the day I chose to commit.

The lights, red and blinking, tell me I am one minute closer to the road home (the road is Pershing, but her memory fails her, so she calls it 'that P road.') The doors open, and I enter a place where concrete defines not only this city, but the ambitions of the people who inhabit it. As I sit, I wonder if we're all suffering from the pathology of dishonesty with ourselves. I think about that four-day love/hate affair (Breakthrough/Breakdown) I had with systematic, enforced realism. I remember memorizing the patterns in the carpet so I didn't have to memorize the patterns in my own life. Remember kneeling by my car door, weeping for the person I had become, weeping because--if I was anyone in this universe--I was a fraud. Remember how relieving that revelation was: how knowing I was nothing allowed me to be empty and hungry again. Remember finally allowing the word surrender to become an active verb, rather than a conveniently impersonal noun.

The room was empty 96 hours later, but my hate and my self-imposed isolation bled on those hotel walls and seeped into that carpet. I left it behind because I began to see God in community and in honesty. "Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch, we are free (V for Vendetta)."

Twenty-some minutes later, I finally reach home. I realize how very easy it is for me to be honest with others so I don't have to be honest with myself. But no more. Honestly, if I can move past my pride masked as skepticism, past the shame that choked every air passage of liberation in that room, past the 3.30 minutes of literally staring fear in the eyes (3.30 minutes of uninterrupted, silent, direct eye contact), past worshipping in the dark without feeling the dark in my chest anymore, I will remember three words:

Commitment changes everything.