Help. That's what people seem to want to give you when you tell them a sad story, your sad story. But sometimes you don't want help. You simply want someone else to hear your story.

My uncle was molested in the first grade. By his principal. Skeletons in the closet.

And now he's dead.

I think everyone has a back story. They have to have one. I guess it's whether or not you're real, if you've toyed with life and it's bitten you back. Sometimes I think people haven't experienced the pain I have. Maybe I'm just being selfish.

Sometimes you just want physical pain, because your emotion is long gone. Or maybe it was never there to start.


The best stories told are the true ones.


Pain. Sometimes people turn it into hatred. Hatred on others. Hatred on themselves. It all depends on strength of character. Sometimes they don't even know the pain is there, all the worse.

I have this very vivid memory. I’m eight years old standing in the hallway of a hospital. There is a nurses station of some sort with all these life monitors. The kind with the green line that goes up and down. Sharp lines, piercing the screen. And I’m there, watching, captivated. And the monitors, a few of them, the lines are barely moving, some of them stop completely. And I'm just standing there, standing, feeling like, I don’t know, powerless. People are dying and I’m standing there, just a kid.

There was a time when I was five. Rocking my heels on the step outside my house. Listening to my neighbor after her only child had ended his life. All I remember was the screaming.


….


Maybe I do more than I think. Maybe I don't. I often wonder if other people are worth the time. Then again, I'm usually so lonely I bother with them anyway. If you can get a person to laugh, it kind of disarms them. Then you get to see they are as fragile as you. Maybe.

I seem surer of things than I am it seems. Some people think I'm smart. It's possible but I don't see it because of all the other people out there smarter than me.

My grandmother used to press her ring finger into the base of my spine to get me to stand up straight. I was always hunched over, muddling over the idea of making a mistake. Apparently, mistakes aren't allowed. Without mistakes, how does one learn?

........

I wonder if everyone cared would that solve things? What if people sat around and wondered what the ant they just killed for ignorant household invasion thought before he was slain. Would it make a difference?

Imagine a world with no obligations, would people become entirely self absorbed?
....

Tomorrow is the first anniversary of my uncle's death.

I think about the impact he left on our lives.

It was one of pain. He was in pain, but he didn't fall gracefully when he died like his father did.
My grandfather. The nurses at the hospital were crying after he died. People he never met came to his funeral. He was an unsung hero, touching the lives of so many people. He would always say "personality is half your life." He lives by those words. He knew everyone and everyone knew him. Newspaper articles, news stories. Everybody talked to him. He was such a great influence but I feel like it was wasted on my youth.
He killed someone once. He had too. Murder isn't murder if it's war. Does that still make him a hero?

What is the measure of a man?

I'm not here to define that. I doubt anyone has the right too. Some people feel they have enough degrees to have earned the right.

......

Sometimes you meet someone who takes your mind off things for awhile. A yin to your yang. And then you learn their story. You lock eyes and a moment is shared that can't be expressed in words.