I am here to tell the truth so that when I look back on my life I don’t regret that for over half of it I was numb to the fact that I can write well. I am writing what I know. Whether I am describing a structure that surrounds me or the construct of my psyche or the amplitude of a fleas wings against the voice of war (only one of which I’ve heard) you will find that it is a small world in which I maneuver. There is no fantasy here, it is only knowledge of myself. I am starting to repair my self esteem and to mend the relationship between the life I live now and the multitude of searching my soul has done through aeons of energy swapping. And also my brain is healing so I’ve encountered some sort of twilight zone zest for creativity that I can’t seem to shake and I’m hoping this life has me more broken than previous lives so I can continue to heal and make good again this go around.
Albuquerque is when it became obvious to my family upon my return that I had changed. Before arriving here I spent a month driving around California, Arizona, and Colorado in a camper van – which is enough to help anyone change – especially if you’ve not been to the mountains before and you have no other plans or agendas but to get to the other side of any mountain you see. If the mountains changed me than I’m convinced that my soul is not stubborn in death and that my soul would grow most productive in the next life because change to a mountain is millennia.
I remember the smells of wildflowers and herbs from those places I sought. Many varieties ended up on my dash to preserve those moments when I made it to expansive fields between peaks of grandeur that were untouchable to me. It’s true I used to pick wildflowers and I traded a gregarious disposition towards people for wilderness isolation over a period of a few months. Remember I was trying to get away from boredom. To not let boredom follow me. Isn’t it true sometimes that people can’t help us find happiness, that what we are seeking instead is horizons and echoes.
When I was a young kid I used to smell burning, like sulfur, and when I did I would put my chin down and question my place and it would always come back to me being independent from the rest of you. Not alone but different because nobody else seemed to smell boredom as my mother would come to call it. All I would share about that place is the fact that I have this smell to smell and not the questions I was truly pondering at a young age. Things like why are words so strange when they have several meanings like building buildings for instance and how can something never end like space or why do I wish that everyone in the world was froze accept for me, why does dust move so slow in sunlight through open curtains and wouldn’t it be cool if everything became tilted in real life from this mirror I have angled on the carpet. I was not much different from the next kid in questioning the world around me. I think what does set me apart is that I care to remember minor details of my life that are significant enough to warrant writing them down so that maybe my writing style will flow much easier and I can find a niche in what is important enough for people to want to read as I am finding there is only a few of you out there that will find yourself at this point in the story and millions more that are not as important to me than you are right now.
I have found that exploration of the natural world is best when I can share the experience with other humans. In this way we can go around pointing at where to look and push one another to go beyond our yearning and towards a destination without questioning our original intention. Exploration or escapism. There is a difference between wanting solitude and wanting to escape from monotony. For me, solitude is a long term commitment whereas escaping is a temporary solution. Solitude is a healthy way to find comfort apart from society, and technology, while to escape means one must feel they have been held captive by social norms and modern practices. I feel my intentions in heading out west too early as a young man was to escape monotony and to explore the natural world. The only problem is that I would think of myself dull and boring in comparison to the characters I would meet. I would have to change by not changing. I would have to become strange to them before I could change in the eyes of those who knew me best.
Francis Erich McElroy 