Keep Walking

I did a shitload of walking in the last 24 hours. Mostly through my hometown of West New York, NJ. The problem with that is that as you walk through old streets and familiar surroundings, so too do you walk that good old path of nostalgia. Sometimes, it can't be helped. Sometimes, you walk it in hopes of finding that old path. I don't know which one of the two I was trying to accomplish. All I know is that I was in another decade last night.

I left my mother's house in Union City around 10pm. on foot, so as to give myself plenty of time to walk to my job in North Bergen. (Graveyard shift.) I had crashed there the previous evening for reasons I'm embarrassed about and don't want to get into. (Forgot to pay the energy bill and my place was a sauna without the AC.) Anyway, I start walking and I start remembering.

I remembered where Time Out arcade used to be and how I used to cut class to go there and play Mortal Kombat until my eyes were about to bleed. I also remember a rainy day where me and my Crew walked there and had the time of our lives only to walk back, have some hoodlums steal my baseball cap and then introduce me to my very first right hook. Ah! Good times!

A few blocks later, I was at Memorial High School. It still looks exactly the same. God I hated that place. Still do, a little anyway. They say high school is the best four years of your life. If that's the case, I should've given a blow job to a .45 caliber the minute I got my diploma (which took me 5 years to get). I won't get into why...there are too many reasons to get into at the moment.

Anyway, I passed the school and those memories soon faded. Soon after, I took a good hard look at the town as I walked block after block and got closer to work and wondered to myself:

Why the fuck did you come back to this town after you left the military?!

Besides my family and friends, I couldn't fathom why. However, they still would've been family and friends if I lived somewhere else! Why did I come back to this town where everyone walking past me gives me a hard look or a glazed one depending on how high/drunk they are; where you see idiotic things like a fat chick driving one of those economy Honda/Hyundai cars instead of walking her fat ass around to lose that weight. (That happened around 58th street. She was driving around and almost hit me as I was about to get on the crosswalk. She turned the corner and I read on the back of the car the letters F-I-T and I couldn't help to chuckle to myself, "Yeah! Just barely!" ) Where a nice little Korean couple (I can tell them apart now) actually stopped by a tree to pick the berries and eat a few. That almost made me gag considering the state we're in. I don't trust anything off of the trees in Jersey, but I digress. I kept walking the streets. Streets where a few young chicks were walking down smelling all good and dressed to the nines...in FULL HOOKER GEAR! (Yeah! I looked! Don't be stupid! You would've too!)

As I keep walking I keep wondering, "why did I come back?" And then it hits me! So I stopped around 63rd., a block away from where she used to live and I say to myself:

Well, if she doesn't love you anymore and you don't have a chance to get her back and you're really honest with yourself about being truly over her...then what the fuck is keeping you here?

And as I got closer to my dead-end job, I start realizing that there really isn't anything keeping me here.

I realized, that I have to keep on walking.