just like any other day

Evan was looking for tragedy by the way he was orbiting around the same anxieties, over and over. Just like every other day for him. Exactly as he made it. But he could have been a million miles away. He looked totally removed from himself.

The room was quiet and dark. The only light came in around the edges of the blanket that he push-pinned over the window as he sat on the edge of his bed. Not nearly enough for the waning life, in near total shade, lived by the aloe vera plant in the large pot on his dresser.

Evan cringed as the dogs next door began to bark. This could go on for a while. His dogs snoring on his bed, ignoring the shrill yapps, made him more comfortable. But not by much.

The television was turned off, making them and a boxfan the only sounds except him in the room.

He didn't want people to see his light. How bright it was. He didn't want it to be taken from him, so he hid it in that dark room with him. He pretended it went out and kept it from everyone and everything.

He didn’t trust anyone. Evan was afraid of the dark, but he was at peace there.

There were no distractions here, which ruled his world. And he hated anything that controlled him, so he stayed a moment.

Today was the same as the ones before.

Evan was shedding light in dark places. He just didn't know what he didn't know. It bothered him.

And so it went on...

It felt like he was being eaten alive by his own thoughts, by a swarm that had grown beyond his means, that might leave nothing left, as Evan struggled to maintain his long-lost composure.

It bothered him, but not enough to find out more than that.

Reaching past the lamp on the bedside table, he grabbed a cigarette from the pack sitting next to it and stood up.

His two dogs stirred and stretched, excited with anticipation that this meant they were going outside. But he stayed another moment.

Still caught in the trance-like daze, the gravity was inescapable as he stood there and trailed off back into his thoughts while insecurity and anxiety grew from inside of him.

He choked his emotions down with the smoke from his cigarettes from time to time, drawing him back, out of his head only long enough to sporadically scribble a few lines into his journal.

Then he would stop and stare up. Meanwhile, Evan’s attention had slowed and sunk, descending into an abyssal depth of his relentless questioning. He’s lost again now, for anybody’s guess how long. Just like any other day. To the depths which only he was privy to and was afraid to show or tell the world.

He didn't play Truth or Dare anymore. Nobody plays by the rules that he knows.

The memories of disappointment and setbacks, the letdowns and the heartache... it turned into all he knew anymore, growing to be so overwhelming for him to consider just how many years before he ran from questioning his own motives until he had been divorced from his own identity. It was one more thing that he hated about himself.

It seemed like a simple but extremely discomforting inquiry about what he is really haunted by. About what he wasn't able to even acknowledge that he was bothered by at all. He kept a smile on his face and denied any negative feelings. He hated talking about what he thought his weaknesses were. He hated thinking about them at all. Just like every other day.

When his friends and family would catch a glimpse of the tumultuous inner workings of his heart and mind, he became ambiguously defensive and withdrawn until it became a painstakingly amassed menagerie of repressed emotions, left hidden and some forgotten -some intentionally so. But he couldn't admit to what he wasn't even sure of.

From time to time anybody who considered him as he sat there in his head, far off in outer space, would witness his smile seem to wrestle with itself on his face as tears began to fall down his narrow cheeks and onto his unkept beard.

He was determined to evolve his hopelessness into an optimistic nihilism or some other former clarity. Unwavering, he hunted for a less difficult and dissatisfied existence, but he was still unsure if that goal was at all realistic. He hates not knowing what the point is.

And today was just like every other day.

He sat back down, anxious about the things outside his door. The home where he feels anything but. Where he resents being. Where he knows it isn't good for him. With things that aren't his. Too much clutter is amassed to allow more than passage through it. The responsibility. The rules. The potential. The failures.

And his mother- her and everything that hurt him and what he was running away from.

And the dogs slowly laid down, disappointed.

He knew their look, and how it felt. He hated himself for that. He hated most things about himself, and it added to the cacophony already roaring in his head. A day like any other day. He didn't know how to use a voice outside of all or nothing, day or night, just 'screaming for help' in any sense of the words.

But nobody listened to him. Nobody seemed to notice. He hated that nobody responded to his worsening emergencies. He hated that he hated them for it so much.

And he hadn't known his own ability to have a voice that didn't have to yell over it to be heard. He hated that too, but he never asked to stand in these shoes, and he was doing the best he could. But the more effort he made, the more he felt a deficit of authority and his responsibility on the rise. It's not like he wanted it to go this way - it just happened over time. He hated that he felt like it was too late now.

He didn't even totally understand how things got so bad so fast. Not remarkably long before he then did he even become conscious of the discontent he was plagued by. The subtlety of his fear and anger had allowed his compassionate nature and desire to help others to be overshadowed by his ever-justified anger.

He felt as helpless as a child to control the events of his turbulent life. He hated feeling out of control, like all the days that preceded. And after all, what kid wants to realize one day that he grew up and this is his life:

He's thirty-five; living back at home, again; responsible for alienating himself from close personal connections; unemployed, uneducated, and untrained; a cautionary tale; the reason he can't have nice things; afraid of the damage he has done and can still do; feeling alone, lost, and nowhere to go; considered arrogantly self-sabotaging; desperate for something to make it all make sense, again; not worth the tremendous effort it took to endure his friendship and the drama that seemed to follow wherever he went; at odds with himself and the world as a whole; falling short of everything he ever dreamed of being or doing; haunted by the nightmares those dreams became.

He hated the terrors that waited for him when he slept. For years now, the monsters that he ran from during the day hunted him in his dreams at night too, to violent and traumatizing ends. He was afraid to close his eyes and go to sleep. But he couldn't stay awake forever, no matter how hard he tried. And he was still afraid of really living because then he might have something to lose, but at least he could see those monsters coming.

So, he stayed there a while longer. But, like so many days before this one, he was so tired of how much it all took out of him.

The weight of it all was an anchor. It was a weight that Evan didn't know he held, totally unaware of his association with this indefinable mass. He knew something was not right, but he never guessed things could feel like this. He had caught himself up in a cyclical rut of self-loathing, confusion, and misunderstanding. He hated thinking there was nothing he could do.

He was desperate to change. Anything. But nothing has. Not yet. Just like every other day.

He felt like he was somehow on the verge of something that would make it all make sense again, or so he hoped... Then, suddenly, Evan laughed quite audibly to himself and said, “The only way out is through.” He shook his head, looked down to his feet and leaned forward putting his elbows on his knees and continued to mutter to himself, "I guess it needs a plot then.. hggmmm....."

He hated being put on the spot.

He was talking about his life, which he lived with an ambiguous and defiant insecurity. The same as he always has, like any other day.

But something changed that day.

Despite years of trying to find some other answer, even if he never wanted to admit it to anyone else, Evan knew he wasn't quite right yet. He had always hated that uncertainty, but for the first time in longer than he could recall, he was okay with that.

He wanted to stop giving up on himself. He hated that he had in the first place. That was the hardest thing to forgive, but Evan refused to compromise. Even with himself.

He knew how significant his own choices were to factor into how stuck he felt in the cycles of fear and self-defeat. He had endured this storm for years before anybody else noticed it raging. But his own role in it all was obscured to him until he was directly in the middle of the mental maelstrom.

Evan hated the richness in obscurity the world offered. But in the eye of the storm, things had become clear again.

He hated how easily he had lost sight of himself and how difficult it seemed to regain his composure to the outside world.

He was terrified of the future and all its potential. But Evan knew that was a gift.

Just like any other day.

Thirty-six would be a ‘Yes Year’, Evan decided. Ready or not, his life was about to be turned upside-down and nothing would be the same. Everything was about to be different, come September.

Just like he was waiting for. Just like any other day.

And he was ready for anything.