Abruptly slammed doors.

Ever lie awake in the dead of night, just letting the time fly?  A courteous nod as it passes you by, a coy little smile as you see it off.  Ever feel confused as the clock approaches midnight?  It is still today, but it will soon be tomorrow.  Is tomorrow now the day after, or should it still be “today”?  No – now today is actually tomorrow (when speaking to friends) Oh, shoot.  That’s almost a paradox, and the boss lady has that listed as next months prompt.
I am a man that has spent his fair share of time bathed in uncertainty.  I mean, I make a choice and I stick to it confidently, but at the edge of my mind there’s always the contemplation that drives me up the wall, or even into a short lived self induced state of depression.  Did I make the right choice?  Where will this road take me?

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…”

Many times I will slap sense into myself, once I realize what I’m doing.  But still sometimes I entertain the thoughts, I backtrack to that symbolic fork in the road and contemplate it some more.  I subconsciously make a choice without thinking and then later sift through my thoughts, analyzing my choices and wondering if they, in fact were the right choices to be made.
Other times, I just coast through life minding my own business until something wretched comes up and vomits in my face.

For example:
A few weeks ago, while I was forfeiting the rights to hours of my life to the place that signs my checks, one of my fellow sufferers was excitedly telling me that she had become pregnant.  She was ecstatic, almost annoyingly so.  Every other word was about how she was pregnant, how she became pregnant, or who she got pregnant with.
Before this day I hadn’t spent much time getting to know this woman; now I began to find out a lot about her.  She wasn’t looking for a relationship, but this man just threw her off guard.  They had a lot in common and she was very happy with him.  The pregnancy wasn’t planned, but both contributors were happy and willing to make it work.  She was struggling with two jobs, was a smoker, and had had trouble getting off some nasty drugs recently.  Still, with each negative, there was a beaming smile and a positive note.
I now see what it means when I hear pregnant women glow radiantly.  She was so utterly excited about the whole ordeal, you could have shit on her lap and she would have simply laughed and said she would need to be getting larger pants soon enough anyway.
So then I went on my more than earned vacation.
Almost two weeks later I worked with her again.  It was awful.  The radiant glow I had seen was completely gone.  The woman I now saw was slightly wiser, but equally miserable to the one she had been before.
Her baby died.
She had a miscarriage.
I cannot fathom the despair one must feel to find such a thing out.
Fortunately she has done nothing wrong… yet.
This won’t be a rant about how it was dishonorable for her to have been pregnant in the first place, or how she shouldn’t have been smoking like she had been, or working two jobs like she had to.
No, this is about the “man” she was with.
Not three days after finding out his girlfriend had lost their child, this pompous little prick dumped her!
He dumped her through a text in the middle of the night, and then only communicated minimally via Facebook wall tag.
I could stem off several reasons why he is a dishonest little dickhead from just those two sentences, but then our dismayed friend finds out that he had been cheating on her the whole time!
Surely this is the lowest form of scum I can imagine.
But this is just one of many observations I have had the past few days.
Another quick scenario:
I have a girlfriend of two years, which is a well known fact.  I talk about her often enough at work that there isn’t likely to be somebody who does not know.  However, there is still a girl that openly flirts with me, and even subtly suggests bringing a friendship to the next level.  Fuck buddies?  Are there dishonorable qualities in something like that?  I’m not one to judge.  But when the parties involved are already committed to somebody else, the thought is as dishonorable as they come.
Who’s the home wrecking woman?  Why it’s the dismayed (ex) mother to be.  Yes, I feel bad for her, and she went through a terrible ordeal, but is it not still dishonorable to attempt to engage in such an act?
***
I started this month with an open mind.  At first I couldn’t fathom how I could write about honor, for I hadn’t really given anything thought in that frame of mind before.  So, I started looking for honorable value in everything during my day, and unfortunately just about the only good thing I could find was truly insignificant.
Everywhere I looked, I saw instead the exact opposite.  It seems incredibly obvious to me now that nobody is innocent.  One dishonorable act leads to another, and it seems society has been in this downward spiral for quite a while.  Dishonor has tainted society, and people have gotten so used to it that it is now overlooked, even accepted, because it’s the new norm.
Can you believe the disillusioned mother actually asked me if she was wrong to be mad at him?  Correct me if I’m wrong, but this guy needs way more than an angry Facebook message to set him straight.
Then there’s her.  Did she really think screwing the nearest warm body would make her feel any better about what had happened?  Perhaps how she got in this predicament in the first place?
Instead of sugar coating every aspect of our lives, we should learn to be more honorable.  Nobody is a perfect individual, but that’s what makes us unique.  We should learn to be more honest about our flaws.  Stop hiding behind the blinds.  Draw back the curtains and bear your true identity, because only then can anyone truly see the honorable qualities you have to offer.
Would anyone like the liberty bell if it spent its days trying to hide it’s flaws?
I know I am going to try to be more honorable as of now.  After discovering that dishonorable acts are evidently the root of most dramatic events, it seems only logical that to be happy, one must purge themselves of such acts.
So here I am.  First post on the site and likely far from the last.
I am the 31^st, for I am always chosen last, if at all, and have never really fit in.
How am I supposed to be honorable as the 31^st member to an all exclusive 30 member club?  Not to mention that, but I am not even honorable enough to make my post on the correct day!  The blasted calendar has not only forced me to meet a deadline, I was made to meet it early…
Did I just break some sort of unspoken rule?  Is it dishonorable to use two italicized words within the same sentence?  I don’t know.
I’m just that traveler standing still at the crossroads in a world that reveals only its pitiful endings; just that man, waiting for that epiphany, when I can finally set myself on fire and rise from the ashes – a new man –  or something like that.  Is that honorable?

In the end, it doesn’t matter what everyone else thinks is honorable.  Think about it.
“On MY honor”
Who the fuck cares what everyone else thinks, as long as you stick to your own beliefs?
I spend a lot of time wondering who I am.
Do you know who you are?
P.S.:    That thing I found that I thought to myself could be considered an honorable gesture?  Ever notice the only place one gets the door held for them is a gas station?  Maybe electric doors have destroyed that interaction people hold for that miniscule moment forever.  Now, when I enter a gas station, I always hold the door for people, and it is almost always held for me.
It’s the one place in life that everyone is an equal.  Everyone is going into that building to get fucked over, every single week – sometimes more often.
Still, though that is the one shining thing that was revealed to me this month, there’s still the one asshole that always storms through the door, only opening it far enough for his body alone and allowing it to slam abruptly into the face of the person behind.

Filed under: On My Honor by P.S. Valley
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