We are all but recent leaves on the same old tree of life and if this life has adapted itself to new functions and conditions, it uses the same old basic principles over and over again. There is no real difference between the grass and the man who mows it. ~Albert Szent-Györgyi

My mother, whenever I started to cry, told me how peculiar my behavior was as a child. I never cried when I was little.

“You never cried at birth. Not when the doc patted your little booty, not when they stuck needles into you, not even during the cat scans.”

My brain was swelling.

Since then I have probably shed the tears I owed. Never out of fear though, never out of guilt. Not that there isn't any guilt.

At the age of three I frequented my grandfathers studio. He showed my how to use lines. Handed to me my first sketchbook.

“This is for getting all those girls you've been eying”

I lost it within a month, and then I found it 14 years later.

My mother saw my doodles and showed me how the colors we see are never really the colors we should use.

My father wasn’t artistically there until I turned ten. Being an art school dropout in the career of politics and organizing, he showed me how to shape things together. I focused on composition with every paper after then.

Grandmother, a widower she would say, taught me how to fight. This is where the poetry and metaphors kick in. She steered my train of thought into a u-turn towards the appearance of “good citizenship.”

Melvin wasn’t even his real name yet the legacy he left in the attic changed my eye. Opaque crayon colors and charcoal cartoons were scattered across splintered walls like an autobiographical comic strip. His work inspired my civil disobedience.

Lets not forget the romances, not to say they were romantic but to subtly implicate the word relationships. There were only a few but even so each had their distinct aftertastes. Each left a callus. Essentially I regret every one of them. But I have grown from them.

Some people say that you should not regret. Telling you that you should just live your life without giving a damn about the past. Fuck that. You regret what you want. There is nothing wrong with having your regrets. They have formed you and you should never forget the regrets that have made you who you are. The saying should really be, “no qualms.”

Now I am as displaced as I ever was but searching for a path. It’s cliché that I happen to have merely one idea but they spread out into thousands of directions.