“My life is more like one foot in the twilight zone and other on a banana peel and any second I’m going to slip and be gone.”

Frank. You are singular. You are not from this world. You have never been of this world. No matter how similar our DNAs are, you do not belong.

We do not know how you came to this world, but you came. You looked around, and realized you were different, not just different, but, DIFFERENT. When you were younger you were not understood nor appreciated, but rather constantly laughed at, belittled, and abused. It didn’t help when you grew up in foster homes ran by “people straight from hell”. Nobody knew what to do with you. “Is Frank different for the sake of being different, or is he different?” everyone wanted to know. They studied you and concluded, “In any world Frank would be different”. And yes, for once they were right. But you were here. You had to try.

You tried to learn the rules of this world. You studied the physical world and got a MIT computer engineering degree. You studied the human bodies and got a MD but never practiced. You studied the mind and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy. You observe how everything works in this world. You are brilliantly bright. You are a genius. You know you are smarter than everyone else. You are. And you think you have understood everything. However, even your mind is out of this world. You are a contradiction to yourself. You have no real common sense and you make no sense at all! You do not understand how people work and you often wonder why people act the way they do even though you know the answer too. You devised a set of rules about this world, so you could live by them and live. You are mean to people you think are not nice, and generous to those who are nice to you. You think you are right--how else can you think? But there shall never be a way for you to evaluate yourself except with your own internal wits.

You believe in “truth, kindness, humors, bravery, and love—most of all love”. You live by the rules you invent and you prescribe them to others with ferocity. You tell stories of many roles you have played in this world--engineer, hacker, political negotiator, spy, carpenter, gardener, adventurer, K2 climber, pilot, grandson, son, foster son, brother, lover, husband, father, friend, patient, boss, city councilor, convicted felon(for stuffing a cut tree in trash bags), story-teller, comedian, philosopher, Taoist, writer, painter, poet..... After all you consider yourself a poet and everything is a poem to you. You are immensely fearless and you know no boundary. You strive to be capable--physically bold, mentally determined, emotionally daring, financially wealthy. Still, life can be so difficult for you at times. You just want to live and be in. “Yes I want to be alive and yes I will start where I start”, you tell me. You keep trying.

“Sometimes I think I am in a window looking at world inside wondering how to get in”, you write. And you are dyslexia and cannot even spell and do grammar! You say you have migraine, you have depression, you have allergies, you had pneumonia, you had leukemia, been struck by lightning, bit by a shark, and hit by a meteor. I don’t know how you could have survived all these and the heavy medications. They even say you are crazy, but you know how to get a certificate proving your sanity, and you write a poem about it afterward. You know everything, yet you know nothing. You don’t even know who you are. Are you a butterfly who is just dreaming, “or worse a brain-in-the-vat-ala-the-matrix”? You don’t know. And I don’t, either.

Sometimes you think you are god, and other times you fight him. You are more human, more real, more primal than any other human being in the world. You are saturated with human defects and human triumphs. But you are not of this world. You can never get in no matter how hard you try. That is your eternal curse and sorrow.

I think, the only door between the two worlds is love.

6/19/2004
6/21/2004