Someone called me a walking autumn, earlier today. I wonder if she can see all my impending decay. Aesthetic, though it might be. And the cooler air is better for breathing, even when stalled in bouts of mild hyperventilating, from time to time.

But it was certainly meant as a compliment, and I consider it so. This time of year has historically played into my mind of rebirth. The shedding of the old to make space for something new, whatever that might be. I don’t make guesses at that sort of stuff. Turned in my soothsayer badge a while back. Nothing but trouble, that trying to peer into the future.

Still, I’ve been thinking of choices, and their absence. Each further step down a path always ultimately means less lanes to turn down. And, of course, there is no going back. Not really, not for us shaved apes. No matter what possibilities the quantum physicists might suggest, once time has passed us by, there is no getting it back. And I wouldn’t want that anyway. Even in the times I fall into the delusion of wishing it were so. Forward. Onward. On to the next step. The next quest. Next burden. Next success. Heartbreak.

It does become a trap though, that looking back. A pit I keep stumbling into, these days, no matter how well I know the ways around it. Might be a natural part of getting older. I wouldn’t know, this is the oldest I’ve ever been, and I still think myself fairly young. But maybe that’s the delusions acting up again.

Because the truth is that part of my problem, as of late, has been thinking about how I never really got all that much time to be young, in the way that almost all my peers near and far have. Those choices we make, well, mine landed me in roles of colossal responsibilities not long after my scholastic days concluded. At twenty-five, most people I know were leaning into being carefree (as much as anyone ever can) and taking chances, making mistakes, and learning in ways that impact can be absorbed by boundless opportunities still appearing to be before them. Whether they were ever really there, or not.

But your humble narrator here, at twenty-five, I was changing diapers, working full-time in a dangerous job, and attempting to keep a band together, the last of which failed. And of course, clicking away at thoughts, but back then, it was Sunday Mornings still. Don’t even get me started on my love life, then. Or today, for that matter. Still got the job but the diapers have been exchanged for the emergence of middle school problems for the offspring. The wild part, or so it seems to me, is how I strangely feel younger now than I did then, in so many ways. But, appearances can be deceiving. And there are plenty of other ways where the time passed and age are beginning to show, even if my hairline is still perfectly intact.

So, I’ve been attempting to think my prisons into being stations, instead. Some means of temporarily stopping in midst transit through this life, as opposed to the long term penitentiaries they have seemed, as places to extoll the payments for my perceived crimes of existence. Which are likely never as grievous as I sometimes make them out to be. That good ol’ catholic guilt. They cement that shit in solid, I’ll tell ya.

But as with everything, it is a process. And as with everything worthwhile, it is a difficult process at that. The constant and dynamic state of learning what I must live with, and that which I must live without. Fighting for optimism without falling into fantasy. Regularly failing at that, but thus far, never completely. Arising each day, even if not enthusiastically, to face what must be faced, even if only scrapping upon the bare minimum. On occasion, I might even be so bold to attempt at something more akin to the maximum. Though I have to be mindful of the batteries when doing that. That, or I will be reminded, involuntarily. A good old collapse and breakdown is always good for checking some unrelenting ambition.

Yet, with each moment, with each word I write, more and more of this timeline falls into the oblivion of the past. Grasping at the future with diminishing chance and minimal return, on occasion. And with that, my continued attempts to stoke a fire from these damped and mostly stamped out sparks. Perhaps I should get myself out from under this self-made precipitation. But as with so many things, easier said than done.

I’m writing at work, which I almost never do anymore. Distractions and diversions of attention abound, that and the tone doesn’t quite strike the same. But maybe this is all due for a tonal overhaul. Too much of the same, so writing from not the usual penitentiary might do some good.

But we’ll take the change of scenery, for this evening.  As this time next week, I will have started another bout off from the labors that earn my living. Sabbaticals, as I’ve come to call them. Though it isn’t as though everything else in my life suddenly ceases. There were high hopes I held for the last two of these sabbatical stretches, and both concluded disastrously, to put it mildly. Yet, ever the fool, I still hope for something good to emerge from this next round.

But in my efforts towards honesty, I’ll confess to you now, dear reader, this one seems quite daunting. For I am well aware, and even a bit terrified, that the work that so urgently must be attended to, is the work I must do inside myself. Heart and mind and spirit, and so on. Still, this fight has to happen. I must face down the man in the mirror. Not for the last time, but I know that this time is important, no matter what results, internal or external, may arise from the ashes. A paradigm shift, even if I must will it into existence. Another phase, even after so many. Or better, a chapter, in this story I feel so compelled to write with blood. And sweat. And just between you and I, likely some tears, as well.

There are conversations that I may not want to have, but must be. Even, or especially, the ones with myself. And there are those that I ache for, still, seeming eternally, that can never be had again. Some things can be no longer, no matter what. So it goes.

All while the passage of time continues, unrelentingly. Six months. Six years. Eleven years, or a decade and a half. Or maybe just the whole damn thing, thus far. Reflecting back and bouncing, or stumbling, forward. Balancing the yin and yang of who I was. Who I am. And who I am yet, but still might be. It has been favoring the darker edges, lately. The moon side, as the chicks who believe in magic rocks would say. Still, there is evidently still a light within that is visible from the outside, even if I so regularly fail to see it myself. So, I’ll feed it as best I can, while trying to abide the abstinence of overindulgence.

Read something, this week, that I hadn’t since my mid-collegiate days. In that time, I took this novel, and the writer at large, as some sort of ultimate inspiration. As a representation of the ideas of freedom, and pursuit of truer self. But as so often happens, time, that bastard, had altered my perception and reception of the story. What was held as ideas seeming like innovation, now seem melancholic and pitiable. The guy was my favorite writer, in my late teens and early twenties, back when I still dripped viciously with a fool’s hope. Thinking all the world was mine. That all doors were. And perhaps they were, then. They are no longer.

The thing about that book, and the writer as well- is all that freedom and aimlessness start to seem tragic when you know how the story ended. Meaning the writer’s. Meaning his life. The wine jug never far out of reach for the protagonist, seeming once so hip, only served as depressing foreshadowing. The romance of all that adventure and reveling and such dies when you know the author met his own mortality throwing up blood into a toilet in St. Petersburg, Florida. But, I suppose, that’s the Beat generation for you.

But hey, listen, I may not be stupid, perhaps tragically- but I still have plenty of benevolent fool left in me. Might always be that way, and truth be told, I hope that to be so. Even after all I’ve seen and done, which is plenty more than most and plenty of it difficult and grim- I still feel the fight, even if only currently a smoldering within me. So, let us fight, at least one more time, for that brighter side.

I don’t know what the next step is, but regardless, I must take it. I didn’t imagine myself here from where I once stood in the past. Which means where there is still to go is at least slightly unknown. And even if there are fewer chances, there still are more than enough to find myself somewhere that I’ve never been. Could be that I’m upon the precipice of some fresh tragedy, and surely, eventually, I will be.

But there is still the opportunity for, maybe, something good. Something that my imagination cannot grasp, or something that my pragmatism has, at the moment, deemed impossible. Change is the constant, after all. Even on this fated march towards entropy.