As I Lay Dying

I remember being 11 or 12 and watching a PBS documentary on James Baldwin. I didn't know a whole lot about him at the time, other than the fact that my father was a big fan and had many of his essay collection. It would be through my father's books that I would eventually come to know Baldwin's work. But back then I watched knowing next to nothing about the man, seeing a quiet boy from Harlem evolve from a child prodigy preacher to newspaper journalist to celebrated author.

These were all things and experiences I knew so well. These were things I wanted for myself. This was who I wanted to be. More than a decade later, when my fiction would first find its was into print, I was proud to have critics liken me to him, for them to notice the influence. But this isn't about all of that. This is about his funeral.

At the end of the doc they showed Baldwin's sendoff, a light show adorned with dancers and drummers. There seemed to be thousands of people there, many of whom the man himself never knew, many of whom had come to pay their respects to a man who had such a strong influence on their worlds from afar. Even then as a boy I wondered if anyone would remember me. Who would come to see me off? Who would care?

Late last night D and I got into this conversation about our arts, mine as writing, his as acting and writing, as I find myself at this precarious point in my career, this kind of limbo, I wonder what my future holds. As I prepare to embark on a literary endeavor that's very new and different and that will require the help of some very talented visual artists, as I accept the fact that I'm a perfectionist who is never satisfied and an artist who generally puts my integrity before my financial well-being, I hope and pray to not end up as anything more than footnote in someone else's memoir. But I'm sure none of us want that. I'm even sure that so many of us fear it.

I think back to almost a year ago when K and I were out on his deck in Georgia drinking rum and talking about our lives, how he envied me and I envied him (You're not alone Meadows). How he had this familial unit, this house with the SUV in the subdivision, a wife that loved him, etc. And there I was: single, relatively broke, a thorn in the side to the powers that were at my publisher because I wanted more, a one-time seller, un-produced screenwriter whose relationships seemed to melt at the one point where I thought they'd hold together. He told me that if I'd had his life I couldn't keep doing what I did, that it wasn't my time to be stable.

I think of K's words when my soul slips into shadow, if only for a moment or months at a time, when my next great idea makes me scared as hell that it won't work. I think because I started so young my sense of time has a tendency to play tricks on me. If there is to be such a thing as a bio on me, everything I've done would be viewed as my 'early' work. But as I look at people's children, my neighborhood, and the realms where I wanted to live forever, they all seem to be crumbling like some ancient ruin, making way for a something else that I have yet to see.

And as I lay dying in this figurative sense once more, the creative womb within me bleeding its former successes and failures clean, the cramps tend to be fucking unbearable. These are those times when I crave chocolate and caramel cuties most, salves for the growing pains that are changing me once more. Stability is only a fantasy for those in constant movement.

I have been lowered into the earth as many times as I have slain my foes and stood over their dying eyes, my blade so sharp and swift that even I didn't the fatal wounds I inflicted. My big revelation for this ending winter is that it is my own strength that I have always been afraid of. It is the fire that I have tried so hard to control that has often consumed me from within. Were it not for words like these I would have scorched myself to death long ago, or chosen the pistol and mask on some urban battlefield for the place to make my stand. As my vision comes clearer than it has even been I see that I was strong enough to stay focused, to stay the path that I chose before I got here when most do not, when most run the other way. I travel a tunnel in completely darkness, moving step by step toward a light that maybe be years away. But I'll get there. Somehow, someway I'll get there.