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The sheets were pulled high over my body, the edge of the beige comforter tickling my bare shoulders. Gray morning light spread through the brown drapes of my window, dawn approaching. It was Saturday and I was just getting to bed, having peeled off my clothes and dowsed myself in Bengay.
The menthol-scented cream was beginning to penetrate my skin, loosening my muscles and clearing my sinuses. I took a few deep breaths as I drifted into sleep.
I’d spent most of that early morning watching movies on my sofa. Until about 2am, I’d been carousing with an insurance agent buddy at an Astoria bar, not that I was doing any drinking. Other than the occasional sip when one’s ordered for me, I’ve quit the stuff entirely, left it behind for a clearer mind.
But I’ve started going out again and my social life is beginning to flourish. It is not quite Sex, Drugs, and Literature, but it runs in that direction at times.
Mostly though, I’ve been instilling a little more discipline in my life: eating right, sleeping for eight hours a night, exercising five days a week, reading and writing for two-to-three hours each day. My only challenge is that I never have enough time to fulfill all of my inspirations. As I’ve been working a forty-hour week at the theater, my time is stretched thin.
Aside from that, life is going more smoothly than it ever has. I’m making a decent wage so my quality of life has improved. I can afford better food, better clothes, even better pens and notebooks than I than the ones I used during the first three years of my career. It’s hard for me to understand the life I was living back then – so little money and so few hours of sleep, without the luxury of a home base and with no more possessions than what I squeezed into my two rucksacks.
It’s hard too for me to analyze the changes that have taken place. It seems like the only times I even think about them is when I’m dead tired and belly up on the couch or on my mattress – too exhausted to remember much else except that most recent moment when my body fell to rest.
It’s hard for me to tell what’s real sometimes, with all the thoughts and conversations that run through my head, with all the trivialities and meaningless labors I must perform in order to make a living. Real or imagined, whatever life I’m living has become unendingly fascinating to me and whatever interludes of boredom I let plague me over the first two decades of my life have long vanished. Now insecurity and fear seem to be on the way out too and in their absence is clarity. Actions and events appear as they are – devoid of emotion and meaning, free to be analyzed and understood, their meanings to come and go with each changing perspective.
As I play with perspectives I allow the lives and the stories of those around me to mix with the ideas in my head. Co-workers tell me about their stints in prison for dealing crack. I’ve began drafting fiction about it. Friends around me are getting married, many also getting divorced. I started writing about that too. It took me a long time to learn to empathize with people, to love them unconditionally. In the process, I’ve learned to love myself unconditionally as well. I’ve also learned to earn people’s trust, to allow them to open up to me, to treat all people with dignity and respect. It’s a practice that demands diligence and watchfulness. I’m certain that what I derive from it will yield inspired stories. I’m doubtless that it’s made me a better person and that it’s allowed me to be kind, warm, and compassionate to others.
Advancement and progression take time though, and it might take me awhile to get all my stories down, to learn to tell them correctly. When I wake up, I will go back to it – back to thinking, and writing, and reading, and working, and taking care of myself, and making money and further inventing this life of mine.