30 breaths at 30 years.

There’s a common thread that courses through everyone’s lives: cliché’s.  We believe our lives are distinctly unique.  And they are, if in no other way than the order in which events unfold in them and the way we react to them.  But the grand themes are typically the same: love, loss, finances, career, and the social experience.

My 20’s were a cliche, albeit a fringe one at times.  I’ve slept in my car, gone hungry, lived in six states, was fortunate enough to see 30, and spent a decade searching for who I was and what I had within myself that I felt since I was a kid would attract to me a life of significance.  Is it not cliche that I spent my 20’s peeling back layer after layer of myself in an almost desperate search for that?  I am 30 years old today.  I don’t care much about this day, however I care a great deal not only about my future, but learning how to wield each moment intentionally because in reality, every moment can bring me closer to my goals and my dreams if I handle it correctly.

The last year can be seen as one of my worst, but the way I see it now is that it was the last care package life sent me as a 20-something year old.  Because of this last year I have grown personally in ways I never imagined and I will use it to make a better life.  I changed paths, now walking the road of adulthood.  This is exactly what is meant by “life is what you make it.”  I feel more like an adult, psychologically if nothing else.  Physically, I’ve retained a stick figure physique (big head included) but will be addressing that.

My father died.  I say that to myself a lot.  It’s very difficult to wrap my mind around and sometimes I feel like he never existed – it’s a painful double edged sword.  My daughter was born.  I went through hell and back with her mother.  I broke my hand while working like someone who makes six figures as my paychecks flat-lined.  I went through more personal growth in the last year than I have in the previous 27.  The landscape of my life is newer but the rumble of thunder and the pricks of lightning are still heard and seen because this isn’t over yet but I will take this day to look back and acknowledge what I have thus far done.  Good for me.  Good for my daughter.  Good for my family.  And good for my company.

I am becoming a master trainer.  I am becoming my family’s economic powerhouse.  I am becoming a great communicator.  I am becoming an inspiration to everyone around me.  I am continuing to thrive through every single challenge lying in wait because that’s who I am.  I’m made of fire and iron and I’ve made it this far through the most traumatic year of my life with a bigger heart still beating and tenacity that deserves a goddamn trophy.  And because of it, I am finding myself.  I’m a fortunate man.  I’m a happier man at 30.

Unrelenting formlessness.

Beneath the burnished and hardened exterior lay the ashes of the past year. Hollowed out, the deep & endless halls amplify the tiniest sound, though sounds are far and few between. Like a phantom, the fire that burns inside me floats through the halls, throwing a pale light against the formless dark. The sound of labored but steady breathing reaches into the emptiness. There’s nothing here. I’m not who I used to be. I’m a shell, a suit of iron moving through my life looking for a more suitable inhabitant, a new me. I’m tired of being tired, tired of feeling numb. To walk to the surface of this land I walk fares no better, as I’m randomly bludgeoned by projectiles that seem to seek me out passively aggressively.

I am sure none of this makes much sense. If I could paint it I would. I need to keep going, keep walking, keep talking. “Pep talk push-ups”. Let the life in, the love and passion in. I’m tired and I don’t care. If I stop now, I feel I may not be able to continue. This is weakness leaving the body, the psyche. I either turn into a machine until I reconnect with my humanity or I become irrelevant, incompetent and that is something I will not allow. The new city must be built on the ruins of it’s past and that’s just how it goddamn has to be. The alternative is failure. I don’t accept the alternative.

Of shock and awe.

“He’s gone…”  “He’s gone…”  “He’s gone…”  It repeats every day in my head.  Every night in my dreams.  Every morning it wakes me up.  How can this be?  It’s been almost three weeks since my father died but some days feel so normal, like he will show up in June, ready to accompany the rest of my family to the hospital when Makayla is born.  Other days I feel like I am suspended within a multifaceted tornado made of broken glass where I am not harmed but surrounded by fragmented reflections of myself.  I look closer and ask the shards of reflections, “Who are you?”  “Who were you?”  “Where’s your dad?”  “How could you not have known this would happen?”  Irrational, understandable, panic, and peace throw themselves on top of me like wet blankets and I want nothing to do with any of them.  What do I want?  I want emptiness, a place where I can meet my father, a place that transcends the finite halls that are plagued by mortality and it’s shortcomings so I can say one last goodbye.  I want to feel or see where he is, I want him to tell me that he will watch over us, that he has met his granddaughter.  I want to know what he thinks about her.

My muscles are quivering, these are the aftershocks of shock…..of awe, the remnants of my last desperate reaches and attempts to follow my dad when he took his last breath, foolishly and selfishly demanding that he not leave his family, taxing my intellect and imagination to it’s maximum capacity to create a memory of where he is right now, trying to trick my senses into convincing me that I have touched it and in turn, followed him into the beyond if only for a moment so that I can feel reassured that he still IS.  God, I miss him so much.  Just months before he died, he and I hiked Camelback mountain with my mom.  It’s not an easy hike and he apparently had a tumor in his lung when he did it.  That’s a fucking Iron Man.

Why did he have to die?

It’s fucked up, but I miss and ruminate on the days of Eisenhower Hospital; he was in his last month of life but he and I shared some of the most powerful moments of my life during that period.  I can remember in exquisite detail when I groomed him.  Right before I started, we each made a lame-ass joke to one another and then….we were completely silent from that point forward.  The energy in the room changed as if it snapped to attention.  Time did not stop, but it felt like it slowed down significantly.  The clippers hummed but I was hardly aware of the sound, I heard something else that I cannot explain, I felt something I cannot explain — nor do I have any intention of trying.  It still makes me cry because it was so sublime and…real.  It was cerimonious.

His hair was short and snow white with strands of dark grey.  He was “sweating” his cancer.  He allowed himself to be vulnerable with me and relaxed his head into my palm, allowing me to care for him.  We breathed slowly…synchronously.

I find myself at a loss now, so few words left to type.  Perhaps it is best.  All I will say is that’s the most significant thing I’ve experienced with my dad.  As verbose and exaggerated as this all might sound, I learned more about manhood in that moment than any other in my life, as if it was transferred to me intuitively.

You were a fucking rockstar, pop.