The fates and the sirens and the inevitable

I was very silly.

I kept everything that I ever wrote in a red leather duffle bag.

For you earth newbies, back in the day, there were no zip drives.

Instead of storing my stories on a disk, I transported the hard copies

With me

All around the United States

In a red duffle bag.

Looking at that bag I thought- my life has purpose.

If someone finds this bag, they find me. I exist.

And then I met him.

I met him and he loved me and he coerced me and he tricked me.

I gave up everything, every place, everyone to be with him.

And because of this, I lost my job.

And because of losing my job I lost the right to drive the car I was paying for.

And when you lose the car you are paying for, everything in the car goes to the Tow Company retrieving the car for the bank.

I begged.

I don’t want the wheels anymore, I could care less about the car.

Please just give me back my red duffle bag.

In that duffle bag was 20 years worth of me.

Sorry honey, they offered, we gutted the car, trashed the contents and sold the remains.

Car and life homicide.

I swear, If any of those stories, or poems or thoughts or musings

Ever get famous or popular or read or rewritten I will know.

And I will shoot everyone involved for stealing my essence.

I lost all of it for making bad decisions.

I though it was the end of the world until I read somewhere that

Ernest Hemingway had written a book,

That had become due to his publisher,

And due to fate, he had lost his original manuscript to the wind, and water and life.

And he rewrote it.

STARTED FROM SCRATCH.

And the revision became a best seller.

Perhaps I was meant to get my car repossessed.

Perhaps I was meant to lose my life.

Like Elton John says, losing everything

Is like the sun… and I choose

I chose

To start all over

To relive those twenty years from a new perspective.

To keep writing, to keep defying fate, to keep being an artist

And this time around, bad decisions will not faze me

I will rewrite, document, relive, rewrite furiously

And I no longer need the pacifier of the red duffle.

All I need is inspiration, a keyboard or a pen and pain.

And history is made once again,

The future is recreated a new,

And I am whole.

The silly of yesterday has rewritten my future.

So I forgive myself.

Because if I had my red pacifier…

If I had my red duffle brimming with words…

Would I be here, now?