Off Subject but Worthy

I’ve always wondered, I’ve always hoped, that there is something within each of us that surpasses the structured societal boundaries that we’re nearly gagged and mummified with from early childhood. Time and again, I set myself up - I’m a dope, you see, for hope - to look, expect, and yearn for the best that resides within the human soul. That spark that can be tuned to create beauty or create horrors, self-righteous or self-serving; utterly malleable, impressionable, fallible. To my regular regret, I’m utterly disappointed in my fellow man. I find that few men will sacrifice willingly for others, and that those who play the martyr are never recognized. More often than not, it’s the self-preserving instinct that fosters natural selection which also lends men a helping hand down the path to corruption, maliciousness, and a selfishness so rank and putrid that it’s hard to see the drowning soul through all the worldly muck.

So many times, after floundering through the universal gore and grime that pollutes our every-day existences, I’ve seen what some believe is the Truth - that the only way out is down, and that to continuously strive - and thus, hope - for better things or greater dreams was the surest path to misery. Whether I remain unique in my stalwart steadfast eagerness to remain hopeful, I do not know. It’s so rare these days, since the birth of my son, the acceptance of the life I’ve made for myself, and the glorious warmth that is love, that I find myself sinking like an antiquated dinosaur into that deep murky pool of malignance. Yet, the occasions still rise, like bile at the back of the throat, where the compounded slammed doors, pulled traps, and ceaseless struggles finally take me by the ankles and start to tug me beneath the surface. And my Hope, the single guiding light within me, the last of what I would call my innocence, slips dangerously from my numb, unresponsive fingers - frozen with grief, unable to hold on any longer to the ideals of the soul around which all of my being is constructed.

It’s times like that, where I look at the world, the heaving mortal masses, and I doubt. I question every ethic, moral, and personal understanding that lies within me that have been in place since the day I woke up and realized my mother didn’t have all the answers. That my family is, truly, composed of some of the worst examples of humanity that I’ve ever encountered, on various levels for different reasons. They all exemplify different degrees of self-serving egotistical vanity, the perpetual shallowness of self-righteous high-handled notions of integrity. These people, my family, my shared blood are less and less to me what society, what tradition tells me they should be. One should theoretically be able to turn to, and depend on, family in times of need, desperation, grief, chaos. “The shirt off my back for you, my brother,” is this not the old saying? For all my life, all of it, with the exception of the mother that birthed me and raised me, every single member of my family who I have asked, “I need your shirt, please, just for a little while,” has turned their back on me. Literally, and figuratively.

It’s when this happens, when I realize that all my hopeful ideals were misplaced - again, and again, and again despite my ardent belief that people can change - I feel the edge of the rift of misery torn from beneath my unstable feet and I begin the fall back into my one and only Hell - a state of being that lacks hope, and belief in hope.

Still, always, there has been a helping hand - and, sometimes, more than a pair of them - leaning over the edge, into the slime and ooze of my own despair to grasp for me, pull me back to the surface, where my cold hands can thaw and once again my hope is placed within my grasp. These hands, this graceful saving fingers, have ever and always been possessed by a unique, beautiful group of people: my friends. Beings who, by all the standards of tradition and societal conceptualization, should not be those who we can rely on over all else. I hear all the time, “Oh, she is only just a work friend/an acquaintance/someone online.” They are not our brothers or sisters or children or parents. They are not the keepers of the family lore, the venerated heralds of the past to whom we look for wisdom and guidance. Yet, I challenge this standard of the day, the belief that family will always be and it is friends that come and go.

Through all of my life, it has been the people I’ve known since childhood - playing Chinese jump rope with, bumming lunch money from - that have been my lifeline to hope. Who continue to inspire me to believe that there is goodness, greatness, and honorable intention within all men. Those people who have offered me their shirts, and more - who have walked with me into the dark and helped me find my way back. Who have given without taking, or asking for compensation, compelled by good natures and perhaps a little love.

It’s these honorable, amazing, astounding individuals who I humbly, gratefully, call my friends that I now understand, more surely than ever before, are my true family. My loved ones.

The old saying is, “Blood is thicker than water,” but I dispute that and say, “Ties of the heart and soul are more true than the promises of blood.” Maybe not for all, but some.

My friends, I would follow you into the dark. Thank you for everything you have done for me. I love you.