Prologue to Le Puy and beyond. Part 13.

Yes I was frivolous in my life. What ever I wanted I told myself I could have. There was nothing to hold me back. Somehow my mind told me I would be fine accepting the fate of this ordeal. In 2007 I finally went bankrupt. I hadn't felt a purpose in my life from around 1999. I had truly drifted without a clue. Briefly I left these lands for sondrie londs down in Brittany, Sweden, Czech Republic, Australia, Spain I took myself. I lived the crazy life, but my record was playing at the wrong speed. I know I fulfilled nothing long lasting in what should've been a brave escape. I feel my immaturity laid me bare. I was hunting for something I never perceived lingering in the blind spot of my sight. The years grew between regular 9 to 5 and bankruptcy. Between 1995 and 1999 I worked consistently. Then I left for Australia. I returned never to connected directly with that expectation from society in modern Britain, but the debts mounted as I felt I must conform to my peers, mother, father and society. The first mobile phone I ever had was bought for me in around 2001. I didn't need one: life was always at the end of the path for me. Then I wrote vain glorious poetry while circling, in a drugged mind, not being. Ruled entire by an ego built from the shambles of my family. I wrote of the barbarism in my first poetry. I mimicked TS Eliot. The piles of books, cds, dvds, clothes, ipods, computers gathered as I fell out with being a number on payroll. But I knew not how to break away from the peer expectations. My mind was crying. The very pain I first felt then stabbed utterly deeply and no one explained what was happening to me. I thought I had become trivial in my own mind. None of the attempts left me anything but glum and needy. I grew fat and absolutely disengaged from friends and family. Thankfully 9/11 and 7/7 came along and ruined the world further than I could hope to reconcile with. I was killing my fellow man for no need, suddenly. All western men hated the devil incarnation in Bin Laden or Saddam because we had all died as the twin towers fell. Divided into to never to be reconciled humanities. The violent majority and the longing minority. Nothing will ever be the same. Life hasn't truth in deed. So what does this man find to deal with if not those who see him as foe? There becomes a barrier. This barrier was killing me. I knew it not. I couldn't find a way out of this doom I had become. I couldn't focus my eyes away from my shuffling feet. Turned in on myself I knew no happiness - I was extinguished; my flame grew low in the trembling night. Many years have passed and I have been locked in this prison of my mind unable to tunnel out. Folded like brittle toffee thoughts defeated my hopes. Why I didn't during this time actually end my life makes me wonder. There may have been some small area of my self waiting to pounce and relieve me of the cage I had become. Bankruptcy was the final stage, a lengthy stage, in my mental penitentiary. I wasn't behind bars, but I clanked brutal chains. For a few years I struggled in conventional existence again and YHA offered me a temporary visa back within the accepted society I am barren from forever now. I learnt to use my hands to dice, play and toss. They were burnt and larcerated; tarnished and misformed. I engaged with England. I travelled copiously and collected towns to compare and contrast. As I braved the weather on the South Downs Way or stroud naked from Padstow to Trevone or observed the flow of the Irish Sea from upon majestic Blacksail/Old Man of Coniston or appeared haloed below an Icebow on Aldeborough stands. I knew I had discovered beauty; but if I was still unable to accept the torture dividing my time between bed making, toilet cleaning or meal creating how would I go forward ever as this new person: this one percentage I knew I only was. 2013 has come along and contrastingly I can't be the man I was trying to be for everyone else. I still show no existence visually. My thoughts, brought so low for so long, have left me drained of want or need or owning. All I see is a reflection of a past and I accept it not as my present. Turning the page of doubt I asked for help and some un-asked-for truth blinked awake within. Leading me on towards an open minded tolerance. I am led to accept the reality I have become is my unique strength. What I considered fearfully as calamities of failures I now know is my destiny. Accepting myself without doubt and not judging or revoking what I know is hell. The society I perceived to be mine, but could not merge with, I see as a mystery hidden in untruths and unreality. Something riddled with disease and unrelenting anger. No angels come to deliver those without hope; spreading my own wings I fly away to join a oneness that 99% would fear to know. And justice will be done ...