Adventures between the
Ages of 20 and 30

I cannot, for the life of me, remember when I finally left my parents' house. Maybe this one day didn't even exist. The days of my youth were a continuous running away and returning. Some of it was out of my own free will, at other times it wasn't. Planned for and failed new beginnings. Somehow, I did graduate from junior high school, started an apprenticeship as a chef. I never finished it.

The day came when I no longer returned to my parents' house. Maybe I had already officially moved away from home. That's easily possible. I could ask my parents, but I don't care to do that. This is all about my memories, and if I don't recall it, it will just have to be that way.

My life between the ages of 20 and 30 was fairly similar to the years of my youth: many new beginnings, many downfalls. Many cities and encounters. Friendly people, mean people. Hope and piles of broken pieces. The change from a normal life to one without having anything sometimes happened so fast that even I didn't understand how I had already ended up there again. A life lived within the eye of a storm, slammed from one wave of incidents to the next one. So fast, it didn't ever leave me time to get my footing.

Sometimes I pose myself the question whether I should not have done exactly that: to get my footing, to put my feet on the ground. To work up a better concept. To not live from day to day, but to build a future for myself. Not just temporarily, but for good. At the moment I pose myself this question, I realize that it is the wrong question. Because this was exactly what I had already tried to do. I never meant to live the way things turned out to be. Each city, each job and, somehow, each relationship was connected to the hope and the plan to get back on my feet.

I don't know why I kept failing over and over. Outsiders may look at it as being my pride or my stubbornness. But it wasn't just that. Today I believe that it was fear. Anybody, who would have been able to help me, and most likely would have done so, would have found out the truth about me. Everything about me. Everything about Felix. That was exactly what I didn't want to happen. I wanted to just be normal, like all other boys and men. A job, money, a roof over my head. Accepting help would have meant facing the truth that none of what I seemed to be about was true. How would people react to such a disclosure? I didn't want to wait for the result. I turned away before they could do so. I often left before somebody could show me the door. My fear of rejection and disappointment was stronger than the fear of hunger or loneliness.

When you're in a state of panic, you can't make a plan and think logically. There may be exceptions. But,