193

Not everybody wakes up.
Not everybody can redeem themselves.
Not everybody gets a chance to become a better person.
Some are on the right path but die along the way
and their story never gets a happy ending.
Not everybody gets a happy ending.
Nobody’s even entitled to an ending.
Sometimes life just ends.
In the middle of a pop song- you should have been more careful, you should have turned to the right…
Poof.
All of it,
the light in their eyes,
the struggles of the past,
the dreams for the future,
gone, goodbye, sayanora, go fuck yourself.
Like it was nothing, like nothing ever happened, like nobody was even there.
It can be so impersonal,
a big mean surprise.
It can be such a pitiful sight,
seeing the strong wither away into oblivion.
Even those that are considered lucky didn’t even get luxury of dignity
and were deprived the sanctity of their final words-
they forgot them the moment they wanted to share them
and when they remembered the words,
they forgot the meaning of them.
Some, perhaps even most, never got over their personal demons
continued in their darkened path of bad habits and misunderstandings.
The moments of enlightenment too brie
and too painful to linger.

I don’t want it to hurt,
I don’t want to it to be near,
I don’t want to go away
and I’m asking you this,
if you’re listening
though I don’t think you even have that capacity anymore,
to leave me alone for the next 200 hundred years.
I promise I will only waste 193 of them.
The rest will be time well spent.

I promise.

***

TAKE IT EASY

Yesterday during kick-box training my trainer stopped during one particular exercisewhere I had to exchanged two punches to the other guy
and then receive two punches in return
and the trainer told me to ”take it easy,”
cos ”you don’t know it yet but your face is drained of all color. You won’t notice it until it’s too late and then you’re hugging the floor.”
It’s true,
I didn’t notice anything until I was on my way home
and I felt dizzy and tired,
and it wasn’t until I had a good meal inside me that I felt better.

None of this is something to be ashamed of I guess,
but that’s how I feel.
I should be tough and handle this training
but apparently I’m too weak.
And whenever I leave training,
my trainer always reminds me to ”take it easy”
cos he can see that I’m stressed out too much.

It’s been a tough week for me,
at my job I’ve received negative feedback
because I make sloppy mistakes.
On a personal note,
the boss also told me that my language is too coarse
and when I come into work,
I’m complaining too much
and my colleagues get distracted because of this.
cos more often than not,
I start about something negative
and it’s tiresome listening to some naggy motherfucker all the time.
This affects the work environment.

Naturally she has a point,
cos I know I ain’t easy to deal with at times.
I can feel how uneasy she feels in my company at times
and that she doesn’t know how to deal with me.
Same with my colleagues who’ve witnessed on multiple occasions how quickly my mood switches
from casual to jolly
to depressed.
I could be having a good time
breaking balls with colleagues
then suddenly I’m lost in a ruminating thought
I start hating myself
I feel embarrassed cos they didn’t laugh at one my jokes enough
or
I’m haunted by this fear that I did something inappropriate
and they’ll talk amongst themselves
saying what a piece of shit I am.
And I’m constantly checking myself,
watching my language,
making sure I don’t touch anyone,
cos that would freak me out,
would spur on my OCD
and then I’d fear losing my girlfriend,
the one I love.
And
I know I should challenge my OCD
and not recoil into it.
The more you recoil into it
the stronger it gets.
But it’s too hard
and even after a few victories,
one failure can put me seemingly back to square one.

There’s all these things I want to achieve:

I want to be a great boxer,
and I do a match one day-
become a decent amateur (despite the fact I’m close to my thirties and I’m just starting out).

I want to be a great writer
and
create multitudes of
short stories,
novella’s
novels,
screenplays
and plays
cos there’s so many stories in my head
but I’ve wasted so many of them
and I never finish anything.

I want to be a great Buddhist,
be meditative and calm
and teach people how to approach life.

And all of these things are hard
and I guess I want too much
cos I also gotta go to work
and I don’t like this work but I gotta make money.

I gotta sleep on time
or
else I’ll be tired and cranky at work.

I gotta eat healthy too or else I’ll feel bloated
and my man-boobs will get bigger.

My girlfriend tells me
to just focus on having fun with boxing and writing
but I haven’t been having fun doing either of those things in quite some time.
I feel horrible when I’m doing it
and I feel horrible when I’m not doing it.
So I don’t do it as much anymore
and just mindlessly watch TV shows and movies
and dream about doing it in the near future.
And when I go to sleep I dream about this man I want to be,
even though I don’t think I can ever be this man.
I think it’s too late to be this man,
I lost my shot for being this man,
this interesting and inspiring artist.
I think it was there somewhere in the past
but I fucked up
and choose self-pity instead.
Cos that was always easier,
cos telling yourself you will always fail
is easier than working hard and
achieving something…

So now that I’ve gotten this out of the way,
I’m going to get some lunch
and after lunch it’s time to make myself some coffee
and do some writing.

But before I do
I’ll remember what my trainer said:
”take it easy,”

You got that?

I think so.

No thinking,
you gotta be sure.

Yes I’m sure.
I mean how hard can it be?
Just relax, take it easy, have fun.
Should be doable right?

Right.

***