ability to express a knot of emotions within yourself and have it understood and felt within another living thing across centuries and continents is vastly more important to the human experience than any achievement of science, religion, or industry.

I believe that science is the closest second. I believe understanding the world around us separates us from the other animals, though it is a divide we must remember to balance carefully. Understanding nature matters, but removing ourselves from it is a slow death.

I believe in possibility. I believe we are possibly a sum of chance, or design. I believe we may be alone. I believe we may not be alone. I do not believe in a god, but I believe one or many to be possible. That is the first time I have let go of my staunch atheism in almost thirty years. Honesty.

I believe in holding doors. Smiling at strangers. I believe in lending a hand. I believe in being kind, despite the day you are having. Not for reward, not for recognition, but for the sake of others. I believe true selflessness should be among the goals of all of us, and if I were to be asked for the meaning of life, I would answer with that.

I believe in listening. Understanding, or at least attempting to. Letting go of ego, and becoming vulnerable for the sake of another. I believe it is often painful, however the end result of peace and serenity often makes up for it.

I believe sometimes, you just have to get something out, even if it isn't what you set out to say.

Awake, for Better or Worse

The room is dark and the fan is on. My eyes ache and Elle is a few inches or maybe miles from me. The room is dark and the fan is on and my hands are shaking and my blood is crashing through my veins and brain and heart and my lungs struggle to pull in


any






thing.





Panic. A static and stomping fills my ears and thoughts. I am scared. Paralyzed. Images of my body. Images of my mistakes. Echoes and ghosts and futures and the past. The fucking past seared into my face and every time you look at me isn't it all you see? Isn't it all I can see anyway?

Face after face after face, all lost. Eroded away by the constant tectonic alcoholic. The head of household. The good man. The hope and then, of course, the truth of it all.

It takes a half hour to pull myself together enough to get out of bed. To look at the shape of Elle under the blanket, sleeping it off. Breathing slow and steady, at peace. The things I've said. Done. Been. It's all I feel anymore and when I stopped drinking it came flooding in and I couldn't hide. I spent weeks at the edge. Making up for lost time, I imagined, and if I could only make peace with it, with it all but



why should I get off that easy?




Don't I deserve each moment like this? Each moment I have attacked you all with? Why should I accept it and move forward? No, I deserve this. This and more.

The shape of Elle under the blanket. Peaceful. Here because she loves me or here because we came here alone and together and I deserve that uncertainty. That paranoia. It will never matter what she says or does, I deserve to feel like I have to fight for her.

I stand and walk through the dark and I try not to choke against my collapsing lungs or let the dizziness take me to the floor and I reach the wall and lean and take my notebook from my backpack near it and go into the bathroom. I sit in the bathtub and I can choke there. I do.


Choke. Rest my head against the wall and let it all wash through me and over me.


I've been taking melatonin again. Nearly nightly and I took two last night and slept restlessly and I took two tonight and it is now almost five and I am drowning in panic. I have been here so often in the past and I know soon I'll be drinking Nyquil by the bottle and soon I'll be back on the fucking Seroquel that hollowed me out but I slept. I slept well and my real self didn't wake up then until I took myself off.

My breathing slows and I count my fingers slow against my thumbs.


One, two, three, four.


Four, three, two, one. Over and over.


This isn't even the worst part of sobering up. It's not facing what you've done. Or making amends. Or making the change completely. It isn't the way your chemistry reacts without alcohol. No.


It's realizing that so many parts of me weren't created by alcohol. They were just me. The panic. The rage. The sadness. The paranoia. I'm quick to react, judge, damn. I can be mean to people I love without a second thought. I can be cold and cruel for no other reason than because I am capable of it.

I forgot all of that shit lived in me and in the decade I was an alcoholic and the half decade before it that I was building steadily up to it, I forgot that those were parts of me.

I forgot that I was awful.

Always this picture of a good man that Elle had never met. Had been buried under a disease. A good man that was still somewhere if I could only pick him out slow and carefully.

I had forgotten what I was. What I am.

I sit in the bathtub and count my fingers and control my breaths and I can feel my heart slow eventually and I stand and take two more melatonin and wash it down drinking from the faucet. My face in the mirror. Red and swollen and the fucking past seared into it and I wonder if I have ever been happy, like I remember I was. I wonder if any of the light ever really shone and I wonder if I was so fucking happy before, why'd I drink so much?

Why'd I quit?


In the mirror he tries to feed my argument but I know why.

For Elle. For hope. For my family, and for me. The me I thought I was and the me I want to be again, for the first time.


A few more deep breaths.


Another drink of water.


Another farewell to the scarred and swollen reflection and I walk into the dark bedroom where Elle hasn't stirred and I slide in next to her, ashamed and in love and awake, for better or worse.