I moved out of my parent's house and into an apartment when I was 16. I made the big move from a small town in Pennsylvania to Cleveland - largely because I needed a way out of the hell that my home life had become. Money from Case Western Reserve University made it possible to attend college.
I moved to Cleveland, and started attending classes at CWRU when I was 16; I had a year of college under my belt, via Penn State University, and the year was 1980. I remember moments from undergraduate life; walking across campus at all hours of the day and night. Papers that were due. The feeling of wrapping up a hard semester.
That was some 36 years ago. In many ways, I took the first steps towards becoming a young man while at the university. I had my first failures there; I was not prepared, not in the slightest, for the workload, the sheer effort of will required to complete all the assignments. I had successes there as well.
I challenged myself to change. I entered the university as a provincial, xenophobic rube; I left the university as a cynical asshole; but I was a cynical asshole open to new experiences, meeting new people, and learning new ideas. I remember touring the university area during orientation; going to University Hospital when I needed an x-ray to see if I had an ulcer.
I have now started treatment at UH for terminal cancer. Every time I go to campus, I have a flood of memories, of emotions. I wonder what happened to people I knew; I wonder what is happening to me.
I see a young man rushing across campus, and I wonder what is happening to him? What dreams is he living? What memories is he creating?
I have started back at campus, this time starting as a cynical asshole. I'm not that open to new experience; there's not much I can physically do. Out of what I can physically do, there's even less that I can afford. My life, on campus, at home, and everywhere, consists of treatments which might make me more comfortable, but that's about it.
When I think about the weirdness of writing the final chapter of my life in the same location I wrote the first chapter of my manhood, I shudder inside; sometimes, I cry, and my wife wonders what I could be crying about, this time.
I ask myself what I have learned in these years, what have I become?
I don't want to answer that question, because there are monsters inside. The monsters are sleeping a little bit now, and I don't want to wake them up.
All I know for sure is that someday I will have to kill the monsters because they are torturing me. I am 55 years old; I have worked hard my whole life. Had I known that the monsters were coming, I never would have worked the way I did.
All the work in the world can't stop the monsters. I have nothing to stop them, nothing except that final answer.
