a thrown boomerang you've been waiting to come back for years

Dear Self,

I'm proud that you hosted a show tonight, despite not preparing for it. Despite having mild diarrhea beforehand. Despite being shaky on stage and stuttering like you do when you're underfed, underprepared, and haven't been up for a while.

I'm disappointed you've never, not fully ever, committed to doing this. Is it a hobby? A pastime? A pursuit? Why does it need to be in any shape the boys make it into--why does it need to be the only thing at all?

You're worried you're using a pursuit of comedy as a replacement for a pursuit of family. Family--as your subconscious understands it--means: order, security, meaning, purpose, love, roots, groundedness, a big vat of human cement that will fill in that amorphous, ever-shifting hole in your soul-pocket. 

You imagine coming home to a home. You imagine walking into an abode* (*housing that involves at least two bedrooms; a real bath with a real tub; windows) that has a fellow human, sadly male (despite hoping that's not the only option for your predilections; maybe there's still hope, but it's late), who is kind and warm and loving.

Who is happy to see you. Who has made a fellow tiny human with you, maybe two, and this idea makes you tear up because wouldn't it be nice to redo everything? To stitch together what you had and also what you didn't have--a family--with new thread, spun out of the good chances you took, the brave commitments you made, to life and love and the pursuit of all that?

'Family'; making a family sits on top of your heart like an elephant. Like punishment and also yearning, perpetual yearning, to get out from under it and on top of it and finally have some success with this goddamn heart complex. 

You stare at babies and never quite think I want one, but that I am one. You miss being a child like you miss a dead friend.

You stopped at the cafe tonight and interrogated the uncle holding his seven-week-new niece. You thought, "Look at how much wonder is in her eyes! Look at how her only job here is noticing!" You felt that feeling in your chest--the one that's like a thrown boomerang you've been waiting to come back for years--and stood there too long, almost waiting for the uncle to go, "Here, yes--take her. She's yours."

*

More often now, you're onstage aware of this lack. When you started, you got up with the firm belief that this was doing something. You were chasing some sort of importance, stature, clout, affirmation to make up for all your lost time. For all the regretted friendships and youthships you broke. But now, you get up and you know there's no punchline in the world that can make up for missing out on anything.

You handled the drunk in the corner okay. You encouraged him a little too much, when the bartender was trying to shut him down. He kept making the show about him. He moaned, he interjected. He spoke like it was a two-way conversation. The audience was annoyed by him, but you know there are worse sorts. He was harmless, you felt. You were grateful you weren't the only one talking.

All you know is that your job is to turn him into a joke. So you did, because that's your job. But you only did it because you had to and not because you wanted to. When you tried to soft shoe some material before bringing up the headliner, he kept negating your premise and repeating: you're beautiful!

There's nothing beautiful about needing things so much, you felt. 

There's a certain--

No, that's enough for now. 

*

It's good to write to you from over here--the weather is placid and fair. Time sits around like a dog after a run, panting and smiling from exercise, its boundless joy making its tongue hang heavy, happy to go nowhere, slobbering and sunbaked. 

You teared up when I mentioned missing your childhood. You're not sure of it but you may be right: the love you feel you're missing out on could be mended by fixing the broken bridge between your now and your past. Like your heart needs a path to walk back into itself again.

Or maybe it's not having a child and all that shit by now. Maybe the primordial fairy tales are right.

If you can reset the dominoes, maybe it doesn't matter if you do comedy or not. Just like, in a real way, it wouldn't matter if you were a doctor, a librarian, a therapist, a teacher, a lawyer, a celebrity, an aeronaut. How loneliness--incompleteness--hangs around with the disregard of vape smoke. Even when you can hang 'wife' and 'mother' on the hook of your name.

Also remember: diarrhea comes and goes. 

All my love, 

The Soup