It's not you, it's me.

Charles Bokowski once famously wrote that "the days run away like wild horses over the hills."
I watch my own reflection change as my hair starts to grey in the corners and my stories get longer. 

About ten years ago I met an old woman who occupied the seat next to me in a diner.  She had thick coke bottle glasses, shoulder length grey hair and weathered skin. She sat up straight as she sipped her coffee and began telling stories to a stranger about life, and death and her mother and friends. She spoke of harsh winters and the pain of losing loved ones to the cold. I drank my lemonade and chewed my sandwich as I feasted on her words. 

She had held many friends, loved many folks, laughed many laughs, and shed a great many tears. Time had been no kinder or harsher to her than it would be to anyone of the rest of us, this much I knew. Something in my mind called back to the love that woman conveyed in her stories recently.  I was recently listening to a story being told by a group that were casually unaware that they were telling it.  One was speaking of the promise of new love and the future full of promise and brightness. Another was speaking of the death of a season, when circumstances and the winds of change scatter the leaves from the branch.   I watched with curious eyes and admittedly lingering stares as these people both spoke of a moment in different terms. My heart rendered a little at the sight of the shifting dynamics of love in the lives of these 3 people.  

The life that you know will change, and what it becomes is not always what the rest of those around you have agreed to. 

I'm about to pull up stakes again. I've made up my mind and sure, there are a dozen days and plenty of ways that could keep it from being dead set... 

But I'm going. 

I think I've charged headlong into uncertain waters looking for something each time.  Maybe its love, Maybe its peace. Maybe its a sense of understanding or a sense of belonging... Maybe its all things that I already have, and maybe its all things that I sometimes tell myself that I can do without. 

I'm pulling up stakes again and headed for quieter country. Perhaps to a land where folks are a bit less cynical. Not to say that all the good folks here are a problem. It's not you, its me. There isn't anyone responsible for my happiness but me, and I know that if a man can't be at peace with himself it doesn't matter where he is. 

I know there are memories here that should be buried and left in the desert. The only thing that can cure somethings are time and distance.  I've got some inspiration, and a small sense of direction. That may not seem like a lot to most, but for a drifter with an apocalyptic minimalist view on happiness... That feels like a hell of a lot. Days keep running, time keeps flowing, and if there is by chance some happiness out there for a man like me... it could be worth it to grab a handful of it for a while.