Memento Mori

At the age of 19, I left home. Part of a larger project I'd like to finish.

"Here come the sun     And I said...     It's alright"             -The Beatles     I left home, 19 years of age, having endured 19 summers of Texas heat, 19 winters of Texas cold. Lonely little towns, landlocked harbors that moored nothing but the oceanless sailors. There was no ship.  You had to dig your canal to the ocean.    I left with all the proper digging gear.    I was wearing a  pair of jeans, a hazy Texas blue sky denim, distressed, patched, stitched and burned and yet it retained a good wash. American Eagle. Wide loops to hold the leather belt with the dark brass buckle, which would in turn hold the near decimated jeans to my waist. 30 dollars on a clearance rack. 45 with the belt.    A pocketknife, stainless steel, that was in desperate need of sharpening. I had sadly left home without the whet stones. It would do, I suppose, in a moment of frenzy. 6 inches long, and baring it's threatening serrated teeth. 30 dollars straight from the manufacturer. Sold to me for 15.    A wallet in my right rear pocket which contained the necessary ID's, 114 dollars, and a Chinese coin that is said to bring fortune to the one who holds it. 10 dollars for the wallet, and 69 cents for the coin that I had been holding for a year to no such luck.    A t-shirt from a hometown football game I hadn't even attended, having instead stole away across town with her. Athletic fit, tightly conforming to the contours of my torso. The only thing I own that says that at one point in my life, I was in Weatherford, Texas. 20 dollars from the extortionists that I call home to.    A necklace from an Abercrombie & Fitch in Santa Barbara, dark leather with the iconic moose emblem on some charm. Said mainly that there was a girl sitting on the dock of the bay that held a certain chapter to a book I've yet to write. 7.50 with tax.    Timberland boots, built for endurance. The original beige was twisted into a more broken grayscale due to days upon days of testing the aforementioned endurance. It passed the test, after I had shocked the leather, mind you. Good boots just the same. The acquired black made them all the greater. 200 dollars before the black.    A messenger bag, brown canvas with skeleton keys hanging from one buckle, an ancient padlock on the other. The keys and the lock were not made for eachother. They keys went to houses I would never see, owned by people who I would never know. Death saw to that, and if not death, the distance was just as great. My work was under a lock and key that were not close.    Inside the bag: 12 pens, a copy of Art & Fear, a copy of Fear & Loathing, a camera that had taken thousands of pictures that weren't worth being called Kodak moments. A small pocketwatch box that contained 24 packets of Bigelow tea, 48 packets of turbinado sugar and no pocketwatch. The teacup, bone-pale porcelain, was in the wraps of a necktie that I never wore, on a day that never happened. The tattered remains of several sketchbooks, unbound, and rebound between the mustard-brown leather of a handmade volume that resembled a literary Frankensteinian creation, tightly shut together by a length of belt. This volume was known as the Morgue, a place to put the dead ideas to ressurect them later. 255 dollars and 32 cents for the contents of that 40 dollar messenger bag.    A white bandana with brown stains in the creases from enduring those Texas summers. Dad said I looked like Dylan; Mom, Hendrix. I'd need it if I went south. 3 dollars and 39 cents.    A corduroy jacket with fleece lining, dull and ragged from enduring those Texas winters. Dad said I looked broad in it; Mom tried to steal it. I'd need it if I went north. 70 dollars.    I'd need them both if I had stayed.    I left home on that sweltering August , worth to this world no more than 775 dollars and 9 cents. There was a certain mortality to that hot air. Everything I carried, carried in itself a depreciative value. From the clothes to the very bills in my wallet, I was slowly going broke. Memento Mori    The only thing with appreciative value was the forty dollar silver on my left ring finger, which gave people the impression... well, isn't it obvious? It was the only thing with an appreciative value, which doesn't say much because silver never had the sharp incline that gold did.    And the only thing that could not be properly estimated were the words which I penned into the Morgue, in the attic, in the heat of a maddened summer, like the maddened hero of Dostoevsky, who wasn't necessarily sane himself. I suppose what you're reading now, are the words of a mad man.    Gibran knew of mad men.    In the end, they tore off their masks and revealed their dark faces to the sun.    The proper definition of ressurection was to be found in literature...    In the worlds I read of...    And the worlds I wrote of...

Author's Note

Excuse the errors.