(no subject)

[bankie]

I have the mind of someone who has been lost for several years. Identity is no longer an option, so the quest for one becomes obsolete. When I put my thoughts to words they become jumbled and incoherent, and it seems unlikely there will ever be an end product. These words lie and tell a truth. They will likely never be seen by another’s eyes. Pity is a comforting emotion to cascade on ones self. It is why there are so many lazy people and so much blissful apathy. Maybe I’ll double space these lines so I feel like I wrote more. That’s a neat trick. Stream of conscience…is it conscience or conscious? I think its stream of conscious…stream of conscious writing was popularized by James Joyce, so I think I’ll steal his style since my name is James also. I guess he wrote about things that mattered though. Maybe I’ll get around to that. I just googled it…its stream of consciousness…so I guess my English teacher would be both proud and disappointed…I was right about James Joyce popularizing it. I remember when I first started college I was surprised to learn that Maya Angelou was still alive. I thought influential famous black people were all dead. Silly me. P. Diddy is pretty influential also. Now I sound like a racist…wait…nigger. Now I do. I’m not though. Wait now I’m justifying to myself what I already know. That denotes that perhaps I’m trying to write this for someone. It’s said the best writers always write for someone. I don’t know who I’d want to impress though. Probably some girl. I’m a sucker for them. Now I have to empty all those girls from my life out of my head as I write. But that’s not going to happen. I shouldn’t try. Let me get this back onto a narrative. I feel that people who have moved around throughout their life lack those core connections that we create with others through the binding factor of time. The longer you know someone, the greater affinity you seem to feel for them regardless of the relationship. I ran into a guy from high school the other night, a guy who I rarely talked with in school. We shared a couple classes together and never had a prolonged conversation about anything more than a girl or some sports team. Yet when I saw him obviously drowning his sorrows at a bar last week, I felt the compulsion to give the guy a hug, slap his back and ask him what the hell he’d been up to since school. That brief connection that we made clearly made that moment just a bit sweeter for both of us. And isn’t that what we should be doing…sweetening every moment we can?

I also had a thing for his girlfriend back in high school…maybe I just wanted to know how she was. Guilt show.

Regardless, I somehow feel a connection with people when they tell me “oh I moved around a lot as a kid” or “I just moved here from Fiji”… I share those allusions of being displaced and not knowing where to begin to fit into a structure that functioned just perfectly without me being there. The only time it actually overtly bothers me is when I see friends of mine now who greet the people they grew up with. I can almost see it behind their eyes, the verification that said person is unconditionally accepted. Is that all I’m looking for, acceptance? Is that all any of us are looking for? I need to stop ending my sentences with prepositions. That’s enough for now.