Oh person you thought you'd never be

In the midst of paper writing I decided to look through old journals.

I'm never sure if it's ever the right idea. But sometimes it's a requirement for me to look and see how weird and dumb I was at one point in time to remind myself that I may be doing the same thing six years later unconsciously. I guess it's easier to handle my battles that way, though, these days. I am swamped with life and it seems an utter waste of space in my brain to spare anymore of my sanity on some bad habits I should have left in a high school building, or in Columbia, or in one of those flaxen fields I visited after smoking joint after joint, staring at the river, dreaming up everything in my life.

Come to think of it, I have been missing that lately. I have been missing running out of my house, tying back my hair, lighting up my cigarette and stretching my legs out in the back of my old friend's car before we head off to go smoke a joint by the river. There is nothing more Missouri than that, my friends. It's the part I'd never attempt to run away from. And when autumn came around it was over and I had trouble keeping my hat on my head when the chill winds came. Soon enough all of my innocence was lost in all of those things I swore I'd never grasp. Now I am living in a completely different world. I wake up in the middle of crime on 39th street Kansas City at 3 AM in the morning and watch a homeless man drag his foot down the blizzard sidewalk. I wake up in the morning and embark on the challenge of just getting to a normal destination, like work, or class. I live in this city that isn't a city. It doesn't feel like my city, at least. This city is big enough for people not to be real and it's still small enough to get a taste of real. For me, though, this real is nothing like the real I remember.

If someone asked me three years ago if I would want to turn into this person I would say, "fuck no". Everything was so simple then. I'm not sure if I could go back if I tried. My life was thrown into a garbage disposal. I can't say I blame myself for becoming this person. I can't say I blame myself for becoming the kind of person I hate. Sometimes a person just needs to survive. I knew it would happen sometime. That's what always happens. I saw what they saw and that day it made sense. Now I have the real power to not stay that way. I have the choice. I know the best of both worlds now. I just need the time to sit down for a second and breathe. I just need the time to turn it all around.