Tulane

Tulane

            I woke and sat at the edge of my bed; I sat at the edge of 23 and knew I had become lost again. Chicago was not a frozen tundra anymore and yet I felt gray all the same. I had returned from Boston a week before, quit my piece of s**t, soul killing job and gotten sick the day after. I had had the most terrible week in, well, in exactly one year. It had been a year before, after numerous margaritas at sunset cantina, that my blackout self had decided to throw himself in front of a car on Saint Paul street.

            It was one year before that I had stood hammered and yelling at a cop not to take me to jail but to help me, that I had yelled at him that I taught at a homeless shelter as if that very activity could absolve me from my sins, as if that very declaration could erase my pain and rid me of my loneliness. It is not that I wished for death, I had simply grown tired of numbing a pain so internal that I wished for one so physical it would far outweigh my inner one. I wanted to feel it all. I wanted to drown the sorrow and burn my self, only to be reborn from the ashes.

            It was the end of April, the beginning of May. It used to be only Novembers, when I would wake up to empty hotel rooms, empty apartments, when all my friends had left to celebrate a holiday I did not. Somehow, the weeks before my birthday had adopted such sorrow. It seems almost cruel my darkest days have been on the same street. It had been two years before when I had had my first panic attack on Saint Paul. I ran as the rain poured, letting it cover my tears. I ran as the thoughts flooded my brain. I was thinking how it should’ve been my mother’s birthday, how I was failing a class I cared nothing about, how I wasn’t going to graduate in a few weeks. The world seemed to be crumbling and I was feeling it all, I couldn’t put it back, Pandora had fucked me.

            My hands grew numb and I stopped being able to text. My stomach felt so tight and my lungs hurt. My face was twitching and my heart was beating relentlessly. I had no idea what was happening to me and that made it so much worse. I was so scared. I was so scared of starting a new life, once again.

            But I got through that day and I got through getting cuffed to a gurney, and Tarik watching as I cried my heart out in an emergency room, and through the morning where I felt as if I had fallen into the deepest hole in the world. I got through the Novembers and the Aprils and the Mays. I cut off the hospital bracelet off, taped it to my calendar so I would see it every day, and signed up for a marathon. I vowed to work my a*s off every single day, to fight like hell every single day to never feel how I felt that morning ever again.

            Now there I was, sitting in a Panera in Downtown Chicago, drinking coffee and writing about the darkest day I’d seen so far, feeling as if the world had become heavier, feeling hopeless and lost once again, but still putting ink on paper, exorcising my demons in the only way I’d known to work for me. That is when Keith Dearborn walked in. A recruiter for Tulane University in New Orleans came in and asked if he could read my writing. I hesitated, but proceeded to warn him it was heavy stuff and gave it to him. Keith sat down and read it and then said “Man, I think I was supposed to come into your life as much as you needed to come into mine.” We talked about life for a couple of hours and shared things you only tell your closest friends or complete strangers you think you’d never see again. It was truly incredible the similarity of the things that we had been through in life. Having just arrived to Chicago a few hours earlier, Keith had no reason to walk into that Panera and neither did I, seeing as I lived nowhere near there and that had been my first and perhaps only time being in that location. We exchanged numbers and he took a copy of my resume promising to help me out.

            Now, perhaps, I would never see or hear from Keith again, but that two hour long conversation with a complete stranger somehow helped me. I could have said no and continued to be in a terrible mood, but I’m glad I didn’t. Maybe, it was what I needed, or what he needed. Maybe, it gave me a bit of hope, hope that there are people out there that care, that we are not alone, that while the world may seem gray at times all we need to do is find that small tear and rip through that s**t, if not to get out, then at least to let in a bit of light.

            The truth is that nothing had changed. Uncertainty was the only certainty in the goddamned world. The truth remained the same, I had no idea where I would be the next day or what the future held for me, but no one does. I did not know where I would be working, or where I’d be living. All knew is I had made it so far and, perhaps, there was a reason why.