DAY TWO

Hello again.

Sometimes I marvel how quickly I burned through my first life…

When it ended I felt like a middle aged character from a Dickens novel. The big difference being that I was barely 20 years old.

As good as I was at weaving my complicated persona to cover up the fear and weakness inside me, the threads weren’t strong enough to hold it all together. And then it happened.

As the clock struck midnight on the last day of 1977 and a group of young people stumbled blindly into the New Year as I had done the past three years myself, I turned my back on the party and stepped out onto a small stoop on the corner of a main street in my hometown, less than half a mile from the hospital where my first child would be born someday and breathed the fresh air of a new day.

I often feel badly for people whose only experience of the dramatic comes in a bottle or a pipe or a needle or a pill. I lived that drama till I was naked and wounded with nowhere to hide.

And I know so many people who live vicariously through books or songs or movies or cartoons as if they really know what it feels like to be free. And I love those people but I can’t lie to them.

Until you’ve stood on the precipice of extinction and looked fully into the abyss of your own failures, you’re still living a cliché founded on a lie. I wish I could take away your pain but some paths you’ve got to walk on your own.

I have a friend that lost a finger one day but it saved his soul. I lost a friend one time but it saved my life. Too many have lost so much more for so little.

My road has sorrow but it always ends in joy. Sometimes there’s even joy without the sorrow but there’s never sorrow without the joy. If you’re not on this road, isn’t it time you took the red pill?

@ 2010 Joseph Ricciardi Jr