Departure

Departure.

                                                                                                in 17 hours i will be on my way.

i guess it could be helpful to talk blatantly about myself for a while, instead of veering off on                          poetic tangents. if you know me closely, skip the following paragraph.

                                   

                        biography: my name is nicholas adam becher. nick. i am 25 years old. my birthday is may 17^th. i graduated from affton high school in 2006 and started going to webster university in st. louis missouri the following august. aside from writing, i have always been involved with music. i started playing alto saxophone in the sixth grade and eventually switched to bari-sax. i picked up guitar in middle school sometime around the age of 13-14. slowly, i built up a dream of playing music professionally. i started a metal band, an acoustic folk band, a pop-punk band, and a few other random genres. none of this ever panned out. the reason this is important is because music is what led me to meet my future ex-fiance, as well as what fueled my decision to eventually drop out of college for a while. by 2008, i was so involved in the music scene that there was no passion left in me to go to school. i went on a hiatus around spring break 2008, which my close friends joked about regularly. spring break 2008 lasted for 3 years. in 2011 i started attending community college to finish up my general education courses. at this comm-college, i took a fiction writing workshop that ultimately is the reason i decided on declaring my major as english. sooner or later, i ended up deciding on a university where i wanted to finish out my degree. that school is hawaii pacific university. i graduate in december with my BA in English.

                                    non-poetic tangent: sometimes my eyelashes itch so badly that i                                                                                       consider pulling them all out, despite how painful                                                                                                  and ridiculous it would be.

the thing i am leaving out of this expansive block of self-involved rambling is

                                                                                                the girl.

the driving force behind my entire post-high school experience can really be boiled down to a girl. one girl that encapsulated me at some point and made it impossible to imagine a life without her. this is a warning to anyone who plans on reading this blog, especially if you are this girl: she will come up a lot, and i will be brutally honest

                                                                                                about everything.

            is that distasteful?

                                    i think it depends on the context.

see, this whole blog is open to anyone who wants to read it. and anyone who knows me personally knows who this girl is. but i have to draw a line between brutal honesty and vengeful attacks against someone i used to love. believe me when i say that there are no feelings of contempt, hatred, disgust, or spite left in me. i have had time to gather myself and what i’ve come to realize is that my mistake was letting someone have so much control over my future. my mistake was not figuring myself out before trying to build a life with somebody else. my mistake was my own. so the brutal honesty that will undoubtedly surface throughout the course of this blog will not be distasteful in the slightest.

                        the fact is, i cannot talk about my life or my future without speaking about the things that led me to where i am today, and she was an integral part of that. i’m not afraid to talk honestly about my past. and more importantly, i don’t want to dwell on the negative.

when i talk about departure, i am speaking about the inevitable distance that creates itself between our everyday selves, and our internal voice. departure from expectation. the best example i can think of: i am an english major. i am expected to write grammatically sound paragraphs. to use diction. to develop my thoughts coherently. but in complete and utter solitude, there are no expectations. i don’t want to capitalize anything, so i won’t. i don’t feel like writing in structured paragraphs, so i break them up and make them look neat. the point is, to be in solitude, to distance yourself from these norms and be truly alone inside yourself, you are completely free.

                        digressions.

                                    tangents.

                                                departures.

                                                            and eventually:

                                                                                    solitude.

            perhaps the remotest place in the universe is within the confines of our thoughts.

Solitude

Solitude

[the state of being alone. separated from other people. whether considered as a welcome freedom from disturbance, or as an unhappy loneliness. remoteness. a quality of quiet seclusion in places from which human activity is generally absent. a remote or uninhabited place.]

in two days i will be leaving to the island of oahu for four months. this blog is a chronicle of that journey. four months of solitude. at times, i think of it as an escape. an escape from the mundaneness of my old life. an escape from the repetition of my hometown. other times, i fear the unknown. i fear the loneliness.

            hawaii.

                                    you don’t know shit about hawaii.

when i moved to hawaii for school two years ago--- well let’s go back a few steps, i didn’t fucking move to hawaii for school.

            you want the short of it?

i loved a girl with all my heart. i did everything i could to be with her. her dream was to move to hawaii. my dream was to be with her.

                                   

            the short of it is: only one of these dreams came true.

and here i am, two years later and two days before i go back to the speck in the great expansive blue. by myself. alone.

                                                            in solitude

i guess the point of this whole thing – the blog i mean – is to touch base with reality at least once a day. there are a thousand clichés about what hawaii does to a person. the truth is that it is just a fucking island in the middle of a shitload of water. and whatever it does to you is really a collaboration of an exponentially expansive amount of chemicals and particles colliding and intertwining and destroying and creating and just fucking driving you to where you are and where you’ve been. this is not fate. this is not destiny. this is just what happens.

                                                            and it is a miracle.

but let’s get back to the point here. i believe that the most vivid and immaculate pieces of human history are born from moments of complete solitude. of complete isolation. because these moments are focused and exact. they are irises in the eyeballs of history. they are finite. they are miniscule. but when they are grouped together, these moments build and build until they are us. the lonely thoughts of every great mind in human history have created the books we read in school.  and all of these philosophers and musicians and philanthropists and politicians that have shaped the mind of my generation and the next, they were all, at some point… alone, living and breathing in complete, beautiful, resilient,

                                                            solitude.

 but… why?

            why reduce yourself to nothingness?

                        why reject a helping hand?

                                    why turn down a beer with a friend?

                                                why would a human being CHOOSE to be alone?

                                                            meaning.

            the truest, purest form of self-discovery will never exist without solitude.

and that is the point of this blog. the strangest piece of this puzzle is deciding if i will truly be alone on this island. i am a reasonably friendly person, despite the tone of these words. and i know there will be people there that i will befriend. the truth is, i’ve been alone for a long time. to me, loneliness is not a burden. it’s a gift. and the people around me will simply never fill the void that has been growing for so long.

this blog is a place for me to bare my soul. i don’t want pity. i don’t want sympathy. i am a writer and i just want to write. and for the first time in a very long time, i feel the fear of solitude turning into optimistic ambition. i want to look into the heart of the island and see what it can do for me and nobody else. this is an opportunity to discover myself. this is an opportunity for you (assuming at least one person reads this blog) to go with me to one of the remotest places in the united states in an attempt to really see what this world has to offer. and maybe it is just me writing to nobody and i’m all alone in this.

you know what? fuck it.

                        that’s solitude.

                                                that’s the point.