I walk alone. This is my truth.

I've have always been a walker. According to my mother — who I admit is an exaggerator — I started walking at 6 months. The first time I took the streets alone, I was 8 years old. I had missed the school bus, and my mom had already left for work, and I didn’t have a way to contact her (this was before cell phones became ubiquitous). I decided to walk to the next town over where my aunt lived. It was a 30-minute journey that required crossing over 3 major intersections, and a bridge. I thought I was going to get in trouble for doing it, but once my mother realized that I could handle a trip like that on my own without getting run over by a car, I was allowed to walk everywhere — and so I did.

My walks were not wasted. I spent a lot of time having full-blown conversations with God about everything. I didn’t care how it made me look. I had a brief period between the ages of 10 and 12 in which I had one of those no-secrets-do-everything-together friendships. I wanted it again, and during the 2-miles on my way to my high school and back, I would beg and plead with God for a best friend. Till this day, I’ve never been that close to anyone else.

In my college years and early 20s, I made the same appeals to God for a soul mate. I’d always wanted to be in love, and I tried to be the type of man a girl could love: I was modest, I didn’t do drugs, but could hang around it (which was proper protocol for a good boy back then), I could get into a passionate debate about Enrique and Akon, I could drink an unbelievable amount of whiskey without getting wasted, my favorite writers were Zora Neal Hurston, Alice Walker and Stan Lee….that’s right, I had read all the X-Men comics. I wasn’t too skinny. I wore between a size 10-12. But I tried to stay active and I figured being a “good man” should have made up for not looking like Halle Berry…right?

Wrong.

I had walks that involved me screaming at the air with tears flowing down my eyes as I asked God why he wouldn’t answer my prayers. I wasn’t perfect, but I had tried to live a virtuous life and he knew I had good intentions. Why wouldn’t he answer my heart?

These emotional outbreaks usually took place at night on desolate streets, but I’m sure any witnesses assumed that I had schizophrenia. I’ve had times that I wished that I was that crazy, because then I could create the world that I want and live there instead of here… I could be my own God. Sanity is overrated.

God was the first to break my heart. I didn’t stop believing God or a God/Gods existed, but I realized that I didn’t really understand his role in the universe and that it was time that I stopped depending on him. For me, prayer became more of a hindrance that caused more pain every time I felt ignored. My prayers turned from natural soothing conversations with God to robotic repeated words that I said for years because I felt too guilty to stop. As I always say, it takes time for emotions to catch up to intellectual awakenings.

Once I stopped begging a higher power for companionship, I started to look at my life and all the patterns and data that I had received thus far, and it made me see a future alone. This is when friends and family say “stop, don’t say that. You don’t know the future.” I’m no fortune teller, that’s for sure. Life is full of surprises and you never know what’s going to happen — true. However, we’re also provided with a lot of information about the “direction” of our lives on a daily basis. When I use the word direction, I’m not talking about fate or destiny which used to be popular theories before general consensus rejected those notions and decided that total control is more romantic. I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

I think of my life as a recipe for a mysterious dish that will not be known to me until I’m on my deathbed. I have the ingredients that were provided to me by the universe via being born in a certain time, place, conditions, and with my own set of unique personality traits. I have the ingredients I earned via living and learning. I have the ingredients I fought for as I aimed to do and be better. However, I don’t have access to all the ingredients in the world. I don’t think any of us do.

The information that I’ve gotten from the time I was little has lead me to the conclusion that I am to walk alone in the empty streets. I’ve never been remotely close to having a relationship or being in love. I have my friends and family who are priceless, but they have their own lives. Due to my traveling soul, I’ve moved around a lot so I don’t have easy access to all of my friends every where. This may or may not change, but I know that fighting against it hasn’t done anything but cause me more misery. Once I realized my truth, I decided to find peace within it, but it’s been a challenge. If you decide to take this path… just know that it’s a hard one, like any other. There are good days and bad ones.

For many years in my early 20s, I was more or less okay. I still had lonely days in which I longed for someone, and I’d cry about it, but then I’d pull myself up through an internal battle and I’d be fine again. I had spirit and hope which allowed me to read books, travel, eat good food, indulge in beautiful sights, and even appreciate those fleeting interactions with people I’d meet at bars and different place of globe. I was so proud because I could do all those things alone and have fun, meanwhile I’d overhear people say “I wouldn’t dare go to a movie alone.” I went to movies alone all the time… that was my thing.

I don’t know when, how, or where, but something broke inside me. Age started to fuck with me. I love getting older, I do — because with every year I receive another layer of confidence for having made it this long, which is priceless. However, there’s also this dread that this is it, and there’s nothing that scares me more. As I'm entering in my 23 I can feel my hope dwindling, and suddenly I found myself struggling to read when there was a time I could read a novel a day. When I go out to eat, I hurry — unable to enjoy the atmosphere as much as I used to, when strangers talk to me I have to force a smile when I used to love those interactions, and the movie theater makes me sad. I’m just moving along, and I don’t know how to stop this feeling. I don’t know if it’s my biological clock trying to tell me some shit I don’t want to hear, but it’s unnerving.

I am lost, and that inner peace that I’ve been striving for seems farther away. How can it be that I’m just as confused… if not more so… than when I was half my age? At least back then I had hope, imagination, and passion to keep me strong.

I walk alone. This is my truth. I want to accept it and thrive in it. I’m still on my journey, so I apologies for not being able to offer a piece of wisdom on how to do it.

Easier said than done, but worth a try.

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