The Man Who Wasn't There

 "Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn't there!

He wasn't there again today,

Oh how I wish he'd go away"

Excerpted from a poem titled Antigonish, by William Hughes Mearns in 1899.

I stumbled upon this poem in Michael J. Fox's book - No Time Like The Future - An Optimist Considers Mortality. Fucking awesome book - read it - and put your obstacles in perspective.

MJF quoted it to underscore a particular aspect of Parkinson's. I get something entirely different from it. On top of that, the poem was supposedly written about a ghost roaming the stairs of a haunted house in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada. So there you go.

That's the beauty of poetry - it means whatever your heart tells you it means.

The man who wasn't there is me. I project a version of me that is almost entirely a creation - as a defense mechanism. What you see and what I feel are two totally different things. What I feel is real; the rest is a fucking joke.

"He wasn't there again today, oh, how I wish he'd go away."

This fucking poseur isn't there every fucking day of my life; every minute, every second. He will not leave me alone. But I am sneakily, craftily, working on making him go away this year.

I am making progress. I won't get into specific details because that will trivialize the progress. Suffice it to say that, on Friday night, I somehow remained relatively calm walking into the face of the thing I hate the most about my job. And I was more "me" than usual. Which proved entertaining to people I had to deal with.

This does not mean I have changed my opinion of this menial fucking job. I haven't. I still hate it with every fiber of my being, and eventually I will free myself of its suffocating clutch. But I didn't let it kill me on Friday night. We established a sort of detente between us; fewer bodies ended up in the ditch.

"Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there! He wasn't there again today, oh how I wish he'd go away."

Motherfucker haunts me in my recliner, at work, at the store, in my car, in my sleep. The irony is that I gave birth to this monster - now I want to kill him. As long as he persists, I will never be alone, and alone is a state of being I covet. 

All I can tell you is that I am working on it. Somehow, somewhere in the dark, my thinking has shifted. I can feel it. I feel results. Beating back the assault. You'll have to take my word for it, for what "my word" is worth.

As long as he persists, I will never be me.

And "me" is someone I'd like you to meet.