198 Shakespeare Street, S.F.

January 1997

So I made it to 1997. Just like I didn’t want to do. So much for a symmetrical tombstone bearing the dates 1969-1996.

Do I regret not having killed myself before the year was through? Now, nothing has changed except...I don’t particularly feel like dying. I feel stuck in the misery of existence.

***********************************

I was in Taiwan for a week and a half. I went to visit Audrey and it was to my surprise and disappointment that she was not only unwilling to make time for me, but she didn’t even spend the free time she did have with me. I wouldn’t have gone there to inconvenience her brother and father, I went for her.

So it was a blow off, and I thought that was certainly the end of our acquaintance. I wasn’t going to let it show while I was there, but that would be it after I left. There was nothing more between us. But it turns out there was something between us and the reason for her avoiding me was acceptable.

Why do we meet the people we meet? Why are the people who enter our lives in our lives? In how many lifetimes have I met Audrey and in how many different relationships? How many types of relationships could we have been in to have gotten to where we are and become who we are now? What promises have we made to meet each other again and again? Maybe we’ve only met once before and have been searching for each other for god knows how long. Maybe our cycle of re-births are closer and we find each other every few lifetimes, maybe every lifetime. Attraction, gravity, extending to karma, pulling one another along with the other.

In this lifetime, we’re cousins, and for some reason, that is perfect. As cousins, we’re family, we always have that connection and can’t get away from it, but we also have distance, we can’t get too close. Maybe that dynamic is necessary because of something that happened in a previous lifetime. Maybe we need to heal something.

I thought it was Amina, she was central to this formulation. But what do I have with Amina now? Nothing. What do I want with her in any future lifetime? Nothing. Little. Nothing. Amina is nothing in the big picture.

***********************************

Amina. I came across some pictures of her that I still have. I’m glad that I didn’t throw away every picture I have of her. Every time I come across her image, I’m struck. Something hits me, something stops. Who is this in this image that I loved so dearly? That’s the effect she still has on me; that’s what she meant to me.

I stare long and hard at the image, taking in her face, her hair, her eyes; this woman, that moment. It was real, that moment existed and it was frozen in time by a camera from a single vantage point. Time stretches before that moment and after. I keep staring at the image until it starts to become surreal and unfamiliar; the way I sometimes stare into a mirror until I start becoming unfamiliar.

Certainly she has changed, certainly she is no longer the same person I loved. I don’t even know what I loved anymore. So. I love an illusion. My love is something that got frozen in time like a photograph. It is something that no longer exists, is no longer real. What I love now has nothing to do with the physical reality of Amina that exists somewhere now. What I love is something in myself which preserves the memory of her that I loved. But it is not currently real. I don’t love something that is real. I love something that is no longer real except in myself. What I love about Amina now only has to do with myself.

So I can let go of Amina now, can’t I? Even if I meet her again, it would be different, she would be a different person. I wouldn’t react in the same way as I reacted when we were at Oberlin. I could meet her now as a stranger and not have lingering memories interfere with what is before my eyes. The Amina I loved is gone from reality and only exists in my heart; whatever it and she was, I’ve internalized. She won’t last beyond this lifetime. When I die, she and everything she was before to me will be gone.

I have to teach my heart to let go of Amina. But I’m always wondering whether she will enter my life again somehow.

***********************************

Do I have promises with people to meet in subsequent lifetimes? To look for one another? If I do, do I have the right to unilaterally rescind them? If promises were made, they must have been based on something strong, something that transcends anything we might do in a single lifetime.

***********************************

I have this memory to haunt me. The 70's is an odd decade to reminisce about when they were your formative years, but maybe any decade is.

I remember the family had a brown Dodge. I remember it in Winter more vividly. I remember Winters more vividly in general, maybe because I was born in the Winter. Cold, transient, but with something to look forward to.

I remember driving out on Rte. 4, the entire family, brothers and me as children, still in need of decisions made for us, in the back seat, me in the middle being the youngest. We would be going out to dinner.

Our parents had found a restaurant with a Western motif in Garden State Plaza, before they covered it. They weren’t too much into experimenting. Once they found a place or had it recommended to them by some friend, they would patronize it. They’re still like that, and I do that now out of instinct, though I do try to resist it. I remember the name of the restaurant being, “Bonanza”. The price was right and the food was good as I recall. I don’t remember how often we went, but we went repeatedly, and when they came home or called ahead from the office and announced we were going to “Bonanza”, we knew precisely what to expect.

What did we look like to the casual observer? Family of five; young couple, three young boys. I remember there was often a line, sometimes short, sometimes long. I remember taking trays and silverware and telling our mother what we wanted, which for what must have been years was the same thing. We’d slide the trays along past desserts, soup, and whatever else, until getting to the service area, hot off the grill, and to the cashier. Parents paid; I don’t remember once paying attention to the price. Then we’d go look for seats for the five of us. What did we look like this memory?

So now, in some food joint, maybe I see a family, parents with children, maybe just parent and child. I imagine I’m watching a memory in creation. Where will they be in 20 years? Will this scene be remembered by either of them? Will that father recognize or admit what he’s done? Will he know what he has done to her, what she has gone through? What he could have prevented if he’d been more of a father or continued to be a father as she grew up? 20 years from now.

What is it like to forgive someone who doesn’t even know he or she has done something wrong, someone who has been the source of...such things that parents can be a source of?

All they have on their behalf is a memory like a dream. A memory of a family scene, of detached tenderness and cloudy kindnesses, of sacrifices parents make. A memory with which I can compare them against how they are now. Same person, the sameness manifested only by a continuity of physical matter.

From then to now, from there to here, I’ve grown older than they have and in ways, I dare say that I am older. But then I must always have been older.

When was the last time they received a gift from their children? My brothers must have bought them stuff through the years. I never did. In 1980, returning from our first trip to Taiwan, we bought them a lot of stuff. They told us that we didn’t have to buy them gifts, save the money. They always told us that. On birthdays, mother’s day, father’s day, Christmas. So I never bought them anything since.

Would it hurt now, the next time I go to New Jersey, to bring a little something, nicely wrapped for each of them?

***********************************

Normative matrixes. We are formed and informed only by our knowledge. Our knowledge is the extent and the limit to which reality exists. Our knowledge is the extent of our realities. A table isn’t hard because of the condensed matter that reality tells us it is, giving it density making it hard. A table is hard because that is the extent and end of our knowledge concerning it. It is an overriding belief and knowledge that pervades our existence from the moment we’re born. If it were possible to override that knowledge, to have a requisite doubt to question that knowledge, then a table might no longer be hard. My hand could go right through it, or it could be soft, or liquid.

It’s all Illusions. All normative matrixes, realities, are illusions except the normative matrix that recognizes and transcends the illusions. Then it wouldn’t be normative anymore. It wouldn’t be a matrix.

I can’t talk to people anymore. I can’t carry conversations anymore without getting bored. All my thoughts, the culmination of my experience and knowledge, has made my normative matrix, my reality, too different from other people. People make assumptions because of their normative way of perceiving the world. They make assumptions that I don’t make about my world, and it’s hard to talk to them because we’re not even starting with the same background experience and information.

Different normative realities. How many people can’t carry a conversation; who are anti-social? How many people are in mental hospitals because of their inability to accept and adjust to society and the normative matrix that the majority generally share?

I bought a book of suicide notes and the person commentating on the notes makes these very specific assumptions about what is the norm. It bugs me how he’ll comment on something, but how does he know what they know or don’t know or think or don’t think. The assumptions get tedious after a while. What arrogance to state that the writers of certain notes are not aware of the permanency and finality of death. What arrogance to state that death is permanent and final.

Most people live on this planet to live on this plane; to do stuff which entails living on this planet. I’m not here to live on this planet. I’m alive, but my purpose isn’t to do the things that entail “living a life”. That itself is a normative matrix. I’m not sure why I’m here. I’m just window shopping. I’m just an observer. When I’ve done what I’ve come here to do, I’ll go. If I’m still here, that means I haven’t done it yet.

I’m not living on this planet the way other people are living on it.

Oh my god. It just struck me that I’ve never held a job before because that is the way I want it to be. It has less to do with the ‘rents themselves. It probably has more to do with why I have the parents I have. The reason why I’ve never held a job may be because I do not want to occupy myself with some mundane occupation just to live from day to day.

My life is perfect the way it is. If I had a job, if I was earning my own money, I’d be completely different. I wouldn’t have this tension, this anger, this misery, this insecurity, all the things that identify this particular me that I’m attached to. If things were different, other things would identify me, but it wouldn’t be me. Maybe a different me, but that’s not me.

That’s so funny. The idea that my parents are perfect, and have been all along, is funny. It’s perfect that this realization comes as it is getting easier to tolerate them, to let go of everything that happened in the past. Last summer it happened that I felt free from their influence, no longer threatened. It just felt right to let it go and be civil towards them. I really should be grateful to them. Now I have a much better understanding why.

***********************************

So I talk to the ‘rents and there is communication, there is subject matter, there is dialogue. Whereas before I contributed nothing and made them struggle for any piece of information. Many uncomfortable silences. How do I feel about it now?

Something else in me is backlashing against this newfound familial harmony. Once the source of the problem is identified and neutralized, then there is nothing to blame the problem on. Then it becomes necessary to deal with the actual problem itself. The source is gone, the blame is gone, the problem still exists. The problem I have with existence. I still have to deal with this ocean around me. What would I be like if I wasn’t like this?

Someday I’m going to leave on my own terms. Sometimes I feel a touch of regret when I realize the ‘rents will be clueless as to why. It’s a little sad, but they have so much to learn. I think my regret partly comes from what I don’t know about them. I don’t know how hard their lives have been, I don’t know what impact my actions will have on them.

I was leafing through a book of photographs and there was a picture of a daughter at her mother’s funeral and she was in such grief. That is so out of my experience, I just don’t understand why death should evoke such a strong reaction of grief. I have so much to learn, too. Hopefully not.

I don’t know. This gets complicated. My reaction to death is pretty accepting, but what if I had married Amina and then she died. Then I can start to imagine such grief. Where would I plant her garden? So what happened between Amina and me was perfect, too?

198 Shakespeare St., S.F.

December 1996

There is nothing keeping me alive. There hasn’t been anything keeping me alive for two weeks. I’m still alive. I feel that I’ve entered a new period in my life where there is nothing to keep me alive, I can die at any time, but I won’t.

Opportunities have been many, I just haven’t taken any of them and I’m not sure why. I’m afraid that I may have chickened out, which is the last reason I thought would prevent me. I know I still can. I just have to figure out why not.

Maybe I should start accepting myself as an ordinary human being. What happened was that I reached a point of desperation, beyond which was the point of no return. Instead of plowing right through like I thought I would, I grabbed onto something - desperate lunge for the dead branch to keep me falling off the cliff. I started looking at the bright side of life, thinking that there might be something to live for, thinking that there is a way for me to make it through if I just tried.

How pathetic.

So.

There is no reason why I should be alive now and there is no reason keeping me alive. Yet I’m still here.

Why?

It looks like my problems and my life weren’t as simple as I had thought. It isn’t so easy to die after all. But I still can’t commit to living. It’s still in my mind that I can do it today, tomorrow, any time in the near future. But something is stopping me. I don’t know what. There is much more surging under the surface than I had ever imagined. What’s going on in this little mind of mine?

***********************************

I’ve started to be nice to the ‘rents. I’ve stopped harboring negative feelings towards everyone I encounter on the street. A long time ago Diem told me I was arrogant. Only now have I been able to accept that and begin dealing with that. I don’t like the idea of being arrogant and I don’t want to be. I guess I can’t deny that I’ve always been pretty condescending. It’s only a natural step to admit that I’m arrogant. How to deal with that?

I don’t even know where to begin to figure out what’s wrong with me. I don’t know how to reach out. I don’t know how to accept help. I don’t know how to be vulnerable without having a complete breakdown. No one has ever been responsive to my problems, not even professionals. Look what happened then - got tossed into mental institutions. Psychiatrists patted themselves on the back for coming up with some diagnosis or explanation but didn’t do anything to treat it.

It has gotten harder and harder to reach out and speak out. I couldn’t tell my feelings to another person anymore. It has become second nature to take my feelings and quickly bury them under the surface. Anything I want to express about myself I do it with a blade.

I want to smash things, destroy my room, hurt myself, let go, cry, scream, drink myself stupid, throw shit out the window, but then I always step back into this world, this reality, with composure, with frankness, arrogance.

I can still enjoy things, there are things that still make me feel good, but do they outweigh the problems I’m having with existing, of simply being here?

Earlier this month, for the first time in a long while, I actually felt the air against my skin, not even wind, and appreciated it. It felt good. Life as a good thing. Being alive is a good thing, but it’s not so good when my insides have rotted through to nothingness.

I felt the air as I breathed it in and it felt good. It felt life; alive. And still I want to stop doing it. I’ve had asthma, I know what it’s like to not be able to breathe. I’m not taking it for granted.

***********************************

I am guided by God, totally open to definition, in whatever I choose to do. That’s not arrogance, I think it’s just fact. God’s presence makes itself apparent every once in a while. A sign is sent.

I was typing what could have easily been my last entry. I had a flash of inspiration and I was writing the whole truth about my existence, my understanding of myself and my role in the world around me. It became so obvious, and what I was writing was exactly how I wanted to express it.

Then Microsoft Word suddenly quit. It didn’t even try saving something like it usually does. It usually fails to save anything when it crashes, but at least there is something in the trash to indicate it tried to save something. This time, nothing.

And usually everything cuts out and the computer jams and I have to restart it. This time, it was just Word - I got a message box saying the program had unexpectedly quit. I clicked OK and cleared the desktop, but it was still active. Except for remnants of the dead Word screen, it was like the computer wasn’t even registering that the program had been running at all. I booted up Word again with no problem, like nothing had happened.

No indication that what I wrote about my existence existed at all. It was like I hit it right on the nose and that information, the way I put it, was too precious for me to keep. Yoink. There was no question about whether I should try to re-write it - it would be impossible. The best I can do now is re-visit the ideas doing my best not to butcher them.

Basically, I don’t know anything about myself anymore. I don’t know who I am or what comprises my identity. I have nothing grounding my being to which I can definitively say, “I am this”.

The world exists as the limit of our knowledge and the world exists only to the extent that we know. My world doesn’t exist because I have no idea what I am or what my knowledge is. I don’t have any knowledge that is concrete enough to say, “Yes, this is my world”. It’s like my friends and the people I meet, in and out of whose lives I pass with hardly any impact at all.

There are times when I walk down the street and no one gets out of my way, no matter how aggressively I’m walking. I’m always getting out of everyone else’s way. It’s as if I didn’t exist at all, and there are times I want to turn around and shout, “What?! I don’t exist?!” It’s crazy.

Then part of me is thinking, no, maybe I don’t exist. Not to them. Maybe I’m not there and they really don’t see me. It’s as if I’m a ghost or practicing to be one of my own conceptualized angels. Theoretically, if I didn’t get out of the way, they should be able to pass right through me, but that would never happen because of the limitations of my belief and knowledge. At the last split second, right at the contact point, at the point when they should pass right through me, I have a doubt, and with that one bit of doubt comes down a torrent of my firm belief in my physical existence here on earth and that gives me substance. The person will bump into me accidentally and he or she will say “sorry”.

Conversely, at the last split second, right at the contact point, I do not have the requisite doubt about my physical existence to experience the truth of my existence. I always say I doubt my physical existence, but at that moment of contact, the test, I don’t have the requisite doubt to pass through.

I’m stuck between those doubts. Because I doubt my existence being able to exceed my knowledge, my existence has substance in this world and I’m confined by it. But because I don’t have the requisite doubt to stop knowing the world as I see and feel it, I can’t escape the suggestion of my physical existence into which I’m confined. I’m in that twilight region between the daylight, where light illuminates the physical world and we don’t doubt what we see, and the nighttime where we can’t see what is there because it’s not illuminated. I can see the world, but I’m not really there, but I’m too much there to be in pure nighttime.

I have no identity in either daylight or nighttime. I don’t know what I am or where I stand in either. I have no knowledge of myself to project onto the world to give it or me substance. I don’t exist to people because of me, and they don’t exist to me because of me.

Reality depends on our subjective knowledge. Without that knowledge, there is no existence. There is more to existence than this three dimensional physical reality. There is a lot more going on. How do I know? Because this, what we’re living, is so insubstantial, it is nothing, we are just Plato’s shadows. If this is all there is, I’d really might as well be dead. So another paradox, either I don’t exist or else I may as well be dead. I’d rather be alive and not exist, than be not real and just as well be dead.

***********************************

If someone came up to me with a gun and told me to give up my wallet or else he or she was going to shoot me, I would say, “why should I do you a favor and give you my wallet? Shoot me and take it yourself”. That’s a reflection of my existence. If there was anything in this world onto which I could find a projection of myself, I might feel some concern when faced with someone about to blow my head off. I don’t exist enough to have any considerable concern about my forced demise. I don’t exist because I don’t care.

I have no idea what is going on in my mind. I’m not honest with myself. This is what my rumination started with, the one that disappeared. Nobody knows who I am because I haven’t painted an accurate picture of myself to anybody, and I don’t know who I am because I haven’t painted an accurate picture of myself to me, either. I don’t know what I feel, I don’t know what’s going on in my head. I obviously can’t know what is real. All I know is that I have nothing in this world to ground myself or my existence.

There is nothing in the world that I can look at and identify some part of me. People can look at their friends and say, yes, this person or these people are a part of my existence; they are a part of affirming who I am. Families are classic examples; families that don’t get along, but stick to each other because they can’t do without each other.

Maybe that was what was behind that assignment in Professor Morris’s seminar in 1992, when he asked us to bring in an object that made us feel close to God. Stupid assignment, I thought. I didn’t bring anything in. I couldn’t bring myself to distill my relationship with God into some object. So I just mentioned a tree outside Spanish House that I passed every day, frequently wondering to myself what my relationship to that tree was. Tree. Me. Why?

There is no object on earth in which I feel some sort of my identity, something to affirm my existence, some relationship to God, the Real, the omnipresent and omniscient, God who is everything and who cannot not be anything. Nothing, as if I didn’t exist. I don’t exist and never will. If I was supposed to, I would already. That’s good enough proof for me. I have to live my life for right now, not for future possibilities. If someone protested and told me that I exist to them, that just means that they exist, not me.

***********************************

Is reincarnation linear through time, one lifetime succeeding another after another? You live a lifetime and you die and you get re-born in the chronological future - a few days later, a few months later, a few years later? Once I think about it, it doesn’t make sense anymore; why should linear time be universal law? I think any idea that reincarnation is linear through time is only a projection of our knowledge of our own linear lives and linear experience onto something much larger.

So if reincarnation isn’t linear through time, one can be re-born into the relative past or future. Hm, but this is problematic. If one is born into the relative past, is the future already written or can it be changed? Being born into the relative future doesn’t pose that big of a problem, but being born into the relative past is sticky because theoretically the “future” has already been done. Actually being born into the relative future can also be problematic because any point in the future is already history to some other point in the future.

OK, conundrum; rewind.

Why can’t the future, i.e. a relative history, be changed once a person is re-born into the chronological past? Actually, that could help explain the transmission of knowledge and human development. Isn’t it possible that the automobile was developed in this timeline because someone from the future with the technical knowledge to develop the components of the automobile was re-born into this timeline? In other timelines, perhaps the automobile wasn’t developed, perhaps something else was.

It’s all possible. Isn’t there some theory in physics that states all timelines that could possibly occur actually do occur. If so, then it works that any timeline can be affected by the knowledge/karmic transfer of someone from the future being re-born into the past. Likewise, someone from the past can be re-born into the future. Even more tricky, someone from the past from a different timeline can be re-born into the future into any timeline. That’s too tricky for me, I don’t even want to go there. The idea of being re-born into a world with a history vastly different from what I know is beyond my conception.

Rewind again, avoid the conundrum.

Perhaps Martin Luther King, Jr. was a ‘past’ re-incarnation of someone from the future, someone who already lived a different ‘history’ in which the Civil Rights Movement either didn’t happen at all or happened in a vastly different way. It could have been anybody at any time, but in this particular timeline, Martin Luther King, Jr. was born with seeds from his experience in some other future, completely unbeknownst to him, that affected what he did in this lifetime.

This history of the Civil Rights Movement, or any historical event for that matter, is not written in stone. Furthermore, the outcome of the Civil Rights Movement isn’t necessarily satisfactory. It did a lot, but it never achieved the equality it strove for. So it’s possible for someone from this timeline, at any point in the future, to be re-born into that time period and affect things differently. In some timeline, America got it right.

I’ve thought this before that it is possible to be re-born into the past, but not in a way as to be able to change history. I thought the major events of history are pretty much fixed, and any reincarnation into the past is restricted by those historical frameworks. You can be re-born into the Holocaust, perhaps as punishment in some level of hell, but you can’t do anything that changes history. I don’t think so. I think history can be changed by an individual’s reincarnation into the relative past.

Considering how many people there are, this theory is mind-boggling to the point of irrelevance. But it’s possible. And possibly relevant if you don’t look at it in the big picture.

How about a twist: say I’m driving along and there are two possible routes I can take to where I want to go. I arbitrarily choose one for whatever reason and I get into an accident and I’m killed. If I had taken the other route, I would have avoided the accident and would have survived. In an alternative reality, another branch of reality, I did take that route and continued to live a long productive life.

So when I died in the car crash, that ‘me’ got re-born somewhere. If reincarnation can cross alternate realities, can I be re-born into the timeline in which the other ‘me’ survived? It’s another conundrum, because considering the multiplicity of alternative realities in which I could have and therefore did die, is it possible for all of those ‘me’s to be re-born in the same timeline as different people, but who have a bizarre affinity for each other? Assuming they even meet. What a mess!

Forget it. It’s all useless theory. It doesn’t mean a thing.

198 Shakespeare St., San Francisco

September 1996

So this is what it feels like knowing that I will never fall in love again. Attraction is just a game. Falling in love is not in my range of emotions anymore. It feels empty. Numb. Interesting. Love is so important.

Turns out that Susan was interested in me way back last Winter. She didn’t think the feeling was reciprocated and it never went anywhere. I actually did have a crush on her. All for the better; we weren’t exactly compatible. I never quite knew where she was coming from. Apparently neither of us were any good at showing our feelings or letting them be known.

I don’t think I can love anymore. Even hearing about Susan, it was just a fanciful thing. A tickling. There’s no way that I could have ever really fallen in love with Susan. We are too different. Just as I could never have fallen in love with Ana Claire.

Maybe I do know what love is. It’s not anything about a person. I still love Amina two and a half years after the fact and our last contact, and considering what happened between us, that’s an incredible statement. I can’t make a list of things about a person that would make me fall in love with her. Anything I can place on a list, I’ve already found and have been disappointed or betrayed by already. There are things I could like about a person, things that would attract me, interest me, but nothing that would necessarily make me fall in love with that person.

Love just happens. When it’s there, you know it. I just know I won’t ever love anyone again. I’m too damaged in myself, much too uncomfortable with who I am to trust myself or like myself being with someone else.

***********************************

Yukiko moved in at the beginning of the month. We get along alright even though she’s kind of conservative and hangs out with mostly white people. She’s one of those Asians.

If we didn’t have to live with each other, we wouldn’t even associate. She’s a lot better to live with than Jeff, who owns this house. He’s also conservative, but in addition he’s also a typical male. He's a male stereotype. He also has a good side, generous, but he's definitely not the type I would hang out with. Yukiko is clean, considerate, open and amiable. Personal feelings aside, she’s a good housemate.

***********************************

I’ve stopped cutting since I’ve moved back to San Francisco. I also haven’t had the drive to set any dates. Since August. The desire to set a date just hasn’t crossed my mind. As part of my personality, however, it’s always there.

Things have been changing. I feel that I have to kill myself, it’s part of my destiny and responsibility. It is what I’m supposed to do, not what I’m supposed to avoid. It’s not a test, but what is supposed to happen.

Sometimes I feel that suicide is not so attractive an option, but in those times I feel even more strongly that it is something I have to do. Those are the times, strangely enough, that I’m most certain that I should kill myself; when I really feel that I don’t want to. Suicide is not a desire that I should succumb to, but an end that I have to learn to accept.

I cannot die in peace. My soul is too tormented for that. I don’t want to. I think that when I die, I’ll spend some amount of time as a ghost of who I am now. Released, with no judgments. But present, damned, chained. But I think I will be reborn. I think I’ve been “good” enough and true enough to myself that I won’t be reborn in a worse position. But I hurt too much and I’m too attached to that hurt that I can’t advance. I have to settle and understand these issues before that happens. I can’t even rest and take a break from the cycle.

Maybe my role as a ghost will be to teach my parents something. They are the ones I’m to “haunt”. I think that my soul will only start to heal once I’ve expanded their minds beyond their narrow conception of life. If I can change them in some way, set them on some sort of path of realization, instead of the smug complacency in the comfort of their materialism, then I can go forward. The longer I live, the less time I’ll have to accomplish it. I need to heal. I’m a long ways from becoming what I want to become.

I want to kill myself for that reason. Because it is my destiny and it may put me in a position where I can do something that would give my life some meaning. Even though it is very unattractive that I care about my parents enough that I’m trying to set them on the right path.

247 19th Ave., #2, San Francisco

School starts in two months. I might as well stop looking for a job. Life frozen static. My frustration with my life and living isn't my state of mind, it isn't my whole life. It's just the getting from day to day, the breathing, the eating, the surviving.

My life as a whole is still what it always has been and I'm fine with that. I like having nothing to live for and not minding dying at any point. That's how I want to live my life, not looking for far off goals with desire as my motivation. That doesn't make much sense. If that's so, then what's the problem with getting from day to day?



Frances visited last week. We had a pretty good time. We went to St. Helena and got drunk, climbed rocks and cliffs along the coast, went up into the Marin Headlands. There was no real spark of friendship though, she felt only like a guest. Just a guest.

I've become so desensitized towards people and friends. With Frances there is still fallout from the frustration of her past two incredibly unhealthy relationships. Truth to tell, it would have made no difference if she didn't visit or hadn't gotten back in touch with me in the first place. It's good that she did and I'm glad for it, but it wouldn't have been for the worse if she hadn't.

Tria is a little different. I've been liking our friendship. I might even trust her. She's a lot of fun to be with and has kept my mind off how my life is going nowhere. I noticed while Frances was here that the only reason why I still have any sense of humor left is because of Tria.

Tria is great, but it is only a friendship. I would like to start going out with someone again. Frances and I talked about factors that would contribute to the ideal life or living. For me, finding that one special person is the most important thing. Not much else would make life worth living than finding that person that makes me feel comfortable in my skin.

I believe that Amina and I have met before in previous lifetimes. I think we go back a long way and every once in a while, in terms of lifetimes, our circumstances allow us to find each other. We have met each other in previous lifetimes in perhaps many different relationships. Maybe we've been lovers before, maybe parent-child, maybe siblings, maybe lifelong friends, maybe sworn enemies, maybe student-teacher, maybe rapist-victim, maybe Romeo and Juliet, maybe in some lifetimes we've left each other in the deepest of love, maybe in some our relationship was never resolved.

What happened to us in this lifetime may be so trivial. Our forms in Amina and Koji may seem so all-important, but we are just an episode. We knew each other for the whole of three years, how many years had passed before we met, how many more will pass now without each other. This is just one lifetime that failed. Many others we had been happy together, or happy in our separation with a love so strong. Maybe unhappy together or apart. This is just one lifetime.

It's not that important. We will live again and we will be brought together again. The child grew in the mother only to be born dead. Things look so promising only to be cut down unexpectedly. Our civilization grew only to be snuffed out by nuclear war. But other planets, other star systems, other dimensions, life and imagination goes on because that is the stuff of God.

I am here in this lifetime to learn to not be deceived or disturbed by appearances, they are only illusions. To be unaffected and unsaddened by them, they are only facts. The real life is in the learning and the growing. Amina is only an appearance of a soul that I know infinitely well. What she did is nothing. It was done by a woman I know as Amina. And that woman is just a single manifestation of a soul that is so much larger than either of us can ever imagine. I must cut through the appearance of Amina and see her true self so that I may recognize it in the future. But in the future, she will be the one who looks for me and teaches me how to forgive.

But maybe this isn't an end, just a beginning. That heart of Amina came and went and may never be a part of my life again. But maybe she opened something up for someone else to come in and teach me; someone I haven't recognized yet. Maybe Amina has absolutely nothing to do with anything.