April 20th 2013

I've been waiting for this day for a long time. April 20th, 2013. For some, actually many, it's a yearly date to celebrate. It's a time to pull out your pipe, clean out the filter, and just hope for some resin. A time to get so blazed and do so so unapologetically. But to say that's why this day is important for me would be to drastically sell a life short. This day is an anniversary. Or better said, a day where a promise would either be fulfilled or would just quietly dissipate into another quiet anecdote of an already well lived life.

When you're a kid, you're taught many things. A lot of these things are slotted as Truths. If you follow through with these Truths, then theoretically the many equations of life ten times out of ten will produce the same product. When you're a kid, you are basically inundated with a myriad of sorts of systematic thinking. Why? Because you're loved and the one's older than you don't want to see you get hurt under their tutelage, while also at the same time hoping to believe in a possible thing called hope when they themselves are starting to subscribe to a slight hopelessness. You are taught to believe things, that at least under the protection of your parents and your elders, will keep you safe. Ideas and processes, in this day and age, if you follow thru, have to keep you well.

But then your twenties hit, and unfortunately, you learn, and dramatically so, that this will be the decade where all those systems and processes and Truths will be challenged. You learn that this is the time that you honestly have to relearn how to live. Out of the nest. On your own. Flapping vigorously with no idea if the things you founded your life on for the past twenty so on years will hold you up and keep you airborne. But you have to keep at it. And keep at it fearlessly. Even if you're totally and absolutely scared shitless as the ground and reality soon approaches.

Today is the date that a promise I had been quietly holding on to tightly for two years was supposed to bloom. And now that the day is almost over, I can gladly say, I'm okay. Not because I made it through without being nostalgic. Not because I didn't lose my shit. Not because I can honestly say that promises don't last forever, or that the words associated with persons involved are indicative of the quality of the person, or that all things true prove to be untrue. I'm not jaded and it's nothing dramatic like any of those reasons. Rather, the reason I'm okay is that I made it to and through this day, and tomorrow I will have made it past this day. It's that simple. All the added weight of regret and hope, at the stroke of midnight, is gone. The new stays new and the past stays the past. And the promise of tomorrow is enough of a Truth for now. And when the sun climbs up and over tomorrow and as it does the many tomorrows after, I will be able to say I kept myself airborne and my life fresh even if some memories haunt me as much as they serve as reminders of an honest life lived as beautiful as it continues to bloom.

Or it could be because I had an amazing fresa salmorejo and a couple Alhambra Especials today. Good food and quality beer can always change a day no mater the day. Eh... Today, it's just a toss-up.


 -Remoy