I look in a mirror and see Peter. I listen to my voice on the phone and wonder who it is. I look back at what I have done and wonder why. Who am I ? I am so caught in trying to figure out how to stay sober that I have lost who I was and have not yet found who I am. I read, listen and speak, trying to figure out what direction to go. I am mostly a jumble of thoughts that make me tired and unsure. I do see progress, to be sure, but at what price ?

Sometimes I look in that mirror and am satisfied. Sometimes I look and see nothing I like, a broken grey haired man, beaten down by the darkness within. At others the light shines through and can’t be contained. Some days there is a blank staring back at me. I spend a lot of time trying to match the image of who I see to how I feel. I wonder how this kid got in this old pot bellied body. How the kid stopped growing and the body kept going. Didn’t it know that I was still back there ?

I want so desperately to see who I feel like, to like what I see, to like how I feel. I want to get to that point where I can say that we match, the inside and outside. I don’t know if that will ever happen. I’ve had moments. I wonder what it would be to be a piece of concrete. When you see a piece of concrete you know what you are looking at, I would imagine if a piece of concrete could feel it would have some pretty solid opinions of itself, it wouldn’t wonder to much about what its goal was in life.

There’s a line in a song that I like. It goes some what like this: if you could crack the code would you give up all the pain and suffering, the beauty of the light upon this earth and the sweetness of the leaving. Some days I am screaming inside: CRACK THE CODE, CRACK THE CODE. Other days I am okay with working in that beautiful Faith that says its okay whatever comes next. Its okay who others see when they look at me, because that’s who I feel like.