Birth of a plan.

Hope for my future has been sucked out of me like a siphon. As if there's a hope vampire traipsing around disguised as my mother and it's just being pulled from me like the earwax from Shrek's ear, sans resulting candle. So, I've decided something: instead of partaking in passive suicide and losing all will to live a fulfilling and passionate life, I'm going to leave what's pulling me down and go.

go go go.

I'm listening, universe, and I got the message loud and clear.

After I graduate, I'm going to maybe hang around for a week or two, swimming and enjoying my friends, then pack my car with a few duffels and hit the road. Alone. Probably around 9K miles. And I won't have a schedule or a goal, really, except to experience life in the now and moment and be happy.

I know people I'll want to see, though. Of course Jess in Phoenix, my sisters in Texas, Kevin and maybe a distant uncle in Florida, up the east coast to my cousins in Virginia and New York, up to Maine, down to Chicago, Detroit, Ohio, and I'll probably sit in Montana wilderness for a week or so. Then over to Seattle, up to Canada, down back to Oregon and SF and then maybe home. Then again, maybe not. If I find somewhere awesome enough and can find a job, I'll stay.

I can't be hopeless anymore. It's fundamentally against my nature, and if I stay where I am, in no uncertain terms, I will die.

So yeah, that's the plan. The alternative. And now, I can't stop hoping for it. It's everything I'm looking forward to, and I think it poses the possibility of being the large cantilever I re-angle my life on.

Mourning and aloneness.

I'm sitting here thinking about my life. It's been a really rough ten weeks, so sliding towards self-pity is really easy. But I need to remember that when people are pulled out of my life, by their own actions or not, it's to help me value the beauty of aloneness.

This makes me think of Aloneness, one of the major cards in the Osho Zen Tarot deck, that a friend gave me my sophomore year of high school and that I often still think on. The card reads:

"When you are alone you are not alone, you are simply lonely - and there is a tremendous difference between loneliness and aloneness. When you are lonely you are thinking of the other, you are missing the other. Loneliness is a negative state. You are feeling that it would have been better if the other was there - your friend, your wife, your mother, your beloved, your husband. It would have been good if the other was there, but the other is not.

Loneliness is absence of the other. Aloneness is the presence of oneself. Aloneness is very positive. It is a presence, overflowing presence. You are so full of presence that you can fill the whole universe with your presence and there is no need for anybody."

I've ended a long friendship tonight. It's been over for awhile, but I needed to keep it to myself until the timing was appropriate. It was hard to keep such an important issue quiet and not communicate it with said friend, but it was for the sake of our work together and, I know, it served as a means to control my resentment. I was scared to speak openly...I would be nasty, vile, harsh, and I never like to leave a relationship that way. By waiting, I taught myself control, and now everything relevant is known and nothing dishonorable was said.

I feel like my friends, my close ties, the loves that keep me tethered to reality (in a good way) are dropping off like flies. Our lives are diverging from each other, but I'm confident in our ability to span that breadth whenever our lives let us.

All of this just serves to make me wonder what divinity has in store for me. As sure as I am in my own heartbeat I know that these trials are guiding me into a profound next step, and that trimming off some friendships that were more neutral or harmful than good is serving as essentially trimming the fat before I undergo a real test. My life has a plan. Even if I feel like it's getting lost under mudslides, there is a path I am on and that I'm destined to see through.

Trimming the fat or not, I'm mourning the loss. We've changed as people, enough so that a friendship doesn't even look feasible when you look at who we are now and now who we were when we began, but still. There was a deep love there that has been disappointed, and I'll always feel where it once was. He was like family, which made the negligent betrayal that much more painful, but a tree will sprout where I'm sore now and will be the structure for future happiness.

I must remember that God as I know it is with me. It's easier to be aware of it when I'm full of love for other people...how can I not be constantly aware of the All when I feel so acutely a part of it?...but even when I can't focus on how much I feel for others, I still need to remember. Life is beautiful. And it's okay if I don't have someone that I can turn to and talk about how shining it is. I can just turn inwards and give my thanks to the universe and be done.

Shaking.

Things are bad, but I feel relatively good about them. Or maybe I'm just numb from too much traumatic overload. Whatever it is, I feel like my fingers are raw from clawing myself up from this pit.

My mother is a liar. She never pays a penny towards her living expenses; I pay all of it. She somehow spends all the money she earns, all of the non-rent money my father gives her, and now, she dips hundreds of dollars worth in to the actual rent.

And I have to come up with the shortfalls.

I'm going ballistic. I'm going to leave her to lay in the bed she's been making. There's only so much I can take, especially when it's deliberate sabotage of my financial stability when I have little as it is.

I'm in a huge time of transition, and it feels like it's deeper and longer than I thought it would be.

Staring into the unknown, I'm shaking in my boots.