All Evidence Has Been Buried
"Time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, Loss, Loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition." -- Tennessee Williams
Six years ago I made a hasty decision to move out on my own with talmanes, my best friend. We had planned on moving out together since our early childhood, in that chimerically innocent way children do. So when we were nineteen and hurting for our own independence we did it.
Somewhere in the back of my hot, brash mind I knew I wasn't ready. I was working only part time as a bank teller making little more than minimum wage, I had dropped out of college and had just ended a long, and deeply emotional relationship with a girl I mournfully cared for. It was the beginning of 1998, a year I can say with unmitigated certainty robbed me of my innocence.
I recall the night before I moved out of my parents house my mother pulling me aside and explaining that my father was having a hard time with my moving out of the house. She confided in me that he, the stoic bear of a man, wept tears to her the night before about it. Now that I reflect on this, I think it was less about not having me around the house and more about the trials and tribulations and hardships of life that I was no doubt going to face. He had always raised me to work hard and be a surviver but I think he always wanted to protect me from the terrible stresses that he himself was forced to go through growing up. It was -- and still is -- hard for him.
So in the spring of 1998 we moved out. It was a small, two bedroom apartment in Everett, WA, in a part of town notorious for its ghetto, but it was quaint and cheap and ours. It wasn't much at all but we loved the hell out of that apartment. I still remember fondly that summer and our frequent trips to "McRonalds" just down the road, of playing "the Cure" and David Bowie loudly on the living room stereo and of faith's frequent visits where we would make dinner and watch bad anime and she would stay the night.
I started working full time at work. I was seeing a girl whom I had an odd relationship with; we find each other every once in a while and sort of hook up for a while when we need mutual companionship and then drift away again just as mutually. I was also immersing myself in acting and for most of that year there was not a single period of time that I wasn't doing something on stage.
And for a while things couldn't have been better.
In August of that year my grandfather, whom I was very close to -- next to my father he was the biggest male influence in my life and I learned a lot about integrity, education and intelligence from him -- died abruptly of simple body failure, caused mainly from his 50+ years of smoking. I didn't mourn his death in the way I should have and it started a slippery slope of depression. I also didn't think his death would affect me as deeply as it did.
Shortly after, my father had his first heart-attack and scared myself and my family. Again, I wasn't in touch with the stresses this was causing me and so repressed these emotions I should have been expressing. I began ignoring them and my family. At the time my mother and father were having problems in their own marriage and my sister was failing out of high school. My father hopped on his motorcycle and left us all without saying what he was doing. For a week he was gone, doing soul searching of his own.
But I ignored it.
And somewhere in that chaos talmanes wasn't able to monetarily support himself any longer and so moved to his grandmother's house. What he didn't know was that I was only barely able to subsist myself, on my full time wages.
But I ignored that and I didn't tell him. And then kinotu was brought in to replace him.
At around this time I was darkly depressed. I wasn't speaking to anyone -- literally. I worked, barely, and came home and locked myself in my room. Because of this abyssal depression, this hollow vacancy I had in myself, I was doing extremely poorly at work and was later demoted to part time.
Money then became an issue. I was forced to take out loans to afford my apartment and food and barely pay my bills. And soon after I couldn't even take out loans so I just stopped paying my bills.
And still I was ignoring it and not telling anybody. I began to question myself and my life and if this is what living was all about. And am I such a human being to handle this? I want to make you understand that I was so depressed at this time I was in constant anxiety. Suicide was a thought that occurred daily. And the more I harbored those feelings alone the worse it became.
And soon I lost my job.
kinotu at the time wasn't working and soon his funds ran out and suddenly I was the only one supporting us. Why I didn't, at that time, call it quits I can't tell you anymore. Those justifications lie in the mind of a different me. But I felt an obligation to us and so continued.
But still I ignored the depression and still I let no one know. I was so gravely, profoundly depressed I would sleep fifteen hours out of the day and the rest of the day would be spent in bed. I wouldn't shower. I didn't eat -- I had no money to eat. I was genuinely eating maybe once every 48 hours.
If you had seen me at the time you would have been witnessing a man who was slowly rotting and dying. But I told everyone I was all right, that nothing was wrong, that everything was under control. But none of it was. And it worsened my depression.
I started writing bad checks just to eat. I was in debt from all of the bills I hadn't paid, and the loans I had taken out. Three years later I would file for bankruptcy.
The only release I had was in the form of desperate companionship with a girl my own age I had met who lived less than a mile away and who was going through much the same thing I was. We never really talked about it much and we had little in common with each other, but we found desperate comfort in our otherwise inconsolable lives. I would visit her apartment and we would scrape together a dinner, excessively drink cheap alcohol and end the night in her bed with usually wild, primal sex. I predict this type of behavior only furthered my descent into self-loathing.
I don't recall exactly what prompted it, but in the beginning of 1999 I realized that either I had to quit now and get help or I would die -- either by my own hand or at the expense of the current lifestyle I was living. Finally, I told my family how bad off I really was. My grandmother, bless her gracious heart, took me in. She needed a man around the house anyway after the loss of her husband, so it was convenient for both of us.
So I moved out of the apartment and stayed with her and began a long, and arduous process of rebuilding my life and my soul. For half a year I think talmanes was the only one of my friends I kept in regular contact with until he moved away in the middle of 1999.
I would like to say I gained a life time's worth of wisdom and experience in that one year. It's easily prepared me for many situations and decisions I have had to make since.
But if you were to ask me if you could turn back time would you do it all over again?
I wouldn't hesitate in saying, "No."
Six years ago I made a hasty decision to move out on my own with talmanes, my best friend. We had planned on moving out together since our early childhood, in that chimerically innocent way children do. So when we were nineteen and hurting for our own independence we did it.
Somewhere in the back of my hot, brash mind I knew I wasn't ready. I was working only part time as a bank teller making little more than minimum wage, I had dropped out of college and had just ended a long, and deeply emotional relationship with a girl I mournfully cared for. It was the beginning of 1998, a year I can say with unmitigated certainty robbed me of my innocence.
I recall the night before I moved out of my parents house my mother pulling me aside and explaining that my father was having a hard time with my moving out of the house. She confided in me that he, the stoic bear of a man, wept tears to her the night before about it. Now that I reflect on this, I think it was less about not having me around the house and more about the trials and tribulations and hardships of life that I was no doubt going to face. He had always raised me to work hard and be a surviver but I think he always wanted to protect me from the terrible stresses that he himself was forced to go through growing up. It was -- and still is -- hard for him.
So in the spring of 1998 we moved out. It was a small, two bedroom apartment in Everett, WA, in a part of town notorious for its ghetto, but it was quaint and cheap and ours. It wasn't much at all but we loved the hell out of that apartment. I still remember fondly that summer and our frequent trips to "McRonalds" just down the road, of playing "the Cure" and David Bowie loudly on the living room stereo and of faith's frequent visits where we would make dinner and watch bad anime and she would stay the night.
I started working full time at work. I was seeing a girl whom I had an odd relationship with; we find each other every once in a while and sort of hook up for a while when we need mutual companionship and then drift away again just as mutually. I was also immersing myself in acting and for most of that year there was not a single period of time that I wasn't doing something on stage.
And for a while things couldn't have been better.
In August of that year my grandfather, whom I was very close to -- next to my father he was the biggest male influence in my life and I learned a lot about integrity, education and intelligence from him -- died abruptly of simple body failure, caused mainly from his 50+ years of smoking. I didn't mourn his death in the way I should have and it started a slippery slope of depression. I also didn't think his death would affect me as deeply as it did.
Shortly after, my father had his first heart-attack and scared myself and my family. Again, I wasn't in touch with the stresses this was causing me and so repressed these emotions I should have been expressing. I began ignoring them and my family. At the time my mother and father were having problems in their own marriage and my sister was failing out of high school. My father hopped on his motorcycle and left us all without saying what he was doing. For a week he was gone, doing soul searching of his own.
But I ignored it.
And somewhere in that chaos talmanes wasn't able to monetarily support himself any longer and so moved to his grandmother's house. What he didn't know was that I was only barely able to subsist myself, on my full time wages.
But I ignored that and I didn't tell him. And then kinotu was brought in to replace him.
At around this time I was darkly depressed. I wasn't speaking to anyone -- literally. I worked, barely, and came home and locked myself in my room. Because of this abyssal depression, this hollow vacancy I had in myself, I was doing extremely poorly at work and was later demoted to part time.
Money then became an issue. I was forced to take out loans to afford my apartment and food and barely pay my bills. And soon after I couldn't even take out loans so I just stopped paying my bills.
And still I was ignoring it and not telling anybody. I began to question myself and my life and if this is what living was all about. And am I such a human being to handle this? I want to make you understand that I was so depressed at this time I was in constant anxiety. Suicide was a thought that occurred daily. And the more I harbored those feelings alone the worse it became.
And soon I lost my job.
kinotu at the time wasn't working and soon his funds ran out and suddenly I was the only one supporting us. Why I didn't, at that time, call it quits I can't tell you anymore. Those justifications lie in the mind of a different me. But I felt an obligation to us and so continued.
But still I ignored the depression and still I let no one know. I was so gravely, profoundly depressed I would sleep fifteen hours out of the day and the rest of the day would be spent in bed. I wouldn't shower. I didn't eat -- I had no money to eat. I was genuinely eating maybe once every 48 hours.
If you had seen me at the time you would have been witnessing a man who was slowly rotting and dying. But I told everyone I was all right, that nothing was wrong, that everything was under control. But none of it was. And it worsened my depression.
I started writing bad checks just to eat. I was in debt from all of the bills I hadn't paid, and the loans I had taken out. Three years later I would file for bankruptcy.
The only release I had was in the form of desperate companionship with a girl my own age I had met who lived less than a mile away and who was going through much the same thing I was. We never really talked about it much and we had little in common with each other, but we found desperate comfort in our otherwise inconsolable lives. I would visit her apartment and we would scrape together a dinner, excessively drink cheap alcohol and end the night in her bed with usually wild, primal sex. I predict this type of behavior only furthered my descent into self-loathing.
I don't recall exactly what prompted it, but in the beginning of 1999 I realized that either I had to quit now and get help or I would die -- either by my own hand or at the expense of the current lifestyle I was living. Finally, I told my family how bad off I really was. My grandmother, bless her gracious heart, took me in. She needed a man around the house anyway after the loss of her husband, so it was convenient for both of us.
So I moved out of the apartment and stayed with her and began a long, and arduous process of rebuilding my life and my soul. For half a year I think talmanes was the only one of my friends I kept in regular contact with until he moved away in the middle of 1999.
I would like to say I gained a life time's worth of wisdom and experience in that one year. It's easily prepared me for many situations and decisions I have had to make since.
But if you were to ask me if you could turn back time would you do it all over again?
I wouldn't hesitate in saying, "No."