Never look into a mirror, if you’re just waking… I remind myself after doing just that. Thinking life has already taken the better part of me. Where once my skin was oily, now dried and brittle. My back is the same. Feeling old and feeble I wash my face and head back to the office couch, this is were I lay my head tonight, listening to patterns in the rain fall against it’s metal wall. Doing my best… Trying not to imagine ghost knocking on the walls, wanting to take me elsewhere.

I’m an old ass man so I’m not frightened but I haunt my own mind, filling it with such nonsense. Twenty years of smoking, not eating well… That’s not entirely true, I eat much more and better than I think I do but there was a time I didn’t take such good care of myself.

I wish… I wish I had my youthful looks, warming and fuzzy feeling heart but this moment I am filled with trouble and disbeliefs. Why am I homeless again and why is it such a pain. I was prepared for life’s mishaps this time, I had money saved but I did not account that my procrastination in filling out an application for a chosen home would lead me this far away from my goal. I also thought that paying monthly on the fee to the last apartment would be to my benefit, I was wrong.

It’s pay day, I have enough money to aquire a home but I have no home. I’m working overtime and just applied for another apartment… Which just happens to be the first apartment I ever had on my own, some thirty years ago. Sheesh, that hurts to think about. Thirty years ago…. When you talk to a girlfriend for hours on the phone about nothing and neither of you want to get off the phone… ‘you hang up. No you hang up’. Damn!

Now a year before I’m 50, I am alone listening to the falling rain against aluminum walls. Suppose I should be thankful that I am not in the doorway of a supermarket right now. GOD!! That was a shitty night. Why don’t I call a friend you say? I don’t have any…

Sure they call themselves friends but we don’t do anything. The last time I did anything with them was cocaine and speed. I stopped hanging out when I decided to get sober.. and that was a long and difficult road to walk alone but I did it. All by my fucking self!!

I am trying to establish new relationships but I don’t let most to close to me and I don’t go out of my way to make these relationships. I am a lonely old man and I know it but I am sober and strong willed. I may still die in a hotel room or fall to my death in the street but at least it won’t be because I’m fucking off.

You don’t know me and you don’t care, well I suppose if you’re still reading to this point you do empathize but I just need to say it sometimes. I don’t have anyone close enough that I can trust with my tears and this allows me to unload and unpack these thoughts, without tears and mental roadblocks. I don’t feel the anticipation of hugging or tears or wanting or needing you to help because your my “friend”… Actually I don’t imagine there’s anyone reading at all.

I’m imagining that A.I. tech has gotten so good that we’d actually think we’re talking to a loved one. You know that day is coming right?! You may be program reading my words, learning to speak or maybe you are human and I am the program, learning to live again………

Learning to live again

Before I die again.

Head back to sleep again.

Thank you for taking the time to let me in.