It’s something, alright, the way perspective pivots the priority of our emotional capacities. Relative proximity within time being one that jumps to mind. Both the numbness and reverberating waves of woe associated with some personal tragedy, depending on the days since incident. And within the same breath, nostalgia can invoke something so dormant it was thought dead back to vibrant life upon the promenade of identity.

So too, does the more calculating pragmatism of what was find its way to that light we like to call truth.

And still in all that, we never really ever know much of anything for sure, do we? But to ask seems as necessary as breath for I. And you too, I’d bet, if you’re reading this. What is this life that I call my own, and how do the morality and identity claims stack up against the cold, hard facts of what I am and who I’ve been? And what I’ll be still to do. And have yet to feel.

There had been a carnival aspect to the ups and downs I’d marched through since we last met here. Outlooks and expression on the utmost positivity profession scale, all the way to a destitution that forced a confrontation with the very essence of who I think I am and what it is I am supposed to do with this life I’ve granted or am doomed to take part in.

So, to make a short story long, I had lost a thing. A possession, and one of minimal financial value. A thief would have been disappointed with the score, had it been a thief responsible for the separation. But it was no thief, ‘twas just my dumbass being at peak absentmindedness.

I left a guitar in a parking lot.

Sounds enough like the start of a tune right there. And when returning to the scene upon the next day’s realization, all probable leads went cold immediately. The secondaries as well. And don’t even get me started on the tertiaries. My local and musically like-minded friends offered tremendous service in support emotionally and in detective work. But my cynicism is a hard-fought beast. And she was not prepared to lose another fight with hope, when all seemed so clear. It was lost, and it was my damn fault.

Because it wasn’t just a guitar. As soon as I realized it was gone, it became perfectly clear that it was my most important worldly possession, one that had traveled two-thirds of my life with me, and by far the more difficult stretch of that existence. Thus far, at least. At a resale value that wouldn’t likely grant a junkie a full enough fix, to your humble narrator, there was no price that could ultimately be put on her.

She. She’s a she. Darcy, her name.

But alas, hope prevailed and home sweet home Darcy is. Through the ultimate attention and kindness of a stranger. And I’ll be damned if I ever let that happen again. And in the retrieval of this totem, the wonder set in. Well, first I played my heart out for over an hour to mostly strangers… but after that, I got to wondering.

     What it is I wonder is an evolving, breathing being, but I shall attempt to pick it apart. In real time, of course.

     I wonder about what it is that makes a self. Not that it is something that is ever made to the sense of completion, but by a certain point there become cornerstone factors upon which all else finds the footing to reach elsewhere. Darcy, for me, being the most potent symbol of one of those aforementioned foundations. I make music. I have since well before adulthood. And will continue well beyond my technical ability to do so. Part of the hit with missing Darcy was knowing that I still somehow had to keep making sounds of my own construction, but couldn’t conceptualize the how’s without her, the most vital means of muse.

     And this, here, another one. Writing out thoughts and ideas has been a stabilizing force in my mental proficiency since I even had the seed of a mind to begin with. How it has grown, and still is something of the same. What is this, but the scratching of notes in some school day’s notebook. A daydream penned out at work. A written out wondering amidst the production of day-to-day prerequisites.

     But even those, are just cornerstones. There is something else being built here. They even have a name for it, though I attempt to cheat and break it up into a few. But in the deepest recesses of my mind, it has but one name.

I.

     And the descriptors and delineations are but the dressing placed upon the accents of something that is so inescapably true, that I don’t know that there are words enough to confine its definition.

     It is the hopes and wants of present and onward. And the reflections of what was all accumulated to become this what is now. And even the final product may be subject to debate for the scholars of tomorrow, assuming anyone even talks of this me once he has kicked the bucket. My ego likes to feed itself on the idea that discussion of yours truly will be held by others after I’m gone. Perhaps derived from the desire for immortality. Which is likely a human-ed up restructuring of the fear of death, first crafted in a world of ages past when other things were more likely to hunt and eat a thing like me.

     I like to think of it all as a building exercise, but I would hear a debate it being within the otherwise. The sense of self in life is not a series of additions but subtractions. The chipping away at some undefined mass until something more succinct and honest emerges. And time gets wasted gazing upon the marble shavings, where the creation is what gets left behind. Set to stay, after removal has swept away the excess that had only clouded the more truthful vision of what potential resided underneath.

     I am also able to say all this now, because my most recent depression was instantaneously cured. Darcy returned so the horrific hypotheticals being conjured faded away to oblivion immediately.

     I know there are other hurts not so successfully resolved. I have some of them, or have had. Some of them still echoing even though ancient might be their appearance and form. And within the downfall and dismay, doubt easily attacks the self of some current perspective. Things beyond our control. In the control of others, or in nature, in just the timing of the universe, oh so indifferent to the short, little lives we live.

     But here we are again, likely with more questions than answers. And no less of a desire to come back here next week, and ask the same big, vague things in fresh and specific ways. If you ask me. Not sure you’ll be coming back, but I’ll onward regardless.