The Sun Is Not Compatible With Sadness (1st draft) 2007

The sun is not compatible with sadness. I wish I awoke to dreary dampness, grey skies, and low lying clouds. To feel the drizzle on my face, the cool dankness in my joints, I would feel welcome in my sadness.
I don’t know if it’s American or if it’s just the human condition, a spawn of religion, I don’t know why we must feel the need to change when we are sad. To feel better. But I feel fine in my morning tears, I feel good in my bed, unmotivated to face the day, I’m ok today in a cave of darkness and air conditioning free of the desire to accomplish anything. If only I could smoke indoors and if only I lived on a cliff in Ireland, then the world would nod its head at my state of affairs and I would know the stars intended this day.
But I am in the desert, the southwest American desert. I’m sad and lonely and frightened in the sun. I feel its heat, I fear its heat.
The blue skies look down on me as if I’ve shunned their healing powers. The suns beams blanket the land, there is no shade in this sudo urban landscape or beyond, there is no coolness. My dismal demeanor is just brought to a boil in this late summer New Mexican afternoon.
I dread my days here. I dread them through this time and I felt dread for them before. Freedom was but around the corner, only to never happen. And now I’m stuck here in the bright, dry, desert daylight, destine to miss fall and miss winter and miss my life as it passes me by.
I should have gone without and taken on great burdens and worked to the bone to make rent. If I had I could have woke each day and stepped out on the roof to see fall. I would have seen yellows and reds, turning leaves in the millions. I would have smelled the dank dead leaves rotting in the streets, streams and yards.
Had I gone I could have spent my last dollars on gasoline and driven to the end of the country. I could have stepped out of my handed down Buick skylark with a hub cap missing and walked carelessly across the sands. There I would have stood, staring at the waves, looking across the water to Europe. I would have been held in a blanket of sound and felt the warmth of the waves breaking at my feet.
But here I lay on a dreary sunny day, in a bedroom I can’t afford, in a shity desert hideaway.