the edge

I’ve been to the edge several times, the first was right around my twentieth birthday.
I was shattered—everything that I had ever believed in or thought was true had turned out to be a lie.
My life was a lie. Life was a lie. No God, no truth, no reason, no hope.
Taking any action was out of the question. It would have meant that it did matter to me. And nothing mattered to me at that place and time.
So I did nothing for awhile, hoping to die but not wanting to do so by my own hand. I slept a lot, but sleep was fitful at best. I barely ate and only did when I was beyond hungry. I pulled a whole baked chicken out of the trash one night at the boarding house I was staying at—I’m not at all sure why someone had thrown it away, but I could smell it and I dug through the trash and stood and ate it there in the dimly lit basement kitchen.
I think was living on ramen, Faygo and Hostess snacks for a week or so, until I noticed a sign in the window at BB’s saying they were hiring dishwashers. I had been washing dishes at the dorm before they kicked me out and fired me at the same time. I was dirty and felt like a loser, I could barely look anyone in the eye, so was surprised when BT hired me for the job on the spot. Maybe he felt sorry for me, maybe I was just sober enough, either way it meant a free meal at least once a day.
A strange thing happened when I starting working at BB’s—I stopped talking, or never really started. I didn’t have anything to say, so I said close to nothing for the first month. BB’s was populated with a mostly bohemian crowd, most of whom were a little older than me. Sarcasm was a skill that they all possessed and practiced on each other with gusto. I didn’t participate and barely acknowledged their existence—I soon became the butt of their jokes and jibes, but I still ignored them.
The biggest thing was that I felt everything was pointless—I just showed up and did the dishes because I wanted to eat. Effort of any kind was really useless, since life itself was meaningless, a series of happy accidents that somehow spit us all out into the universe. Desiring, wanting, achieving—it was all pointless, so I didn’t even try. Some of the things that went on in the kitchen were hilarious so I couldn’t help but smile or laugh, but for the most part I was stuck in my own head, closed off to the outside.
I was reading a lot of mystical Buddhist literature at the time, each new book held the possibility of answers to the big questions, offered a possible way out of my conundrum. The hallucinogenics didn’t help, however, especially when I was at work. I finally gave up on all of it, writing all of it off as “brain candy,” amusing but ultimately pointless. Like a dog chasing its tail, until it finally realizes that the tail is his own, I took the deep esoteric teachings as a kind of joke—the answer was simply, “Live!”
So I started living, a little bit at a time, but I couldn’t live for myself, so I started living for Janette Griffith. It was a cop out in a way, but I wanted what she had—good grades, a good family and a sense of purpose that was missing in my own life. I wish I hadn’t latched onto Janette—it wasn’t fair to her and wasn’t beneficial to me either. My happiness became dependent upon her, or co-dependent really. Instead of forging my own path, growing and learning, I had created a new cocoon.