The Island pt. 2

“Chad! Yo, wake up!”

I had found myself asleep on the beach--a practice that I had almost made into a ritual over the course of the last three months. The beach was special in that regard--it made being homeless seem easy. More than once I had thought of just living on Miami Beach, begging tourists for beers, fighting seagulls for pieces of bread, and just sleeping on the sand and bathing in the warm night water. Unfortunately I found myself better than such actions. One of the truest things I had ever read in a college textbook was the fact that men -from a very early age- already have an established sense of self worth that cannot be effected by the actions of others. We have a very strong sense of where we are on the food chain, we can doubt if we’re right…but we’ll either settle for less or be happy with more. A man’s required amount of respect is very apparent from the day he finally decides to stop sucking on his mother’s breast.

I fumbled over and stared at my friend, squinting my eyes in the state of drunkenness mother nature gives to you as soon as you wake up. The eerie feeling of knowing exactly where you are but having absolutely no sense of where your mind is at…

“What man?”

“The waves bro! They’re coming in super strong, let’s hit the water! It’s hot as fucking balls right now.”

I blamed Muse on the fact that moments later I was jumping into waves and getting pushed around by the ocean like the 125lb mound of flesh I was. The idea that when I was with my friends I was Invincible was directly perpetrated by them. The fact that we could fight one another, run up and down for hours getting beaten up by the very forces of nature, and eat fattening foods and still say I was fine. It was directly their fault.

It’s sad to say, but almost every bad decision you will ever make in your life is enabled by your friends.

You don’t think it, there is a joy with believing that every decision you make is your own. That you’re a leader and everyone surrounding you is a follower. Being pushed around the waves, I couldn’t help but realize how false that was. The waves were dictating my movements, but we were clearly in different classes. Isolating yourself from your own comrades is a very real practice as we’re all inclined to think that we’re either lower or of a higher class than the people we hang with. We compare every aspect of our being to the people we consider allies and we pick things we’re better at than them to hold on to. The people on the beach were better looking than me, they were making more money than me, and they were overall happier than me -- but I was smarter than them, so upon my own little island I sat content.

I thought as I continued to chase waves under the illusion of friendship that I was always isolating myself from them in some ways.

When I laughed at their jokes but really thought of my own troubles; When I disvalued their own relationships and hyped up my own shallow nonexistent ones; When I belittled their life experience and marginalized their sadness in comparison to my own. A personal obsession with being right, a sad fact was that even though we had taken this trip to achieve some sort of communal enlightenment…I was being selfish.

The truth was that examining my own island on my own was far more important than being on an island with four other just as confused men.

I rose from the waves, breathing heavily. My friends continued chasing after the crashing torrents with the utmost fervor, but I guided myself to the beach and plopped myself down on the sandy towel I had brought with me. I cupped my face with my hands and then turned my gaze to the sea…

Alone on the beach, Soldiers Key never felt so small.

The Island pt. 1

Far away.

That was the whole point of this trip, to get far away from everything that was holding us back. To get away from the streets that had plagued our vision for the last ten years, to get away from the women who had plagued our beds and left our hearts in ruin over the course of our lives, to get away from the problems we couldn’t name and the solutions we couldn’t find. It was a stupid plan, get on a boat and head right on to a private Key five miles out. Chase Mahi-Mahi and dreams for no reason other than the fact that we needed an experience of substance to supplement our lives that took haven in caves of monotony.

I was running away, running far away.

What issues was I trying to escape? Was I mad like the countless other boys pretending to be men? Mad that I had one parent who didn’t know how to raise his son and another who wanted nothing to do with raising her son? That I had been chased down a dark hole filled with heart ache and mistrust, that I had been nurtured and breast fed utilizing lies and deception? Your parents are your models for God, they’re both loving and vengeful. We spend our lives trying our best to please them and then revering them when they get old but it becomes extremely hard when you’re exposed to their all too human qualities. When your mother is a manic-depressive compulsive liar who is more content to run away than to face her problems. When your father is a headstrong blue collar man who is raising and begging three children for approval whilst struggling with the fact that his father had never given him anything resembling it.

I hadn’t been taught much by anyone in life, but I had picked up on enough bad habits to make a nun blush.

“Chad! We’re not that far from Soldier’s Key, right?”

Soldiers Key.

One of my earliest memories of this tiny little island five miles away from Key Biscayne is catching Barricuda with my brother. I never understood why people were scared of ‘Cuda and that’s more of a fault of my own twisted life experience than anything. It was an invicibility that could only be bred in childhood, when me and my brother spent an entire day baiting and making the feared reef predator our collective bitch. It caused me to laugh when I would watch Animal Planet and see people who had limbs bitten off by the fish, they were the fools. They had been chased down and maimed by a creature an eight year old boy was capable of neutralizing.

“Yeah, we’re almost there man, ‘bout three miles out.”

My friends were running for different reasons…

Escaping failure was very different than being confronted with success. One of us was escaping our own mistakes, the other was escaping his own future, the other was escaping heart break.

“I need to get fucking laid right now man, for real man, I know it sounds fucked up…but a good piece of pussy? It’ll set things straight man.”

That was a lesson I had to learn.

Because, I wasn’t chasing pussy, I had spent the entirety of my romantic life looking for a good woman. She didn’t exist. There are some women who can make you feel exceptionally amazing with their bodies and souls, but these are the same type of women who will take pleasure in ripping out your heart. Men, for all of our false bravado and degeneration are the loyal ones, the ones that generally feel love. A man is skilled at providing, physicality, and introspection -as you’ll never find a woman who knows more about herself than a man does about himself-. Women were skilled in lies, deception, and damnation.

It’s strange that the prescribed teenage solution to having a problem with women is to simply find more women.

The island came up on the horizon…

Whether what we were trying to escape could be escaped, whether our sadness could be propelled away in only a few hushed breaths from the sea breeze, whether our sins could really be washed away on the ocean shores--didn’t matter.

As we had already traveled five miles out looking for redemption and answers, there was too much time invested in enlightenment to turn back now.