Dirty Fingernails and Dead Dreams.

Who am I if I am everything, and yet nothing?

Image by cottonbro studio.

I feel like I’ve really crammed it in. I now don’t know where to go or begin. I’ve gone a block down every avenue, and truly, I ain’t got a clue. I don’t know what to be and when I do I don’t for much longer. No matter the prior deep dedication, no matter the soul I had signed to the new leader, that bond will break; an inevitability, like death and billionaire tax evaders. It comes in with extreme haste. That new passion. Every time, without fail. A fleeting feeling of the purest perseverance, supercharged for self-help. A new me, a new now. Not what was before, not just then, but just now. Starting Monday. At 6am. With an alarm clock that will make me want to blow my fucking brains out.

Although, I’ll need to walk the dogs, and six in the morning is mighty early, and I do love a coffee, so let’s say eight. Plus snooze that’s eight thirty. And this time I’m going to journal every day, with my favourite pen in that notebook with artistic paper still blank. I must get these fleeting thoughts out and permanent them in ink so they may stay still, if only for a moment, just like I did for that brief moment before. They only ever last a moment. In my youth, my youthful thoughts felt ever more fleeting, ever more changing, shape shifting, opinionating, and alas, I would feel anew each day and declare such with a worthy grande gesture. Tear out the past and throw away the pages, never to be remembered again. Good riddance.

Good God, I wish I had kept them. It’s quite tiring tearing and starting anew so often.

Once I started anew as a monk, lending my physical being to a monastery so that my spiritual being may enlighten. Not as a monk, actually, but as an Anagarika. One below the ordained, living with them and amongst them but doing all the chores, especially the ones they couldn’t as an account of their extra precepts. I was an Anagarika for a moment, but the moment caught the wind, and only just enough stayed to keep some part of my ego thinking it’s Buddhist.

Then I started anew as an angsty teen-turning adult, listened to British bands that claimed that same title once, got as many tattoos as I could afford and spent the rest on pints, ciggies and drugs. Got a minimum wage job at a high-end fashion shop which only nurtured and helped fund those habits. I learned to play pool for the sake of pub-survival and went to every festival despite the weather. I never learned to pitch a tent but hardly slept anyway. Sometimes, during these times, I had fun, but most times I was in pain and just trying to hide or hinder all the same.

Then I started anew as a poet, to put that pain in a different font. I had read all the greats and related to their pain, so I adopted equal parts and more of them before I was hardly myself, more a vessel of self-hatred, empty of hope and full of fucked up words hidden in beautiful stanzas like weeds in Kew Gardens or the paint Van Gogh drank. I was the canvas and I associated the art with the pain I drank. The art was not worth it without the pain - the pain was not necessary without the art - the canvas was nothing without the pain.

Anew I started once again. This time a novelist, and a short story-ist, then a musician, then a chef, then a waiter, then a carpenter, then an anarchist (again), then a vagabond or a drifter or a digital nomad, depending on the job situation, the location or the intention.

When I was a boy I had big dreams of who I’d be. A sailor or an astronaut. Performing in front of stadiums or creating grand worlds in a secluded room. I’d dream and see clearly who I was to be but now it’s all so blurry and I’m not sure who I am or who I want was destined to be. I’ve scratched the surface of so many possibilities but hardly developed any real abilities. I’ve scratched and scratched but never dug deep and always eventually moved to the side as my eyes meandered to the shinier surface in sight. My fingernails are dirty from dead dreams. I looked to the side of me and see those past possibilities have accumulated dust now, and I’m out of breath from all this scratching.

I feel like I have all this time and all this time wasted and really no time at all. It’s all too tiring hopping from one life to another, like a panicked rabbit staring at a pocket watch, hoping for the arms to stand still, hoping for a different outcome, hoping for some external validation that this life is the one.

© H. R. Sinclair 2024

Image by cottonbro studio.

Thank you for indulging in my thoughts.