Fragments

II

Sometimes I think of my father. I watch him through the darkness of the trailer. I watch as he stares red-eyed and coked up at the computer on a desk littered with beer cans. I imagine him reading hundreds of articles on freemasonry, on the Eye of Ra (which he had on the back of his white pick-up), or anti-semitic conspiracy theories despite it being 3 am. He could've done it out of boredom or curiosity. Except I knew where it truly came from - a cold insecurity.  

An insecurity that he did not know enough, that there was something in the world he had yet to understand, and that if only he could learn more he would unlock the secret to life. That insecurity never left. He would never know enough, there were people, smart people - smarter men - who knew so much more. They were intellectual - he was not. They could create new and profound ideas - he could not. He felt he did something wrong.  He researched wrong. He didn't ask the right questions and never received the right answers. There was something that came easy to some people and never did to him. If only he could go under the surface, where the better people could go so easily, he could be like him - the kind of person life came easy to. Those who were not forced to drop out of middle school. There was something out there, something secret, repressing him that he needed to discover. But he couldn't - because it wasn't something he could learn his way out of - a bad mind.

I had a feeling there was a plan for me. I was a miracle child. My mother believed so. At times I also believed it true - despite my apathy. I thought that everything bad that happened, everything good, and everything in between was a road that led to the success that would be my life. All my spiritualism and hard work would pay off somehow. It would all be proof of my pretentious individuality.

But when I thought of my father I retreated. What if i'm just insane? That my spiritualism and signs I received that I believe say everything will work out for me turn out to be nothing? That in the end I die miserable and alone? That my long nights researching and learning and writing and learning to write and learning to research and learning about this and that and everything in between for all the books I was working on or might work on be for nothing? That my strained eyes study sessions are nothing but a way to soothe my intense insecurity that there are smarter people - intellectuals - intelligentsia who know more, who share profound ideas in their lofty penthouses drinking expensive wines in large libraries. 

I have a fear I will date or marry a smarter man, a man who went to college, who has a doctorate degree and, while he will never say it, he will agree he was the smarter of the two of us. He will listen to my thoughts and feelings like a child who interested in space or dinosaurs - not as an equal because he did real work and real studies and real writing. I will never do enough or learn enough to dig myself out of the hole my poor birth has put me into. Have all my struggles and my experiences ever happened for any other reason except just to happen? Will my writing and thoughts that I believe profound - and others would to - end up being received as low brow and shallow? Is my life not a road I have to brace for the ups and downs to reach the eventual - hopefully happy - conclusion - but only a cul-de-sac that I walk about and about in my listless apathy where I look at all the same houses and all the same people and only in my delusion do I believe I am making any sort of real progress?