So I went out for a walk once.
I didn't really know at the time if that was the night that I would finally figure all this stuff out or not. I’d already had nights like that before, where it felt like everything was finally coming down on me; like every single precariously tipped vase had just been pushed over and every trembling trigger finger had just squeezed. Like all the potential energy in the world was about to go kinetic. It was that sort of weird before-the-storm kind of aura that made me really believe that I would have some sort of amazing life-changing or life-ending epiphany, and I would finally know what's wrong. And something was wrong; somehow, I think I knew that with relative certainty.
But none of those nights ever resulted in anything. A storm never did come; maybe the thunder, maybe the lightning, but never even so much as a drizzle that could have finally satisfied my stupid obsession with introspection.
If someone would ever decide that this momentary adolescent search for meaning in my life warranted honest curiosity and decided to ask me about it, I think I would just start by saying all I really felt was that I had to leave that hotel room. It was just that, and nothing else, nothing else compelled me but that important word had, that word that means I didn’t get a choice. There was no "if I didn't". I did. I had to leave. I had to and I did and I left and so I went out for a walk once.
I knew it was late at night but I didn’t have any what time it was. The sky there was so clear and when I looked up I didn't see blackness but a nice dark blue with nice gray clouds and a big full moon like a perfect white droplet. And for a second I couldn't decide if it was amazing or unsettling how a sky may be a void one night and a comfort the next.
And it all just came down to being alone, really. I think that was the point. I think all I wanted was a chance to take everything that had been bothering me, all those slight doubts and fears and paranoias that have been ever so slowly and minutely eating away at me, and put them in the light. And in the end, the light turned out to be a lamp on a restaurant's deserted patio.
I climbed the fence and sat down at one of the black wicker tables. The chair felt damp beneath me. It was cold and there was dew on it. I tasted salt on my lips and wiped my eyes. If someone had seen me while I was walking, I knew they would have wondered, if briefly, what was wrong.
The point wasn't whatever was weighing me down that night. The point was that none of it mattered. In the end, none of it was relevant. If I was having an existential crisis, if my adolescent hormones happened to be raging that night, if I was just being a sentimental shithead, my Bildungsroman-esque traipse to a crappy little patio less than a mile from my hotel to do some deep thinking yielded absolutely no results. And that was the harsh truth of it. I'm not going to say it didn't have some importance in the small schemes of things, whatever it was. The simple reality is, like most things, there wasn’t really a point to it. I sat there in the dark, alone, the middle of the night turning into early dawn, and I just thought and thought and thought, and it was all why why why. A whole fuckton of why with sprinkles of what's the point, my recipe of stupid teenage stargazing, and in the end, it just tasted like shit. The worst part, I guess, was that I already knew it would.
I just had to leave the hotel room. I had to. Spending another second in there wasn't even an option. And whether human beings are put on this earth for some sort of discernible purpose or if it's true that we really are all walking around clueless and afraid beneath our well-designed masks of fragile contentment, this whole stupid walk only started because that kind of thinking somehow made me believe that I had to leave that hotel room, had to leave it because something inexplicable had been bothering me that I couldn't contain any longer. Maybe there's just something wrong with me, or maybe I'm just trying to take a spark and turn it into a forest fire. But that’s the thing, there was a spark. There was one, there really was one, at some point, and teenage naivete urged me to think that that held some sort of meaning. To say that there was a spark, and to really say it with meaning, takes equal parts stupidity and courage, a mixture that can be found hardly anywhere outside of thick, murky, teen angst.
It seems like everyone regrets their “there was a spark” moment. But I don’t know. Maybe it is just stupid, stupid and nothing else. But I don’t think that matters, really. I think there’s something admirable in it, having emotions so sharp and powerful, not blunted by experience or influence, that you’re able to let idle thoughts bring you out of your life, out of your mundanity, out of your comfort zone, and then have it guide you somewhere completely shitty, all while you’re romanticizing the hell out of it. I don’t know. I don’t know what it is that gets me about that. Maybe it’s just the pure and utter honesty of it. I don’t know.
