Rocks, Gravel, and/or Pebbles.

Image evoking terms often provide in our minds the poorest representation of their actuality. When he said "rock bottom," I imagined something similar to the blue pebbled floor of an aquarium. In my mind, I could see him floating gracefully down, encompassed by bubbles and the peaceful hum of the fish tank's cleaning system. When he got to the bottom, I imagined, a few blue pebbles scattered about, and the impact had the severity of a toddler dropping to his derriere on the plush carpet. 

We aren't babies, though, and our relative density on earth is much greater than that of an object, sinking in water. When a force greater than gravity grips a man from a height higher than a foot or two and sends him plummeting toward the depths, the man contains about as much grace as a caravan of elephants whose step is lost on a narrow staircase. The journey involved in "hitting rock bottom" is loud and clumsy; it is painful for every observer, but far more painful for those who somehow get tangled in the mess. 

I didn't know what the bottom felt like, but I wondered as I staggered along middle ground. Anytime I fell and skinned my hands on the gravel or forgot where I was going, i would run up the stairs to his old apartment and bury my head in his chest. I became so dependent on the knowledge that I had a shoulder to cry on, that I stopped taking responsibility for things. I could dig my fingernails into his shoulder and whine without saying words, and things would feel better; because suppression was the key to what was, I felt, emotional stability. It wasn't the solutions he offered that caused my tears to dry, but the fact that he was there. 

Our relationship became, to me, a less intimidating approach to life. Two was somehow easier than one. Later we agreed that we had both gotten what we were after: I had someone to lean on when I was doing poorly, and he was allowed to be a hero; I was a mute, so he never had to bother with listening; I wanted someone to blame for my mistakes, and he was willing to take the blame. Three dysfunctional years into it, we could both see that we had either martyred ourselves or slaughtered one another. 

So, letting go - that was the easy part. I walked away with a spring in my step and all was well until I hit a bump in the road. I tumbled down, my arms flailing, and I grappled for something secure to sink my fingernails into. Whatever I could latch onto would become my tower, and all the nicks and bruises along the way would be without explanation. 

I think about how many times since then that I have attempted to bury uncertainties under the shadow of a man, finding comfort in the idea that another's presence could fill in the gaps and paint over everything that is wrong with me. I often wonder if this is why we choose to become a pair in the first place - the attraction having less to do with affection and more to do with each person's ability to outshine the other's dull spots.

When he talked about hitting rock bottom, I could hear the vulnerability in his voice. It was the lowest of the low, the most exposed and painful of places - yet it was the starting point for his journey home. When he was down there, he came face-to-face with everything he had hidden. It was terrifying to face his fears and admit such defeat, but it marked an unforgettable point in which he saw himself for what he was really worth.

He was without influence, without substance, without grey areas. Though nearly worthless and violently worn, he realized down there who he was and that became the foundation for what he is now.

Whatever it was that shook him so hard he finally fell, I have yet to find; but as I cried myself to sleep last night, I could see an image of myself, dangling over a pit - my claws were buried in some stronghold, my face was pressed into the shoulder of some unsuspecting victim.

What was worse than the image of myself clinging to what I don't own for answers and support, was the confirmation in my dreams, telling me that as long as I am holding on, I am, by definition, another person. Until I let go, I am relying on his influence. 

I said I wanted a suggestion. I was frustrated. And then, I was in bed, admitting to my absolute confusion, when I realized my source of sanity will forever be a dead end until I let go.

uh...happily ever after, the end?

I developed a bad habit in middle school.

Any time I failed a test, got embarrassed or just wanted to check out of reality, I called my mom (who thought she was doing me a favor by tending to her supposedly 'ill' child), and she would rescue me from the depressingly tan walls and mold-infested restrooms of Douglas MacArthur Junior High School. 

Unexcused absences weren't as much of an issue in those times as they are now, so I spent the majority of my eighth and ninth grade days, catching up on science homework over rounds of penicillin at the kitchen counter. 

Moving into high school, it was the same story: unless I had a tennis match or a really thrilling art project to work on that day, I saw no point in being there. I could legitimately pull almost any ailment from my library of medical excuses, and I exercised this ability regularly. In college, I offered no reason for my absences, but my instructors repeatedly warned me against such slacking.

Even at my last dead-end design job, I had the liberty to take days off. Excuses involved "research," "creative exercise," "beauty therapy," "the flu" (or whatever illness I could conjure), and so on. There was no record of missed days. There was no pressure to schedule a day off two weeks in advance.

Now, I have five sick days per year and I think I've already used two of them. The questions increase with age. Is this what life is? Eat, Sleep, Work? Is that all? Is a job - is MY job - meant to be taken so seriously? 

I have trouble adjusting to the idea that a career defines me and infinitely more trouble understanding the concept that life is 70% work and 30% paid vacation, holidays and weekends. When I was in school, I worked double the hours but never felt so isolated and enslaved to any job. I never thought as much about quitting as I do now.

According to an article on Yahoo two days ago, U.S. citizens work more hours than citizens of any other nation. (I suppose such statistics exclude slave and child laborers.) My qualm, however, is not with being overworked, but with this societal conviction that one's worth should be calculated into a job title. 

Job shmob. I want to have a party. Or go to the park and draw pictures of dead trees. Or something.

Every day is a better day, when given the opportunity to smile.

We took advantage of the reduced price Valentines Day candy, as usual. Last night, I opened the box, selected a chocolate, took a bite and spit it back out - then I repeated the process about three times. They giggled that they had already eaten all the good ones and left the nasty orange and yellow filled ones for some lucky gambler. I threw the box of spit-covered, half-chewed candy into the trash and then the four of us sat on the kitchen floor and laughed until we cried.

I was right when I once determined that working is only justified by the fun I can have on the extra amount of money that doesn't count toward bills. Perhaps the real problem here is that I'm not mature enough to handle the responsibilities of adult life. I don't understand why being an adult has to be so boring. Is there nothing to look forward to?

Yesterday, he said, "I want to run away with you." He was probably kidding - making light of my never-ending search and constantly revolving plans to find the perfect locale and escape to it - but it was the first time I'd heard that sort of thing in years. Someone was actually encouraging my childishness, as opposed to admonishing me for being unrealistic - even if he didn't mean it.

Every time my dad gives me the evil eye for talking negatively about my work environment, I remember how dumb I am. It isn't that I can't hold a job; it's that I'd rather be willfully cleaning toilets in Peru than wasting my life away, doing nothing, here. Still, there is a constant war in my mind between what ought to be right and what I believe to be right, and I can't decide if I should suck it up and be a boring adult forever or live free and reap the consequences of a less-stable lifestyle. 

Are there only two options? 

A sleazy salesman came into the office today, carrying a briefcase and passing out very chic business cards (cards designed by some underpaid employee, no doubt). He said my name about ten times, insisting we had met previously, but I didn't remember. All sales men look exactly the same. Double chins, gummy smiles, receding hairlines. As he rambled on about whatever he was selling, I considered the notion that he has likely been a salesmen his entire life. Hell-bent on taking the opposite route of his divorced, alcoholic father, he married young, sold door-to-door beginning at age nineteen, and never looked back. His plump wife sings in the church choir, his kids are brats, they drive to the Florida panhandle for a vacation once a year. I'll pass.

Then I thought about the recently fired, middle-aged receptionist. She was doing what she could to get by on her high school education while raising six kids when she was fired for lacking the experience of a "career receptionist." I thought about how that could be me: the washed up, wannabe musician who couldn't stick to one boring career path early in life. She was too free-spirited to settle down, so she bounced from temp job to temp job until she was forty years old and still making six dollars an hour. She missed a lot of days before she got the can. That picture does not give me thrills, either.

There is no moral to this story.

"Settle: To accept in spite of incomplete satisfaction"

The reflection of the sun off of wet streets and parking lots was blinding that morning two weeks ago. It had been extra humid when I awoke, so I was drowsy and still dreaming a little bit on the drive. As I struggled to keep my eyes open and concentrated on fabricating another excuse for why I was late (again), the unseasonably hot air and meaningless background music transported me, temporarily, to another place. It was an odd mix of nostalgia: sadness for what is no longer, mingled with happiness that I have, at least, a memory of that place.

That autumn, when I returned from Bretagne, she could sense my struggle and made me promise her that I wouldn't let the knowledge of that place become a haven more familiar in my mind than my own home. She instructed me to remember it fondly, but not allow France to become the standard against which I gauged the rest of the world - as my current locale would never compare. 

A few months earlier, she had overcome similar fears but had no one to confide in. She said the journey to self-discovery is shadowed by fear and disappointment as one sees the world, reestablishes 'home' and decides daily to be freed and not oppressed by the knowledge of both self and others. I scribbled her words in the front of my journal and joined a band to channel some of that energy, but the habits I collected on my journey home made my voice hoarse. I was screaming into my pillow every night to block out the new voices. I was looking for a place to lay my head, because with my eyes open I could see things that had not been there before. As if victim to some hallucinogenic substance, I was able to experience more of life than I had in the previous years - and that ability, that experience, opened up the door to a world of dissatisfaction.

The last time I can remember feeling so alive, as if things made sense and I was exactly where I wanted to be, was the day we sat outside drinking gingerbread lattes with our English friends. It might have had something to do with the malapropos responsibility I had avoided in order to indulge in one such afternoon, but I felt free. I couldn't see the sun setting behind a sky full of charcoal colored clouds, but I knew the sun was setting. I knew what time it was, and I liked how it didn't matter. Christmas lights on timers awoke in the trees around us and, occasionally, a large drop of rain would fall on the shoulder of someone's sweater. We were laughing. The sky grew dark. We ordered more coffee.

The antithesis of moments like those occur often in months such as January and February. With little to look forward to and an overwhelming dread of many more weeks of grey skies, grey fields, dead trees and not-quite-cold-enough-to-freeze-the-streets weather, I find myself waking up a little less joyful and crawling into bed a little more sad.

I find every day a little more unsettling than the last.

On Saturdays, my desire to sleep in is often spoiled by associations with laziness and the socially ingrained idea that productivity = happiness. When I shake off those ghosts from my past and sleep late anyway, I wake up feeling worse than I would if I were greatly fatigued, because the guilt of self-indulgence enters my conscience the moment I open my eyes, leading to an even LESS productive day full of self-loathing.

But on mornings like the day we had tornadoes, with nearly eighty degree weather and the secret hope that my missing trait of punctuality might sabotage my career and be the very thing that frees me to live my life, I am reminded of how it feels to be at peace. I remember that that sense of elevation would not be known if I lacked the sometimes misdiagnosed element of sadness, discontent, depression. 

It was 1987. I was probably wearing a jumper with that navy cardigan and penny loafers. It couldn't have been later than three or four in the afternoon, but it seemed so dark as I turned the corner of the staircase. There were seventeen steps in all. I stopped in the middle of my descent to the living room and tried swallowing the lump in my esophagus. It hurt. Everything hurt, from the inside out. I felt empty, guilty, sad - and I drew immediate explanations from my personal four-year-old life as to why I was suffering for no apparent reason. The majority of my life, I have continued to search for the cause when things become inexplicably dark; often, my search propels me to dig up some unconfessed sin, that I might be released, and when the excavation finds nothing worthy of such oppression, I feel as if I have not searched hard enough.

I wonder in these dark times, "what is it that I am looking for?"

And there are other times when, without explanation, my happy emotions will so contrast the sad ones that I wonder how I could have ever been so low. We were leaning against a stone wall at the metro station, waiting, and I couldn't stop smiling and I thought, "if this is what life is, I haven't been living." I don't think he knew the way he lifted me, but I didn't bother explaining; and as we took our seats inside the weathered train car, he mentioned insecurity being his only issue. I thought, "he has no idea," and clenched my jaw in anticipation of days without sun, days when my own worthlessness will rain so heavily that he might get wet, too.

The relentless highs and lows that grip and stretch and fling me effect not only me, but overflow into my relationships. I was inadvertently reminded again that night that a person cannot know me without knowing both extremes: he told me that the eminence of being my friend is no parallel to the sheer agony therein, and that it has to end.

That was when the storm began. The day, which began unreasonably sunny and warm turned cold, icy. As soon as the hail stopped, the tornado sirens began, but he went out in it anyway. I sat alone on my couch, wanting to cry - wanting somehow for my emotions to come tumbling out as tumultuously as his. The weather was mocking me. Lighting. Thunder. Storms. I think I felt worse for not feeling bad enough than for ruining another friendship. I knew I had the emotions in there, somewhere. I tried to dig them up, but continued to feel so unsettled.

Last night, in two different conversations, they tried offering various explanations. One said, "This is your defense mechanism," and comforted me in the idea that I'm perhaps not so abnormal. The other related, saying, "it isn't that things are wrong - things just don't feel right. I'm unsettled, too."

This morning, I overslept (again). There was a sharp pain in both eyes as I battled my eyelids in the fight to force light into my pupils. The sun was shining in through my sheer curtain the way it shines in the summer - warm and abrasive. Before cursing at my faulty alarm clock or grumbling at the sun for being too bright, I made one decision. 

It is the inability to settle which drives me in life. In fact, the times I feel unsettled are the times when I am, indeed, settling. At approximately 7:21 a.m., I realized that the things which will add to the quality of my life are not the things my parents and peers deem important. Someone else - maybe someone more content with the comfort of 8-5 and the consistency of a routine - that person is a better fit for this life. For nearly twenty years, I have realized the importance of viewing life as a terminally ill cancer patient would (although I have never been a terminally ill cancer patient): time is running out.

Sometimes, I think, my heart beats faster than it should. I pick at my cuticles and my right leg shakes. I clench my jaw, grind my teeth, forget to breathe - I am anxious, not because I'm discontent, but because being settled in just doesn't feel right. Actually, the big fluffy couch makes my back hurt, and I'd rather be sitting in a plastic airport chair in some third world country. I like to keep my shoes on and a bag packed, just in case. Empty water bottles make me nervous and every time I hang another picture on the wall and feel more moved-in, I find that settling is the most unsettling thing I can do.