craving for more

It’s a peaceful break from reality: playing PS3, watching countless comedies, and curling up beside my cousin’s boxer and falling quietly asleep. But it is in the quiet that thoughts begin to consume me, begin to tear at my mind, screaming at me in shrieking, shrill whispers. These thoughts come in waves, breaking upon me like the ocean surf against jagged New England rocks. Sometimes it’s just a fight to stay afloat. I’m not really complaining. I can handle it. I’ve dealt with it my entire life. A beautiful genetic gift from my mother. She understands me. Not many people do. I come across looking like the most pessimistic person in the world, but that’s not really the case. First of all, I like to consider myself a realist. And second of all, I have high dreams, hopes, ambitions that I expect to come to pass. One day I want to get married to a wonderful girl and raise a family. I want to work in a church where I can communicate the gospel message in a way that is relevant and powerful. I want to plant churches. And I want to spend time in Ireland, Scotland, and Australia. I have hopes and dreams and ambitions, and I know they are attainable… I just need to be patient. But patience comes in small packages, and I always feel like a chain-smoker who has run out of his last pack of cigarettes and only has a handful of nickels and pennies in his pockets. 

I want to be remembered. I want to be known as the poor, unknown, weird kid who made a difference. Who took the tear-stained ashes of his life and turned it into a flowering garden with beautiful orchids, flowering banana palms, and cycads reaching to the stars. I don’t want to be just another nobody walking the streets, living an unadventurous life and being void of stories to tell. I’ve had my adventures, and I’ve encapsulated one such adventure—if you want to call it that—into a book I published over the summer. But as I look at my mundane, unexciting, run-of-the-mill life, I can’t help but hunger for more. Hunger for life. For vitality. For a new kind of blood to course through my veins. I want so much more than I have now. I’m not talking about material possessions. I’m talking about the quality of life that I live. I want more, life abundant and beautiful, a life that seems more like an orchestra or ballet or rave than waiting at the doctor’s office till they invite you in and tell you that you have some type of incurable disease. I have a frightening nightmare every now and then: I’m twenty-five years old, sitting at a bar, throwing down shots and smoking a cigarette, drowning out my misery and suffocating in regret. I want so much more than I have now. But this is life: what you want, you can’t have; what you have is taken away; and happiness is as fleeting as the spring rains. Or maybe this is cynicism. Maybe my idea of being a realist is just self-deception. Maybe I need to pull some unknown mask from over my eyes, or at least see the world through a different lens. I want more.