100 Love Letters I'll Never Send (Sometimes You got a take a step back to take a Bigger Step Forward! ) © 1997, 2017

Sometimes You got a take a step back to take a Bigger Step Forward! 

“Every time I go all the way down, to the Southern end, of that Haunted Highway 49, I take time to visit a special place in my past.”

Over the years I kept everything I did. All the music, stories, essays, art, and poems.

I must remember and embrace the lessons that I learned in that special place, ‘a personal hell,’

Your ‘personal hell’ may have been/is a jail cell, or a mental hospital, or maybe relationships, maybe jobs. Some of us have escaped, others are still there.

‘There’ are also our thoughts and memories that become our ‘personal hell.’

Started off doing it. Didn’t take too long for it to start doing me.

…all the joyful things were gone. I gave these things away. All that was left was me hating myself.

My ‘personal h.e.l.l.,' (here except LohRd’s Love) was a garage apartment on a dead end street. The walls and outside was painted with the same color of a dead body, pale green. (I would learn what a dead body looked like later). This was where I stayed during that first heart break. My outside world reflected my inside world (thoughts and emotions, ego death). Trash, dried vomit, smell of stale beer, smoke, empty beer bottles, burns on the floor, and holes I had punched in the walls. My hair was dirty with dried scalp, and dandruff. My skin was yellow from the drinking. I had rashes from wearing dirty clothes and not taking showers. I weighed about a hundred and twenty pounds. Smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, drank and drugged most of my waking hours.

This was the first time I had met death. Like countless others, I chose not to heed the warnings of d.e.a.t.h. (didn’t everyone always tell him). I know that I allowed things to trespass me. Some gone, others remain.

…it’s the things I did during black outs that I am most afraid of.

Artwork by honea byrne © 1997, 2017