It's to be even more expected that people change, too.
Life is forcing me to constantly rearrange myself, like redecorating and refurnishing the same old house. And even though I store away some of the 'old' to make room for the 'new,' there are still indents in the carpet of my soul that remind me where everything used to be.
How everything used to be.
(me and my cousin Chase, circa this summer)
As much as I miss everything I've had to let go of, I like my new digs. I'm gradually becoming more comfortable on this path I'm carving out for myself.
I don't claim to know what's coming but I can promise that I'm going to roll with it instead of fighting.
One day, I will die.
The only choice I have in the matter is whether or not I'm exhausted over petty things I have no control over.
I'll blast myself deaf with my music and I'll smoke my lungs scarred with these cigarettes.
They're vices, no doubt, but they're vices I chose.
They're vices I like.
Vices I want to live and even die with.
I'll pierce this body of mine and inject ink into my skin as I see fit.
My father and mother created this body I posses but not my mind.
God knows they didn't teach me anything about self-respect but, were they around or sober, I know they'd be amazed and proud of how much I've pieced together on my own.
It doesn't matter to me anymore what images they must have lived with in their heads while I was growing up.
Images of dirty drugs, dirty boys, dirty decisions.
Because I know I've encountered all three and have found myself most content to sit cross-legged beside my friends on their porch steps, flicking cigarette filters and creating falsified thug personas.
I was a good kid.
But they don't know that.
And they don't need to.
They don't need to know that my friends, crazy-haired and tattooed as they may be, are the most genuine/caring/hilarious people on this planet. They don't need to know that for every hole in my friends' clothing, there are probably ten stories about how they'd gotten me through a rough patch of my life.
Because somewhere along the line my degenerate friends took the places of my parents and became more important to me than anything ever before.
THAT will never change.
I promise.
