My Plan Not My Purpose (3)…2 min. read

Part 3

The streets are lit, busy and filled with litter. Not just the litter of empty bottles of Cisco, Alizé, MD 20/20, Malibu, Jack Daniels, Thunderbird, Colt 45, Old English, old cigarette butts, and fast food boxes from all the restaurants the lined the streets of this impoverished neighborhood… but deeply littered with lost souls with no direction. Souls like mine that were embarrassed and angry that their plan, not their purpose was taken them to nowhere. But unlike me, most did not know the difference between their plan and their purpose. They did not know the magnitude of their misdirection. 

Their days filled with drugs and alcohol showed on the young women with vanishing clothing, loose talk, and behaviors that mimicked the overgrown and wildly growing weeds that lined the streets. Pretending they did not need or want a man with purpose, drive, and ambition.

The boys trying to portray themselves as men but only successful at passing themselves a blunt. A blunt of idiocy that gave them a false illusion of control, dominance, power, confidence, achievement and success. Only to sit the next day in front of the little television that sits propped on the chair serving as entertainment that in a short period of time proved to be their distraction out of poverty.

Sadly, I knew it all to be a lie. And it haunted me with each waking day, with each step in the wrong direction, with each tear I shed. Each time I compromised my purpose to pretend that my plan was working just as I had planned in my undeveloped mind with lack of experience. How do I escape the position I placed myself? How do I say “My plan was full of childish decisions of false illusions of grandeur” that was supposed to be better than the couple of years of education I had completed at one of the best colleges in Georgia?

As I walked each day to clear my head and shed the tears of regret, I begin to devise a way to say “I messed up. I am sorry. I am lost to my next step” because my next step could lead me into drug addiction, prostitution, or even death. But this too proved to be as hard as the souls that walked with me. As hard as the souls that littered the streets of this impoverished neighborhood that was lined with empty bottles of false illusions and overgrown weeds disguising themselves as people.

My plan.

Not my purpose.

Was still taken me to nowhere. To be continued.

©2017 All words & images by Tanya Graham unless otherwise noted.

My Plan Not My Purpose (part 2)

My Plan Not My Purpose