A couple years ago, there was a week where both my parents were in different hospitals- my dad for his pulmonary embolism (due to pressure on his heart from the Mesothelioma), and my mom for a surgical procedure to correct her spine. Every day I took two trips to each locale to visit them... When I think about this period, my heart breaks for the vastness of my life, for how many memories I've squandered. Drowned in sorrow, I fell prey to the bottle and disconnected from everything except the ever-prevailing terror of looming death, so that when I closed my eyes and drank or smoked my mind into a stupor I saw my own demise, waiting to take me into a spiral of nothingness.

An image I cannot relive/explain/examine in any way- which terrorizes me- comes from that of looking out the fifth story window of the Kaiser hospital in San Bernadino, and amidst all the construction and the stark white exterior was tucked a small, lush green garden, presumably an outdoor lounge for the nurses and doctors. In all my agony and hopelessness, I stared and stared at this enigmatic square of greenery, as if it was a beacon of hope, an architectural representation of everything I wanted and felt like I would never deserve or attain.

For inexplicable reasons, this vision haunts me still, as if the events that led me to the place I'm in now were experienced by a different person, by a man with no reason to live, no purpose or direction. Now, when I visit Riverside, I am pervaded by memories of a life I feel nothing for, and it's precisely in this nothingness, in the dimming of the light behind me that I am compelled to push forward to darkness, to the furthest boundaries possible.

This is no longer a pursuit of happiness. It is a pursuit of vision.
I desire now to be awake. To be in a field, running my hands through the tall grass, to appreciate the splendor and mortality of the breeze that hits my face. I desire to be able to sit under a tree and listen to the noises around me (in my case, mostly freeway traffic), to absorb the pleasures of the world and accept who I am within it; To relinquish my obsessions and hand them over to the fates. I desire these things for myself; Not for you, not for my mom, not for my brothers, not for my friends, not for the entire world. I desire for myself to be awake, with clear vision.

I've become a Hydra. If you cut off my head, five will grow back.