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.