of Midnight Thoughts and Memories

Hey, this is an rare serious entry that crossed over from my other blog.

It’s one of those nights when I should’ve listened to Kat. I should’ve listened to what I said to Mahar.

12:30am Ohio and Rush. Two quick hits, one big one and I was down bleeding on the street. It was a bad night to be out alone. It was a bad night not to have anything to soak it up. A pack of tissues, a hanky or even an old pair of gloves would have been nice. No sense calling for help because I didn’t want to sit in the curb any longer and so I decided to walk back.

I crumpled my shirt to cover it up so I wouldn’t attract any more attention. I was still bleeding profusely though as I’ve been known to in the past. Enduring the pain is one thing, bleeding in the process is another and walking home with these two things has been one unique experience. 5 blocks away and I’ve already lost so much. How come the platelets are not doing their job? Damn lazy platelets. I wasn’t walking straight anymore, my pulse was up and finally came the unusual euphoria. It was during this time when my mind handled thoughts the way it hadn’t handled before. It was like having an alternate point of view in everything I believed in and my mind was processing these thoughts twice the usual rate. Anyhoo, these thoughts are what I really intended to write about. Sorry for the long introduction.

Having a never say die attitude is not always good. It makes you go after the most ridiculous dreams and goals. Sometimes, we do have our share of Cinderella stories wherein we somehow manage to reach these goals. This is what some movies are all about but life is more than what the movie shows. A never say die attitude does lead to Cinderella stories but it can also lead to bad mix of devastating failures and shattered dreams. It can make us aim for something farfetched because we believe, we never say never. Never say die is good, but we also have to be realistic. We should learn to let go of a dream and in worse cases – to kill a dream.

Killing a dream. Probably one of the cruelest things to do to oneself. It has a short term physical effect and a long term mental effect. You can let go of a dream if it’s simply in your grasp. You can’t let go of a dream if it’s already attached to you and has fused to be part of you. You’ll have to kill it.

Hold fast to dreams, For if dreams die, Life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly, Hold fast to dreams, For if dreams go, Life is a barren field, Frozen with snow
- Langston Hughes

We do need dreams to hold on to. Killing it off is killing a part of you, making the task a lot harsher than initially thought. The how part will depend on the person.

A dream is gone and a vacuum is formed. Failing to fill it up will cause us to implode, making things a lot worse. This is the time we hold on to the dependables – our always happy thoughts, the people who will stick with you all the way, the natural contingency plan cooked up by the mind for cases like this. Sadly, not all thoughts remain happy, not all people stick with you and not all plans turn out the way you expected it to be. You should always have an alternate plan.

Life’s plan B is to go back to your roots. Go back where we excelled before. Go back a step behind in time. My plan B is video games. I’m good at it when I was young and I’m still pretty darn good at it right now. When I suck at work, suck at relationships, suck at handling life’s problems, I go back home, plug in the old Nintendo system and finish Mario 3 again and again and again. Feels good to be reminded that your damn good at something.

Kinzie and Clark. I wasn’t leaving a crimson trail anymore but I was still woozy. So many other thoughts have already crossed my mind but these are the only things I felt comfortable sharing. It was one unusual night. It felt like someone possessed me and injected me with these thoughts. Weird...

Going back to killing a dream, if ever you did manage to do this cleanly, tell me how.