Chapter One: New Beginnings
Our lives begin upon impact. We crash into things, unprepared, unknowing, and most of the time, unwilling. Flailing into life, we kick and scream because we were safe and warm listening to our mother's heartbeat, eating whatever she had happened to have that day and now we have been cast out into the cold. And our minds don't understand until much later how she could possibly betray us like that! Had we kicked her too hard one too many times? And such is the passages and impacts of time that are left with us wheezing in the dust as everyone else simply skates away.
For me, my impact started at 21, crashing off of a barstool and landing on a cold floor of a dive bar in bumfuck Egypt. The barmaid actually debated finishing her shift before maybe calling the ambulance. I spent that Christmas getting my stomach pumped as she looked down on me coldly and without any fear. "You need help" she spat out, as if she was telling me I had worn the wrong shoes with my suit. So many years had passed on, and yet in those days, I felt like my mother had only just died yesterday. I had seen it from a million angles though. When something big like that happens, the residual stress pulls you back to that moment for the rest of your life.
The funny thing is, when you fall, it feels just like your attention wandered for a second before the waves of time reach up and BAM- you are thrown into another moment. You could be 10 minutes in the future, or 40 years in the past. None of that really matters though. It becomes a matter of life and death. Survival if you must and all that you end up thinking about is getting clothes on, and blending in, until the next shift.
So you can see how hard it is for me to keep anything stable. I kept a job at a library for a while, but a small incident with getting stuck inside the stairwell commanded I get a job where no one would notice if I left. I ended up starting a studio, covering my absences with looking for new bands to sign. Only my best friend Gomez knew where I really was.
And that brings me here.
Well, here being relative in terms of where we are. By the time anyone reads my memoirs, for all I know, I could be completely and totally ghosted. But maybe you are sitting there in a big chair, curled up like a cat, eyes scanning my words to try to make sense of it all. Or on bus, feet stretched into the aisle, a clear broadcasting of "No, I sit alone, thank you." But I hope that one of you, if any of you, sits among friends. You feel alone. And when you look at my words, you see me. A twenty something year old man with a chip on his shoulder. A time traveler. And hopefully, by the end of it all, you understand why I ever let her go.