It’s uncommonly quiet sitting in 30th Street Station after 10:00, eerie not hearing the gallop of shoes in the foyer. I lost my train ticket, missing the 9:19 to Thorndale, and I find myself looking at the tracks, lost like Odysseus in that abstract idea we call journey, trying to pass the time till the next train. Who was I, what haunted me, what hopes did I have? There is a difference between the shrink-wrapped narrative I tell people and the story I tell myself of myself. We are all hidden creatures I guess, each harboring greater or lesser degrees of what we take ourselves to be. Tonight I find myself wanting to tell my story as i see it.
A year ago this time I worked two jobs 65 hours a week as a pizza delivery driver and grounds crewman. The year previous I worked at a factory tossing bread into a trash can. The three years prior to that I was in undergrad, studying, making friends, losing friends, going through that all too common early twenties identity crisis. Sometimes I wish I could tell that boy breaking up with his first love some five years ago that it was only the beginning. That as he closed the closet door to cry and curl up on the floor, to slither down uninterrupted by the gawking eyes of his roommates, he was closing the door on naivety.
During my first class at UPenn listening to Peter Struck lecture on the phenomenological character of 20th century myth-theory, I realized that I was a long way from cutting deep-dish pizzas into just 6 slices instead of the normal 8. I realized the distance between me now and the factory, the watching of the same motion of one’s right hand gripping bread-dough off an assembly line hundreds of times a day. It’s impossible to describe the drop in emotion waking up at 4:30 every morning to a pinpointed soreness in the shoulder muscle, a soreness which both reminds you of yesterdays woes and predicts todays. I was even further away from that fumbling undergraduate, kicked around from one emotion or belief to the next like a hacky-sack. And I was ages away from that boy who had traveled the world, who had experienced more by the time he was 18 than perhaps most people ever will.
Because if it is not true of me then it is not true of anyone. I have seen “the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.” And I do not merely mean the sublimity of an Namibian sunrise, perched atop Monkey Mountain (a name perfectly descriptive of the animal population) like a bird at dawn singing a song with my eyes. I do not mean the air of the Swiss Alps, how for some reason it’s so crisp you feel like you’re molesting it just by breathing it in. I do not mean the skip of the heart and trip of the legs turning the corner to see the Dome (pronounced dwomo) for the first time. I do not mean the serenity of sipping white wine with my sister atop a hotel, Athens below our feet and the Parthenon lit up brighter than a star against the silver night. I do not mean the alien beauty of the Blue Mosque or Hagia Sophia, so transcendent to all I’d known. I do not mean the lights of Hong Kong city, their worldliness and their splendor. I do not merely mean Venice Square, or the Botticelli room, or the Grunewald, or the Uffizi, or Ephesus, or Patmos, or the Aegean, or the smile of Namibian children, or laughing with Nidipo, or prayer under the Southern Cross, or the thrill of smuggling, or, or, or…
I also mean the love of my mother, how she nurtured and coddled and pushed and prayed for me in ways specific to my own needs. How she still does. I mean the love of my father, how he taught me the quality of a good man through both words and actions, his work ethic, his wisdom, his unyielding courage. I mean how my parents love each other, holding nothing but God in higher regard. I mean a sister and a brother with whom I can trust any secret. I mean the charisma and value of my closest friends through the years. I mean the love I have known on this earth. I challenge any of you to find someone who can equal me in graces given, the talents, the wealth, the health, the love.
But I am a man of extremes. I have loved and lost. I have held dying children in my arms. I have seen the gaunt expression of teenagers unsure of whether they have HIV. I have sympathized with depression not as an outsider but an insider. I have seen drooping cheeks, mouth agape in labored breaths staring in my mirror. I have suffered bouts of insomnia. I have had chronic hives, gained weight, smoked, drank, and ate the pain away. I have felt loneliness, bent over, heaving, taking another hot shower that doesn’t make the silence any more bearable. I have been so angry that I have blacked out. I have spent months on end waking up in terror, not knowing why or if it would ever stop, wondering how the first thought of my day can be the discovery that I am horrified. I know what it is to look at beauty and hate it because it gives me hope, every smile a heralder and harbinger of heartache. I have both wished for death and feared it. It’s a violent juxtaposition owning the strength of youth while feeling the defeat of age. I have died many times, have clenched my teeth and pumped my fists toward the sky more than I have bent my knee in repentance and gratitude.
I have had what theorists call religious experience, where 4 hours seemed like 10 minutes, and I was so overwhelmed with God or Good or whatever you want to call it that I could scarcely withstand it. I have been in such states of angst that (and there is no other way of explaining it) the colors of the world grew richer, darker, thicker. I have been so in love that I would have gone to hell for someone. I. Have. Felt.
I may be rightly accused of not expressing myself, but I may never be accused of having nothing to express. There is a reason I have the poet’s instinct, the incessant need to revalorize every experience. Mine are myriad, variegated, and stifling. Being overtly self-aware, I have an especially acute sensitivity to suffering, and potent memory of my joys. My silence is not an indication of lack of something, it is the opposite. A taciturn poet is a man drowning in meanings, not the other way around. There is too much, not too little. Silence has been my answer, sometimes for better sometimes not. Part of the time I believe that the effusions of youth are self-centered—perhaps I am exercising that demon right now. Part of the time I am afraid to feel; I put my trust in the comfort and stability of meaninglessness. Part of the time I don’t feel because I’d rather listen or help. Some of it is sin, some habit, some a little of both, some of it is good.
There is a sense in which a person can be actively loving by actively seeking to be loved. Egoism of intent turns out to be altruism by the nature of things. Saying you want someone to hear you, love you, listen to you, is to say that they are valuable enough to risk letting them in on the story you tell yourself of yourself, even to help you define what you mean by ‘you’. And I think I can get away with this post as something more than simply therapeutic—more than some effusious rambling— because I don’t often ask others to hear my story as I see it (however jumbled and non-linear it may appear here). It is an invitation of a sort, an apology for my silence over the years, even a treatise of regret. But whatever else it is (and it is many things), it is certainly mine, my story, my way of seeing myself.
