Insomnia

Sometimes this place feels like jail. As I can so thoroughly remember the five rooms that I called my home for seven years, having most of my possessions confined to one room is a little restricting. I sleep on a twin mattress as opposed to the queen that I was familiar with (though the platform full before it was my favorite). There are no bodegas, only supermarkets that never have seven-day candles (though heeding Ifaniyi I now know that I don't need them as much). Every other face I encounter outside of these walls triggers some memory, some set of experiences that remind me of both why I wanted to leave and why I desperately craved something that would make me stay. I did not understand that despite appearances I had chosen a life before I came here, one where I would need to follow orders, for my own sake.

The number eleven has been chasing me since my twenties ended. This is the eleventh year since I began real adulthood. At this time in '97 I was shelving books at a Barnes and Noble for a living, facing out titles by authors I wouldn't even touch now. As I did my job there and at Comp USA and at the temp gigs that would follow, I never ended up being anywhere very long.

And some kind of way people always remembered me. I was working the counter on two different days when both Andre and Big Boi, came up to me, dapped me up and gave me their phone numbers long after I'd interviewed them for magazines. I interviewed the late Maynard Jackson, arguably Atlanta's most important mayor to date, from the break room at the back of the Noble while the music manager, a geeky kid named Gary, looked on in wonder. To him I was talking to a god. To me he was just another subject.

I stood at the edge of a different river yesterday. It was murky and brown and far more still than the place where I went to pray for more than five years, the secret Negarra, Konata, Edwin and I shared. But that pulse all around me felt the same. The results were the same. The outcome will be the same. The next Grand Lodge will be even more secluded and tranquil than the last.

I woke up this morning reminded of the gifts I've been given that most don't have, weapons I've been armed with to help me on a walk through the valley of the shadows of mediocrity and fear. Though I often tremble at the thought of change, I don't think I'll ever stay in one thing for too long. Outside of my family and loved ones the rest is about going where I'm needed, even if I don't fully understand why.

I haven't slept well in these last few days, as I've gone to bed wondering if this set of scripts and this set of dreams will be pan out better than a life in books that was plagued by both bad choices and bad timing. I know that I'll once again end up in a hood different from where most of my friends are and that the existence I will seek will be off most of their radars. But it's all part of the plan, all written in the script. When it's done I will take my bow, hoping that the audience believes that I played my part well, anxiously awaiting my role in the next script that comes my way. Out.