For Context

(CW: Long)

The house has been unoccupied for fifteen years, aside from squatters, and is in varying levels of neglect. The owner is an elderly woman who lives out of town, in the country somewhere on the opposite side of the state. The gentrification of East Nashville is about to transform the area, but Joyce doesn't know because she hasn't lived there since the 80s. She thinks she's overcharging us, but we could very easily be paying triple. The house is a modest early 20th-century stone cottage with a porch and back yard, fenced in. There's a basement that floods with each heavy rain and a drainage creek running diagonally through the front yard, terraced with matching gray stone. A driveway sits above the creek, crossing a culvert, oppositely diagonal.  Joyce has allowed me to exchange work on the house in lieu of paying a deposit. I've negotiated this because I have no money. It's 2014. I'm 23, and the girl is 19 . She's just relocated from Texas after falling out with her parents. She has no vehicle, and plans to start a new life with me in a new state. We know each other from before, and here we have little else.

We move in before the lease begins, cleaning one room at a time, thoroughly, before painting. I find a crackpipe in the attic, evidence of transients entering through the basement window, and trash in every nook and cranny. The patchwork patterns of dead bugs blot every wall, and the paint is chipping to reveal layers of stained yellow and off-white. The windows have been sealed shut, so we pry them open one by one. The interior of the house as we recover it piecemeal, resembles an old ashtray. Nothing feels clean, only smells of bleach and paint and old books. Layers are removed and added, and the space is eventually whole.

Our first night we sleep on a mattress in the living room, the only area our efforts have rendered hospitable. The power hasn't yet been turned on, so we light candles. It's June, and we sweat all night in the dimness. 

The house becomes livable, quaint even, but we don't make much improvement on ourselves. An artist, she networks, finds part time jobs but does not earn enough to assist with bills. I work long shifts and come home exhausted. For a moment or two we grasp at subtle domestic tones and the situation feels wholesome, but it doesn't last. Most of the decorations in our house are hers. I prioritize myself with work, because I've been taught that enough of it can power through any hardship. I believe it unbecoming to complain about one’s station, especially when we've gotten so lucky with housing. There's much to be grateful for.

I've started a new job at a restaurant that I like, and it's barely enough. The people are kind and have esoteric interests, and the food is incredible. I hope to play music with them one day; everyone plays music. We don't have WiFi, so we check out books from the public library downtown and read to each other each night. I take her to shows and introduce her to my friends, but she doesn’t like them. 

Some months later, I'm watching as a car drives her away. The creek in the front yard swells with rain, and the door squeaks loudly when I shut myself in. I'm alone now, and I feel a profound emptiness in every cell in my body. The decorations have gone, and the domestic tones with them. I have one chair, a stereo, and a bottle. I begin my relationship with the void, staring at the walls formerly adorned with her paintings. It’s a cold winter and I heat only my bedroom, attempting to cut down the electrical bill. I can see my breath in the kitchen when I venture out. There are no appliances, only a George Forman grill. I buy a typewriter at an estate sale and begin hacking mindlessly away with no intention. Friends eventually visit, and someone leaves a drum kit for storage in my spare room. I loop guitar riffs on a pedal and keep time clumsily on the kit, listening for something of substance within the noise.  ---

It's one year earlier and I've been charged with removing a tv from the house where I’m living with roommates. It’s a two-bedroom duplex, but there are more than five of us there. Two couples, myself, two dogs, and a roulette wheel of couch-crashers. One of us holds a lease, and everyone else pays him in cash from service industry jobs. All of us are young and angry, but we love each other fiercely. No one is older than 22. The tv is ancient, an old 90s big screen in a massive wooden chassis. We joke and suggest that the house was built around it because it won't fit through any door or window. Each night after heavy drinking, I take a baseball bat to it, losing myself in rage and not stopping until I’m utterly exhausted. We salvage the projector parts and sweep up the remnants, though it’s weeks before the broken pieces are small enough to be collected in a dustpan.  ---

It's 2011, in a rural small town south of Nashville, and I've just dropped out of college. I'm living with a friend from the dorms, now in a country house owned by his family. It's him, myself, and one other friend. We try to find work but jobs are scant in the country. We collect scrap metal for odd dollars and host parties for our friends still living on campus. 

It's the morning after Halloween and I wake up to my room filled with smoke. I alert my roommates, and the three of us suppress the blaze to the best of our knowledge, airing out the house and repeating how lucky I am to have woken up at all, seeing as how the room had no ventilation of any kind.

I answer a letter to an old friend, standing in the front yard with a computer balanced on the barbecue pit. I cannot decipher why she's reaching out, but the glimmer of connectivity from home brings me a rare joy. I haven’t spoken with my parents in Texas for two years, and I won't for another one. I light a half-smoked cigar from the night before (I was Che Guevara for Halloween) and all seems stationary. 

As a group, we roll into town later to buy weed, customarily crammed into one vehicle. It's on a dirt road somewhere, blunt in hand, that someone receives a call about the house - which is in flames. We race back to survey the carnage, and I find all of my belongings have been reduced to a pile of ash. My friends rightfully want to blame someone for the accident, although no direct fault could be administered. It was in my room where the space heater had caught fire, and I had been the one to leave it on. Furthermore, I'm the disruptive newcomer, and the others have been friends since childhood. The would-be inheritor of the house is the closest friend I've ever had. Together we'd been the two oddest characters on our conservative college campus, and I cherish our friendship above all else. Despite the nuance of the debacle I am nonetheless left alone, sleeping on the third floor of someone's mother's house in town, while I work third shift at a nearby factory. I think at this time, staring up at the ceiling, surrounded by boxes of Christmas decorations and discarded furniture, that I could not ever be more alone. 

The days crawl by and we save enough to move to the city, the only logical next step.

We spend Christmas in an extended-stay motel while our new lease is being prepared. 

Some short months before, I'm in my student apartment with the Director of Residency (also the town mayor) knocking angrily on my door, ordering my eviction. He informs me that I've overspent my financial aid allowance, and that I've maxed out my options at the institution. He's gleeful - we know each other well and have harbored a mutual disgust for one another. He says that he'll be happy to see me go. It is one day past the deadline to drop classes and receive "incomplete"s rather than Fs. He knows the administrative calendar like the back of his hand. 

A semester prior, I’m taking a final exam in a Philosophy class, head bent towards the blue booklet on my desk. The test is three questions, all open form, and I'm scrawling furiously. The professor stops at my desk while passing out our graded term papers - it’s our last meeting of the semester. He announces through the dead silence of the exam that I’ve earned the highest score in the class, and that I know exactly what I’m talking about in my essay. I’m distracted, feeling a sudden pressure to live up to this claim with our current assignment, which is timed. All I can think of is how badly I want to go outside for a cigarette. The professor is reputable, enough for my dad to remember his name, but I don’t trust his opinion wholly because he’s a religious man who worked for the Reagan administration. He encourages me to take more courses of his, though none of them are part of my curriculum and each credit hour costs a small fortune.  ---

It’s 2010. I'm readying myself for school again, this time in Tennessee where I can start over. I'm depressed, have only been in the state for two months, and have made no friends. I'm 19, and I wish I was back home in Texas, though it didn't feel like home when I left. For the first time, I can fit everything I own in my car, which I've just bought from my dad. It's the only reason why I'm here, the car. My old one had fallen apart, preventing me from continuing school where I had been attending in Port Arthur. I was trapped, as one is in Texas without wheels, and my dad, moving to Nashville to remarry, offered an ultimatum. He says I've already taken a semester off, and is worried that I won't go back.

I want to go home and join the military. I promise everyone that I'll give one semester my best efforts, though within a week I'm convinced I ought to leave. I know that in the military you're not expected to act as an individual, and the prospect of delaying the reality of being an individual is the most welcome concept I can rationalize. I find it exhausting to express myself, so I don't. I feel underwater, mostly to do with the meds I'd stopped taking before moving. My family that I left back home have removed me from their insurance policy, so I quit cold turkey. The doctor recommends that I don't do this, but I have no choice. 

I shave my head with an electric clipper, sitting on a broken stool in the yellow light of my drug dealer's kitchen. He laughs as he runs the device around the contours of my head, ash from his cigarette falling idly on the floor from its perch in the corner of his mouth. He does a clean job, but I feel naked and regret it almost immediately.  ---

It’s before the summer, that same year. I'm in an oil refinery in Corpus Christi. I work as a leak detector, inhaling chemicals I can't even pronounce, climbing 100-foot structures in caged ladders and crawling between scalding hot pipe racks high above a jungle of concrete and steam. 

The refinery complex straddles two sides of the interstate, and each morning as I badge in, I feel like I'm entering a prison. From the highway at night, the refinery edifices glow red-hot with the molten lights of burning process equipment, eerily beautiful and sprawling in red swathes against the darkened south Texas plains.

I'm called faggot, pussy, and boy by nearly every coworker I encounter. I tell them I'm a musician, but they don't even know what it means to be one. Their only context for the outside world is via Fox news and whatever radio station happens to be blaring from our work vehicles. 

My hair is long and tangled as I wrap it up to sweat each day in a hardhat. By the time I quit the job after six months, it's an absolute mess of knots that cannot be undone. 

I send texts each morning to someone I care about back home, in East Texas five hours away. She ignores them, except to remind me to take care of myself. I begin writing a song for her but no one will hear it for five years. I've managed to alienate myself from nearly everyone I know following a three-month blur devoid of social agency. Being in the refinery is an open-ended echo to a complex post-graduation summer and a shaky first semester of college. I've left home (been kicked out), and consequently "the church". I've no moral compass, and as per my upbringing I include all illicit drugs into the same singular category. If I'm to live a secular life, I might as well act on evil urges. I've no discretion whatsoever and at 18, truly don’t feel that I’ll live long enough for it to matter. 

The prescription I'd been taking for the last three years of high school interacts poorly with alcohol, and it's during this time, on errant visits back home on weekends to play shows, that I experience true blackouts. With grotesque fascination I keep pressing my luck, teetering closer to the abyss each time until I no longer recognize myself.  ---

It's 2005 and I'm lying to my mom. I want to go to public school, even though I’ve been planning not to. We’ve all been mostly homeschooled throughout childhood, except during divorce proceedings when logistics got in the way and my mother’s time was occupied by lawyers and fatigue. I tell her that I’ve been praying, and that it’s God’s will that I pursue music in the reputable program at the local high school. I utilize language that as a fifteen year-old I know she and her husband will be receptive to, and I feel shameful for lying to get my way. I’m unsure of whether or not I’ll go to hell for blasphemy, or if hell even exists, but I choose to roll the dice. I recognize at this juncture that whatever may be true, perhaps the will of God is a malleable thing.  ---

It's 2008 and I'm watching my car go underwater from the second floor of our house. I’ve worked all summer to earn it, and though it is as old as I am I’m more proud of it than anything else I own. Hurricane Ike is sweeping ashore in east Texas and it’s less than two months into my senior year, and we’ve opted (at my parents’ behest) not to evacuate. I’m told that although I’ve been handing over cash for insurance, the car isn’t fully covered, and that I’m simply out of luck. The water in the house recedes after another day of surge, and I help my stepdad tear up the freshly-laid floorboards downstairs. The house has just been built, and is barely finished. I’m 17 and will be “asked” to move out soon. I realize that my presence matters less and less with each passing day. As soon as our work is done, I borrow my sister’s bike and head off into town to survey the storm damage, turning my phone off and keeping scarce for a week or so, laying low with friends before my stepdad can finally track me down. 

---

It's 2016 and I'm standing at a headstone bearing my name. The cemetery is abandoned, sprawling on a hill overlooking a remote mountain town in western Colorado. The names in the stones are of old mining fatalities and long-lost relatives, their epitaphs faded with time. My name is an old one, and I share it with the stranger laid to rest at my feet. I’m in the area to climb a mountain with someone I’ve known since we were since we were 14. The nature of our rendezvous prevents me from announcing it to anyone, which I don’t mind. We climb our 14er and part ways, and soon after she’s gone I climb another, hooked on the altitude and reluctant to say goodbye. 

I continue my trip from Colorado to Texas, visiting my mother and staying for nearly a month. Crossing the state line in early morning, I proclaim out my open window that I'm here to heal, and I feel it to be true It’s the longest time I’ve spent at home since I left and the longest I've been away from Nashville since I've lived there. Everyone is warm and I’m happily participating in the family again, despite our prior setbacks. For the first time since living in the city, I entertain the notion of being elsewhere.  ---

It's still 2016 and my ears are ringing from shows. If we’re not playing, we’re still playing, and if we’re not still playing we’re watching someone else’s set. There’s something to do every night of the week. I feel invincible, like I can be everything to everyone. I say yes to things I’ve never said yes to, and never turn down the opportunity to play. I’ve been in my little house for almost five years, and it is a living, breathing vibrant place, cluttered with music gear in every corner, microphone cables running from room to room as we order sound into song. I’m surrounded by colorful faces, and I adore each one. I host bonfires and celebrate my friends’ accomplishments with them. Each week I play host to someone new, encouraging the creative atmosphere I’ve cultivated at home in our modest project studio. Most of my companions are more talented than me, and I feel pride and privilege with what we’re able to manifest together. I look people in the eye when I meet them, knowing that I represent my craft. People come to see us play, and I shake their hands, still flabbergasted that I’m leading anything, both with the music and also at my job. I’m sober, I build garden beds and read books. I enroll in college again, paying out of pocket as to not incur any more debt for something I feel is necessary to achieve. I bike to work, and my friends all live nearby. The seasons are kind and the years flow by as I sweat through summers in the kitchen, and shiver through wet winter storms with everyone else. I’m in love with my music and cannot fathom a life without it. My mom comes to visit, even changing her flight and hotel arrangements just so she can stay an extra day to watch us rehearse in my living room. My other parents live on the opposite side of town, but they don’t like the way the house smells, so they never come over. 

Somewhere in the social din, I seek solitude, and start taking multi-day backpacking trips alone in the Smokies. I arrange my schedule to allow for this, even though I’m busy playing in bands almost every weekend. I’m shocked at how natural it feels to be alone, and the city seems more and more crowded each time I return to it.  ---

It's 2017 and I'm boarding a plane for Guatemala. I’ve not been out of the country alone before, and I haven’t practiced my Spanish nearly enough. I leave my bandmates and our unfinished recordings behind, seizing the wild opportunity for a job I’ve applied for on a whim, but didn’t expect to be offered. I accept the position serendipitously on my 26th birthday, and leave feeling equal parts guilty and thrilled. My friendships do not recover when I return, and I struggle to finish the project alone. 

On my first tour to the summit of Acatenango, I lose the designated footpath up the loose volcanic slopes just below the crater. There are nearly a dozen international clients behind me, each with lofty expectations and all panting from the altitude, headlamps blaring in the pre-dawn gloom. We see city lights far below us, and the wind howls above my shouted directions. I reassure them that I know the way, improvise, hiding the terror from my face, and they’re never the wiser. We arrive at the summit at sunrise, with a fiery reception from the neighboring active volcano, Fuego, igniting the morning and shaking the ground over a mile away.  ---

I’m 9 years old and I’ve just run away from home. I bolt down a highway in San Antonio for a few miles, shirtless and barefoot in the summer heat, before a cop picks me up and delivers me to Child Protective Services. My dad collects me from there, and my whole body is photographed by a caseworker. I’ve got some minor abrasions from where my mother and grandmother tried to restrain me from running away, and this is about to complicate things. They’d both had their nails done that day, and the marks look worse than they actually are. 

Some time after, I’m in two different therapists offices, each hired by a parent vying for custody. They each try to convince me of which parent to choose to live with, but I’m still skeptical, noting their persuasion tactics. I learn to never trust therapists. I’m prescribed drugs for bipolar disorder, a mood stabilizer for the mornings and something else that puts me to sleep within fifteen minutes of taking it in the evenings. Sometimes I forget, and take them both at once. By the time I arrive at school, I’m laughing hysterically and chalk it up as entertainment to my peers, calling the drugs my “crazy pills”. I soon garner a reputation. Sometimes in rebellion, I flush them down the toilet instead of swallowing them. I go about this more quietly than my sister, who throws tantrums and requires supervision to ensure she’s taking hers. I begin the trend of hiding other parts of my life from my family. I want to run away, but I feel uncomfortable at my dad's house and there's nowhere else to go. I soon discover music piracy. I download too many albums to be screened by anyone, and headphones become my refuge.  ---

I'm 11 and standing outside a church in San Antonio. My dad is the pastor. 

I'm in a row as I often find myself, with my three siblings, answering questions to strangers on behalf of everyone. I'm the oldest boy. My older sister and I are one year apart, and the little ones are too young to fully grasp the situation.

A woman from the church beckons to me with a pity I don't quite understand. She references my dad in some way, his position there in their congregation and the recent divorce. I'm not sure how to react. 

Minutes later, I'm being slammed into a wall in the hallway. We're still in the church, near the administrative offices. 

I'm suspended by my shirt collar, feet dangling on the tiles, bracing myself from the shouting occurring inches from my face. I'm being reprimanded for saying the wrong thing, or the right thing at the wrong time, or maybe for wearing the wrong clothes. I can't remember which. I'm told that we're becoming trash for living where we do, and that I'm a disappointment. I have the family name, I’m told, and I have an obligation to it that I don’t understand. My sister watches and smirks, knowing she'll never receive the same treatment. I'm told to stop crying, that people are going to see me, and to keep my composure. I want to run away, but I'm unsure of where I would go. Furthermore it's Sunday, which means I'll be going home tonight. We're only here every other weekend, and that's more than long enough for everyone to forget what happened.  ---

It's 2018 and I'm screaming alone in the desert on the PCT, reflecting on the events that led me here. I'm contemplating the nature of fault, and whether or not to even call it that anymore. I'd like to take credit for my decisions, but I haven't yet accomplished anything. I've only quit my jobs and flown to California, and though each Northbound step seems to light a new pulse somewhere deep within me, I remain apprehensive about my ability to walk the entire way to Canada. 

I think of how one can act on spite and recover from it simultaneously, thinking how nearly anything can be a powerful element when wielded for a greater purpose. I want to prove everyone wrong, to remove myself from the many lives I've afflicted and been afflicted by, to live outside of any box manufactured for me by another individual’s world view, or by my own attempt to foolishly carve out a corner of the world for myself, something I’ve failed to do time and time again. I no longer feel victimized by my experiences, after all I’ve had it easier than most, but the memory of loss lingers sourly. The trail facilitates space and I’m left alone with my past, reflecting on all I’ve done wrong and the nature of rebirth. I reinvent myself in the same cliche ways we all do on a thru-hike, with a new name and a wholesome disposition. I acknowledge the privilege expressed by my actions in simply being here, feeling truly lucky to be alive to experience the earth in the way that I presently am. Knowing that I’ll never be able to articulate what I’m feeling is as comforting as it is isolating. 

I rule out ambition, because I was not led here purely on my own accord. 

Everyone chipped in. 

Someone says "I love you" through foggy points in my memory but I don't know what the voice wants from me so I don’t respond. 

Suddenly I hear other hikers. I tell myself to stop crying, that someone is going to see me, and to keep my composure. I want to run away, but I already am, so I just keep walking.