Coffee with myself

I sat down for coffee with a younger scruffier nihilistic version of myself. He looked at me with a fire in his eyes. I recognized it all to well. He hated the world. The hate I used to feel. My younger self knew only hate and pain. The young mind maimed with little staples of injustice.
He had to leave the home he grew up in. Not the house, they had only lived in that house a few years. The boy had been part of a poor Massachusetts family. They floated around different apartments all through his childhood as his determined mother fought to make something better for them. She was proud and strong. The boy was young and stupid. He did not understand any of this. He didn't see her fighting the state. A state that stamps your class on your forehead at a young age. My mother, daughter of an immigrant and a criminal of a more robin hood like sort was not destined to have what she does. No, if the state had its way we were supposed to stay in the projects, and eventually die of poverty in poverty. The mother was stronger than that. She climbed to higher feats. They didn't always get along. She fought the state within it. The boy couldn't see the point. The state for him was uninhabitable. The ethos of capitalism was devoid of any value.
The boy tried drugs, he had long hair, all the silly little rebellions. He read Marx, and Camus. He thought he could lash back at the system he hated so much. The boy wrote of the evils of capital. He grew to hate money. He grew to hate the system. The boy even disliked the people. What could he do? He withdrew into despair. Hate was all he knew. He wanted to die. He felt exiled in an alien place.
The boy rejected religion at a very young age. His first question was why did they have to worship the American god? He was young and silly, he talked to priests about the Egyptian pantheon, he was in 5th grade. The boy was silly. He studied philosophy, the Greeks, the French, the Germans, and he fell in love. Philosophy came to answer so many questions. Maybe it didn't maybe the boy just had more questions now? The boy in fact did. The reason philosophy did so much good for him was that he was finally able to express his pain. He didn't reject god because he just never felt him, but because he came to a logical philosophical conclusion as to said deity's rejection, next he didn't hate America, and its people; no, the boy hated capitalism and the rich. He grew. He studied.
The boy felt pain. He felt alone. He succumbed to often to horrendous escapist binges completely unconcerned with life or death. He used to joke, he would say love is the most beautiful thing in the world. He would say he would give anything for it. The boy believed he would never have someone to hold. Eventually, the boy found companionship, they never stayed around to long. He learned how hollow love was. Love wasn't the grandiose deity the boy had dreamed of. Love was a used rubber, an empty bottle, and a warm empty spot on the bed. A woman had laid there the night before. She was gone today. Life continued its painfully absurd character.
He fought on. The boy read more Camus. He read Nietzsche, Fanon, Celine, Bukowski, Burroughs, Burgess, and more. The boy read less Marx. He learned about psychology, sociology, anthropology, and history. He grew more lucid. The boy read. He wrote. He loved, he hated.
I like this point in his life. I remember it. This is when we met. He was still young and confused. He went on a hajj. He stopped at all the old spots of his youth. He and a good friend went around, older more ready. They conquered in past times where they had failed. They built, they destroyed. They even sparred. The boy came home a little more radical, but still lost.
He followed a strange and bizarre path. He woke up one day in a cell. The boy knew something. He looked at the men who had kidnapped him, and dragged him there. The boy made a vow. He said. If I ever end up in a cell again it will be for the right reasons. At that moment the boy became the man I am today. He promised to stop the excess tyranny of the monsters in power. He knew the path he wanted to take, the details didn't matter, only the end result. He would be free or die.