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.