Icarus's blog: "Just South of Blue."

In less than a week I will be 30.
We tend to look back on years ending in 0 as the big ones. We tend to count scars, and tell tales, and tally our achievements to date.

2014 will not be the year I look back fondly on, and say "there, that's when everything -started- to get right". It came close. At the end there was a slightly diminished threat against my life after delaying a massacre in 2013, I was in a promising and positive relationship with a woman that loved me, and I had a full time job for the first time in years. My mother, father, and girlfriend were proud of me.
And my brother and his wife had moved in with us.

With that came conflict, chaos, and hurled decade-old resentment spewing like black tendrils of vitriol and hate.
On a nearly bi-weekly basis.

I've been asked to disregard it on those (and many other) occasions. Chalking it up to "stress".

But this post was about me. It's all about me, isn't it?
If I were to cease to exist, what could possibly remain of all this?

2014 is when the most promising romantic relationship of my lifetime (up to this point)
ended. Abruptly, and unnegotiably.
2014 is when I was mostly financially cut off despite needing a new car, and several thousand dollars of out of pocket medical expenses from an injury sustained due to someone else's drunk driving. The service provided was of no help, only expense, and suggested by my loved ones that refused to foot the bill.
2014 is when I got said job, and immediately set stacks of my hard earned labor on fire
paying endlessly for what was stolen from me.

And 2015 promises to be "the year of the move". Wherein my brother and his wife will vacate this place, move four blocks south, and start a business.
On my birthday.
On my 30th birthday.

I will acknowledge that there have been absurd, ridiculous challenges to their acquiring a house, loan, price, settlement, inspection, closing, license.
Etc. Et Al.

But in our lives we move many
many times.

How many times do we turn 30?

How many times do we get off probation and taste the free air of another far-off country?
How many times do we graduate college, the youngest in our family's history?

I feel as though my life is one parade cancelled after another.
And I have watched my life
burn
at the hands of thieves, tormentors and idiots

and I grow so tired of losing it.

2014 was going to be the year I took, but my heart softened, and my hate was shunned, abolished, and misunderstood by the people closest to me.

2015 holds no promises, no title, no tagline.
2015 will likely close as it opened. Timid, and spent in mindless toil at the whim of cruel, oblivious, grinding fate.

My year plan had to become a two year plan.
My year 30, with all its pomp and ceremony will be canceled due to more enticing festivities down the road.

After all? What have I accomplished?
We can say we are our own masters, that life is what we make of it, that we choose how to react.
That's not the truth. That's what the untested say to valorize themselves against people that no longer can control their situation and fall to it.

Some people are victims, and I don't even count myself in that category after abuse physical, experimentation sexual, parents absent, and peers malicious. Brain chemistry depressing, intellect superior, facaulties impeded, judgment impaired, addiction immenent, criminals and fiends everywhere.

I am not a victim. More was taken from me than I had, I couldn't process that.

I am simply defeated. I have not yet reassembled from that fact
despite my efforts.

But I am trying.

So ask not, on this holy day of zeros, what I've accomplished.
Ask not what I plan, what I hope, what I can.

Ask me if there's anything left; and I will strangle you with the bloody stumps I clawed my way out of hell with.

I will have my house, I will have my peace, and I will quit this world as I've intended. Just not right now.

That won't even be 2015. That won't even be 30.
But there's something... frighteningly heartbreaking about not having your thirtieth birthday.
Something I thought I was above, beyond, and over, but the truth is it hurts.

I'm a walking raw, exposed nerve rebuilding scabs, and spikes around that wound, and I manage to feel -that- of all things.

That's what I manage to feel?
Like some sniveling second child on his sibling's birthday?
Only... it's my birthday.
And it's all about me.
Where would you even be, without me?
















I want my day. I want it to be special, and I want to remember it fondly surrounded by friends and family. I want something that will briefly distract me from the gray purgatory of theft, pain, and delay my life has become.

I won't have it. That's the simple fact of the matter.

I guess that's my fault.
I mean, it has to be, right?

This week is going to be a strange cocktail of emboldened, stoic, bitter determination and basic hurt feelings.