Okay. Fine. You want a story? I’ll give you one.

I’m sitting in the library, here in Austin, Texas. And I don’t know what to do. It is early June, but it feels like the devil’s day. Almost like there is no relent from the heat, from the humidity which is slowly retreating my sense of myself away from everything I have continually tried to escape. Now I have learned one great lesson: that there is no escape.

Supposedly, the gurus and the yoga-fueled tribe will tell us malcontents that we need to accept life in order to no longer be plagued by it. They tell us to accept the heat. To accept the bad jobs. The bad loves. The rent that never goes away. Bills. Too much thinking and drinking. Bad books, too. And never enough sleep. Or too much sleep. And bad dreams! Dreams where you are fucking your first ex girlfriend, over and over. But you can’t come. You can’t move past what she did to you. And that was ages ago.

So much has happened since then. And the dream seems surreal to the point that it is almost silly to even analyze it.

But that is not the story that I wanted to write. What I wanted to say is that I am trapped, here.

Actually, I have trapped myself. I quit my job and ran away to the West. Then to the South. Left New Jersey, through Philadelphia, and took off in my 2001 silver Honda Accord. I didn’t look back. Only I had wanted to dream. To look forward and see through everything. To see something better than lost love, drugs, alcoholism, and endless days and nights of work, work, work.

Always it was the same thing. Work to live. Live to work. Get enough money to keep getting yourself back to the job. And that made sense. Because everybody else was doing it. So what choice did I have?

Once I knew that the girl I was in love with (not the girl from the dream) was statistically insane, I realized that her emotional unavailability was threatening my own sanity. Which is hard to write about, because she was beautiful to me. I still remember her leaning her forehead on my car door, one night, with her looking better than ever--even though she was in distress. Even though her own world was crashing down around her. What with her crazy sisters, her crazy parents, her crazy friends. She didn’t have any time or space to be herself. So maybe that’s what drove her mad.

Everything seemed to happen, in a subsequent fashion, that was soul-splitting. From friends and families that were torn at the seams, to the endless soul-suck of the job that only kept you going back to the same place every day. Of course, some people don’t view the world in this way. Some people actually enjoy their lives, they love their jobs, and they welcome the spirit that it takes each day to get out there in the world and BE SOMEBODY, as we like to say.

Yet, it had to come to an end. Everything eventually does….

That girl, one of my former loves, would constantly belittle my own sane frustrations with working in the music industry. She seemed to insinuate that it was lousy to compare any of my problems against hers. This confused me. Because I didn’t see the competition of misery as being romantic or pleasing to adjust to. This blight that she infected me with would stay me, too, upon the arrival of a new love, some years down the road.

But I’m not there yet.

Instead, I am in this library. This air-conditioned sanctuary. Away from the heat. Away from my family. Disconnected from love and reality. Because this IS reality. Love is. Love is supposed to be everything that is real and consummate of what it means to be a human being.

The absence of love is what this story is about, if it even is a story, about anything. I don’t really know.

All I know is that I am trapped by the desire to escape. I escape the love that has failed me. But I cannot escape myself.

Do you see the predicament I am in?

I guess the only thing left to attribute to what could be called a “solution” is to love myself. Can I love myself when nobody else does?

Whoa! What a dream. What a nightmare. I go from the inanities of stagnancy, to the repercussions of over-analyzing my fixations to be free. In this way, I have realized that we are not as free as we have been taught to think. Because how can I be free if my love dissolves with the reality of its absence?

That is exactly what I have attempted to escape.

When I understand that I was in love with somebody who didn’t love me. Even though they said that they did. Even though I tried my best not to believe them. The fact remains: they are insane; and I am here, in the middle of nowhere, dreaming up a lie to cover up the reality--my reality--of the absence of love.

Does anybody want to read a story about a loveless narrator who will go out of his way, just so he doesn’t have to love himself? Though, it seems to be true, that I have overtly exposed myself. I have exposed myself TO THE TRUTH. Which is, simply, that I love myself too much for anything to ever be real enough to cover up the fact that I don’t love myself enough to be real....

Looking around this room, it is clear that I cannot identify with anybody else, in this regard. And that is why I have taken to writing you--a stranger--a story about my own problems with life and love and procrastinating who I am for the sake of an insoluble disregard for the heavenly ghosts of what is expected of me. If I wrote that to her, to any woman, in a letter--they’d think that I was nuts. And justifiably so.

That is why I have taken to my life on the run. So nobody will ever find out the truth about me. Not even me.

Thus the confusion. Thus the decay. I am a product of the environment unto which I’d been born. And no amount of self-love will ever cover up the truth about my lost loves. That they were and are insane. That I was even more insane to try to love them. And vice versa.

So let us blame each other. And call it a story. One that we will share with our friends. Provoking the spirit of self-love.

Because that is all we are really good at.

Trust me. I should know.