The Protagonist Exposed

The house is silent now. The war climaxed and ended in this room a few hours ago. I’m awake, brooding over what happened. Lying here in my bed with a beautiful but strange woman sleeping soundly next to me, totally naked and uncovered, is a wild sensation. She is absolutely gorgeous. Brazilian bronze skin, fine long hair and amazing legs, her clothes are strewn all over my mirror-waxed hardwood floor as if they were torn from her body by gale force winds. I have a penchant for cleanliness, but some exceptions do obtain. Where things fell once we reached this room and tore into each other earlier is not important. Her breasts rise and fall with her breathing and I can’t help my arousal, one because its manifestation is a reliable early morning phenomenon and two because I have a compelling object.

I purposely didn’t get drunk last night and all I can see in my head now is how beautiful her smile was and the whiteness of her teeth. She was not as reserved about drinking and I had paid the tab without a second thought once I realized where things were going. Ravaged by sex and the lingering effects of alcohol, she has slept for hours now while I have been unable to. Last night was a good night. Hell, honestly, it was a damn great night. God knows I needed it. Things are so hectic right now. If I hadn’t been able to blow off some steam, I don’t know what could’ve happened. Why? It’s a long story.

I have spent the last few years of my life intensely focusing on developing myself. I really had no other choice. Once you enter the world of work to make a financial living, your personal growth can really come to a screeching halt. If your career happens to be poorly aligned with other parts of your life, or if it’s simply unsustainable, it can be traumatizing to have to upend your entire situation and start down a new path. Starting over may mean going back to school, starting at the ground floor on a new profession with an entry-level gig, or one of many other scenarios, none of which are very attractive. Unfortunately, I needed to find something new to do with myself and I was still not sure what I’d really like to spend the next 30 or so years doing every day. Listening to my friends and looking at their situations could sometimes make me feel a bit better about where I was because they seemed just as aimless and unaware of what made them happy sometimes as I did. I had always been convinced that my friends were all more focused and self-aware than me. When I was in college, I was always amazed at everyone’s interest in the things they studied. There were the people who were certain that they had always wanted to become doctors. Others wanted to be lawyers or businesspeople. How the hell did they know that in the whole wide world of things the best thing they could do to be happy was to do these particular jobs with their time and energy? I could understand how being a doctor might satisfy both one’s scientific curiosity and desire to serve others, or how being a lawyer could be both lucrative and gratifying to the ego. Sure, I would love to travel like a businessman, seeing the world on my company’s dime and earning loads of cash at the same time. Still, doing any of these jobs EVERY day felt a little like choosing between various forms of hell. There were people whose jobs were to simply hang out all day, and because cameras followed them, they not only made stupid amounts of cash, but they also became famous. How could I get one of these jobs? Well, at least with respect to working in reality television, there weren’t many of those jobs available, and I wasn’t dramatic or good at making an ass of myself, so I dismissed that and several other non-conventional occupations as possibilities for a future career. It was clear to me that the world of possible preoccupations was larger than what most people acknowledged and that the expectation that after only 18 years of experiencing life that I should know where I wanted to spend my working life was a fairly ridiculous one. I needed time to find my niche. Unfortunately, eight semesters of classes is not a long time, and from a practical standpoint, I had even less flexibility because I needed to choose a course of study within the first two semesters. Needless to say, I botched the whole thing and was lucky to find somewhere to fall after I made it out of college. The work world was what I’d thought it would be- a soul robbing, daily affront to my sensibilities. I went to work for a financial services firm and the part I still like best about my job is the frequent, company-sponsored happy hours.

So I was having a hard time. To make matters worse, I had few outlets. This was partly the reason why meeting this woman last night and having things go the way they went was like a handout from heaven. Well, not exactly, but I needed to release. Sex can be a proxy for so many other things. Maybe it’s the other way around and many other things are substitutes for sex. Either way, the sex I had with this woman was sort of my way of fucking the world back for much recent suffering. Up until last night, it seemed everything in my life was on the verge of falling apart altogether. I had alienated friends, blown through cash I really shouldn’t have spent, and my career was at a stand-still. I don’t particularly enjoy new-age self-help philosophy, but I was attracted to the notion that I might be able to change my life right now by simply changing my perspective. The thing about it that I didn’t like was that the whole business of changing my perspective had the connotation of self-manipulation. The basic expectation that one will simply choose to view the same circumstances in a different way, without any real change in the external situations that make them up, seems suspect. Shit, if that’s all I have to do, then give me a few minutes and I’m gonna be good for the rest of my whole goddamn life.

Discussing my misery with a good friend once, I was offered the advice to, “Begin with the end in mind.” He was paraphrasing a famous author’s words, but I got enough out of that to see where he was coming from. I thought it was a really good idea to have a clear destination when I got in the car to drive, but all I knew about where I was eventually going was that I wanted to be rich, have beautiful smart children, a banging wife, and lots of freedom. My time couldn’t be obligated to any one thing- that would be bondage of a different sort. Why be rich and have no time to enjoy my money, my things, or my family, or do whatever I wanted to do for that matter? These considerations seemed germane to a me that was far from where I was at that point, so I only half-assed used his advice. I couldn’t see a clear connection between what I did with my time at that point in time and reaching those goals.

My struggles aren’t abnormal or rare. The disquietude I feel in my spirit is something we all experience during times in our lives when we are searching for direction or searching for answers to how we might be happy and fulfilled in this life, and for some, in the next. I accept that maybe the choices I’ve made relative to how to best live my life haven’t always been the best choices, but I’ve really tried hard to look at myself and refine myself. I don’t have all the answers, but somehow, I think it’s all going to turn out alright. I’ve got all the tools I need, so being happy seems simply to be a function of using what I’ve already got to get what I want. Where am I going? I’m not really sure, but I think I know where I am now. I thought I wanted to be the guy I was last night but I’m beginning to think I could be wrong and that I need more. Taking a direction only to find that it was the wrong one is not new to me. It just seems like I’ve been searching for answers to what makes me happy forever and I’m tired and frustrated. Why does Greatness have to be so damn mundane, or am I just wrong about it altogether?