Boxed In

I have been told by the few people close to me, both professionally equipped and otherwise, that I tend to "think too much." I suppose I understand the sentiment, in the "over-thinking" sense, because of that I am most certainly guilty. But why else would I have been granted the gift of a brain than to use it?

I remember driving along the California coast in late winter 2005, en route from the San Diego airport to some posh resort whose threshold my foot did not deserve to cross. With the afternoon sky melting into a soft and rich purple, I let the windows down to feel the salt air blow in from the Pacific. Rufus Wainwright's "Want One" provided the soundtrack, and the hopefulness and hopelessness he voiced in each impassioned dirge made me feel the hopefulness and hopelessness weighing down my own life. Even then I knew trouble lurked in a nearby space I could not quite touch or see, and it would find me in full less than a year later.

Life seems to be improving now, somehow, though the promise of escaping to San Diego, Chicago, Seattle, Orlando, Las Vegas and a thousand other points distant from Philadelphia seems farther away than ever. Even so, one could say I feel more connected, more in control, more in tune with the forces I'm supposed to believe will lead me to contentment, despite sinking deeper into the shadows of the box in which I have locked myself. I feel the absence of friends and lovers and enemies and colleagues who have gone elsewhere, moving through life away from the idiot in his box, leaving him to ponder his own culpability in the mess in which he still wallows. They fear his failure will infect them, I suppose.

I'm also beginning to understand that there exists only the veil of control, that the only way to gain true control is to remove oneself from everything that surrounds him: isolation and hermitage. Something about the chickens coming home to roost, as someone wiser and quicker yet much less punctual meeting his deadlines once told me. Again, the idea of this box encasing me. The image recalls a quote from Jim Harrison's "The Summer He Didn't Die": "His reaction to bad luck was to run to the woods, and his reaction to good fortune was the same." Or another from David Guterson's "East of the Mountains": "This isn't any way to live. ... I miss the world."

And I do. Miss it, I mean. I do.