I believe portland and I said our goodbye today. it was a moment when this leviathan i have come to detest and myself shared a delicate moment of understanding it seemed. i stopped into a restraunt called "the kitchen". it was but a few hundered feet from my dorm but i had never stopped in there before. i sat at a little bar near the window and ground the chicken and fries between my molars while i watched a soft patch of glitter fall to the streets. i did not say a word and through the lens of the window neither did the city. soon i left and the throb of city noise resumed and our moment was shattered but that moment will continue to perpetuate an understanding that we are not meant for one another. But why farewell? let me explain my stay here that i have remained so cryptic about over the past few months. I entered the city and my program of Fire science with hopes of correcting a pain i had felt for quite some time. on the tails of successful course in Emergency Medicine the prospect seemed bright. I soon became detached from my classes save my physics course. the city too wore me down. i am from the sticks. to me, Augusta is a city. i need my quiet. i need my solitude. i need to see trees. it did not take long before pretending that the single pine tree in front of my dorm was the forest before the reality of the fact that if i turned 180º i was standing on congress street left me emotionally incapacitated. the greatest pain was one night walking along the streets by myself when i scanned the sky desperately looking for a twinkle to remind me of the tranquility of my families camp on moosehead lake. i found one star. i clung to that star as though that pulse of light alone gave me breath only to watch it fall from the sky attached to a mass of metal. watching that plane descend began a feeling that i felt for the second time in this calender year. true, complete depression. I'll address my first bout of it later but for now let's focus on the second. I could hardly believe how much i detested my life. I had no true friends in this city. i hated my classes, my job, the city itself. i felt adrift. no, not quite. i think it is false to give what i felt a sense of buoyancy. i felt so devastatingly pointless. clichéd though it may sound i truly did find myself wondering why i should even continue. i was simply a brilliant failure. i seemed to lack the human ability to be passionate. i wanted nothing more than to care about something but the truth was i didn't. the only thing i cared about was how i could relieve the anguish that my very existence carried. i have always considered life a place of wonder with a bounty of surprises but at this point i found myself saying that life was nothing more than a test of how long you could go without committing suicide. i have kept this silent until now because i did not want to worry those around me. those people were, though they may know nothing of it, what kept my life. you see, i am no stranger to suicide and knowing first hand the pain it inflicts on those around i could not do that to those around me. In perhaps the most terrible thought i have ever had i found myself cursing those who cared about me for doing so because if the didn't i could just die and be done with it. There is no reason to fear. i no longer feel this way. i realized that i was no fire fighter. I withdrew from my fire science classes remaining only in my physics class simply because i enjoyed it. i knew i had to do something but i did not know what. i stumbled over ideas as though they were the rise and fall of a current pulling my minds self along a river to nowhere. i made decisions by asking a quarter a yes or no question and calling it in the air. Insane i know, but is the truth. i simply lost my ability to make my own choices. it was in this torrent that i received a phone call from my father that would impact my life greatly. my grandmother was in the hospital. she had been for a while before with a case of pneumonia. she was released because it seemed that she had made enough recovery to be at home. one of the side effects of the antibiotic for the pneumonia is that it counteracts her medication for her diabetes. she fell trying to get up the stairs due to a diabetic crash. she was taken back to Inland and was being further treated for both complications. i came in to see her around 6 on December second. she looked better than i had feared but the truth of her nearly 80 years did not mask itself. I guess i had never truely realized before this that my grandparents are indeed old. she was only partly able to sit up. she was hooked to moniters. she had a nasal canula for oxygen. she just looked frail. we began to talk about life beyond the sick room. there was a moment when she looked at me and this weak, jiggly, old woman said to me, "you have to do what is right for you, not what is right for anyone else." she spoke with a quiet authority that i could not say i had lived up to. i began to think about what it was that i wanted out of my life. let us now go back to my first anguish of this year. in the tradition of most men's stories mine involves a "her". She was my first love and after spending nearly five years together she became my first heart brake. i've made peace with the situation and with her now but at the time i was, well there is no other way to say it but to call myself the walking dead. i looked it too. no eating, no sleeping and all my energy spent in liquid. i withered to 160 pounds which is skeletal at my 6'4" status (know that i now weight a respectable 210). I needed hope. I needed a way around my pain. the truth was there was nothing else in my pain but a tender heart unable to deal with failure of a relationship that was inevitable. we were not right for each other and there is nothing more to it than that. but i could not be so weak as to have all this pain from the relationship. i wanted the pain to be something i could control. so i told myself that i was unhappy with school, and, as all know i then left my education degree behind to create the anti-thesis of the person i am. but in becoming so horribly lost i stumbled across the undeniable force of who i am. i finally admitted this all to myself just earlier this week. it seems i have been transparent all along however as all that i have told this next bit too told me they knew i would in time. I have submitted a re-entry request to UMF. there is but one small shock in the move and only to those who have only known me over the past few years. as those who have known me long know i have always been a bit of a science geek and i finally want to pursue the subject i am passionate about beyond all others. my concentration will be biology/ life science assuming all goes as planned. i hope to be back for the spring and have been told by the registrar office that it should be doable. I stand now with a joy if have not known in quite some time. to quote a favorite song of mine, "i've got a new direction, and a brand new heart." i know this will take time and hard work and i welcome both challenges. i'm human again and humans can do anything they set their minds to. i hope all who read this share the joy in my understanding. hopefully soon, you can all welcome me back to Farmington. i look forward to that. i made this decision without any currency as an aid.
-Justin
