It's been overcast and rainy the last few days, with cold and unfriendly winds. I mention this because it's in stark contrast to my mood. I've met new people. It has been, and will continue to be, hard to do. Gathering what was left from my recent shredding and presenting it to new people has been difficult, but without a doubt profitable. It's become clear that my trust comes with a stratospheric premium these days; I have so little trust left of what anemic quantities there were to begin with. As a consequence, allowing myself to be honest requires real effort.
I've spent time with people who listen to and communicate with and love, me. I've been reminded how it feels to have someone's respect. To be trusted. To be touched. To be wanted. And even though I know how limited it may be, or fleeting, or ultimately illusory, it's exactly the sustinence my faith needed to reinvigorate my life.
I feel good. Thank you.
I'm nothing without you. My nights are devoid of stars. The crystal ball I stare into is dark. The warmest sleep is cold without you next to me. You are the other struck from me by the gods. My impenetrable fortress has a secret door left unlocked and open for only you. Seasons blur without you to mark them. In defiance of recollection, there isn't a moment of life without your scent.
You're gone.
Where on the spectrum can I find your absence? There is music, and you are there. There is the carefree, and I hear your voice. Where I sense boundaries, I see you breaking them. When I feel trapped, I watch you escape. My fear lives with yours. You kick me in the morning, a proud fight I admire from under furrowed brows. You are who I was, and who I hope to see overcome that memory.
You're gone.
Fighter. Scrapper. You wear your badges of courage in your eyes as well as your heart. Striving where others surrender, feeling where others seize, exploring where others fear to look, your strength is beyond mine. A cloak of reminiscence drapes you without burden. Looking into your eyes reflects past my view, into places my imagination cannot tread. I'm humbled as I'm filled with pride - with you.
You're gone.
And I consider myself bereft?
Tell yourself whatever you need to. Make the confessions you need to convince yourself what you did was right. Look at yourself and consider, was this the best you could do - was this the best you had to offer?
You fool, oh you fool.
So she told you what she knew. He said what needed saying. You took what you had and ran with it. You ran as hard as you could. It was the fear that made you do it, the terror of what was to come, the vision of impossibility.
You poor fool, oh you fool.
It's a comfort to see you're not alone. You're surrounded by righteousness, if not right. Listen to those voices that whisper the scampering truths you need to persist.
Sad fool, unknowing fool.
Do not fall prey to the knowledge you have. Strike yourself deaf to the pleas of your gut, and march grimly with the self-sacrifice of golden knowledge. Who are you to question what your lying heart tells you? Listen to the beckoning of betrayal and tremble in its view.
Oh, you terrible fool.
I rose with the sun this morning. It's warm and welcoming and it is my intention to be its mirror.
This is the sort of reflection I'm looking forward to.
There is something optimistic about lethally bad habits. I've been a smoker since I was 17, something I picked up in the most cliche situation ever devised. My first day at college, I was offered a cigarette by two extremely hot co-eds. I balked for just enough time to consider the social suicide that would've surely represented at the time, then took it as naturally as I could and proceeded to find a drink. Technically, I had my first cigarette after a particularly long work assignment my father had given me, back when that sort of thing could happen, from a pack of discarded Newports my sister had semi-hidden. It seemed like the sort of thing to do after a long and exhaustive job (thanks to clearly successful advertising) and at the time I remember thinking about just how accurate the ads had been.
My first drink had come long before then. I'm not sure when the first real drink happened, but likely before my teen years. All of them were raided from various parent's liquor cabinets, none of them locked of course, and indulged solely for the rocket-powered fun they invariably offered. Drinking during a time of near absolute absence of responsibility is a once in a lifetime experience, or at least one part of a lifetime experience. The only thing to have changed as I developed my taste for alcohol has been my refinement of tastes for alcohol.
Now past 30, I've had more than enough time to consider the predicted results, consequences, or penalties of these habits. I left running behind me sometime in my mid-twenties. Partying sober has become more dull than a slow work day. My resiliance to hangovers has both waxed and waned so that now it's more a test of my drinking skill and my endurance than it is my biological ability to recouperate. I cough up delightful tidbits whose sole purpose seems to be a vulgar reminder of how long it's been since I last smoked.
Nothing could be more clear to me than how deliberately I am cutting my own life short. Burma shave ads (look it up) had nothing on the ability of these posions to prepare oneself for what was certain to come. As with anticipating those signs, it's unavoidable to consider, however fleetingly, the impending death one is rushing headlong to.
So why continue? There's still plenty of time, right? So much time it may even be a good reason unto itself to continue! As I pointedly choose to stop using the impersonal pronouns, I can state that it is my considered opinion that my smoking and drinking are a conscious effort to end my own life. The facts certainly bear me out, as does their increased usage correspond to points in my life where the love of life (no hideous pun intended) has left me with little but these objects of deadly solice.
Why not something quicker? Why not something immediate? And we come to my opening statement - there is something optimistic about lethally bad habits. With such ready access to faster, or flatly certain, methods of dispatch, why muck about with the slow and clumsy dissolution these habits inflict? They're fun, one might suppose. They remind us of death without imparting it, thus giving us control, however small, over that which is ultimately master of all things. Playing with fire, eating it, or haphazardly disarming inhibitions with a wash of fire-water is an exhilirating way of passing the time. But I don't think that's it. I'm coming to see something else.
I know I'm going to die and I'm burning that time more quickly because at unpredictable increments I have lost my taste for life. I think that it's an expression of my hope for the future that I chose these particularly faulty methods of exit.
Many times in my life I've sat waiting. Waiting for the phone to ring, with her on the other end prepared to say those things I'm hoping with all my heart she'll say. Waiting for the doorbell to ring, or for the doorbell to be answered. Waiting for the time to pass long enough for the pain or despair that keeps us apart to disperse. It's during those all-encompasing moments of pure hope that I am most aware of the futility of it. Perhaps the futility of it all. As that time passes, the hope slowly fades and fades and fades away, until there simply is nothing left.
I mark that time in cigarettes and swirling washes of alcohol.
Where tragedy or tremendous truth is involved, blindness is one of the consistant themes of human mythology. Seers are invariably blind. Seekers who are too successful lose their human sight in trade for the superhuman sight they gain. Justice is blind. Truth is blinding. Socratic text describes this process with the cave and shadows parable, where the average person percieves nothing but shadows of the true world, the 'socratic ideal' being too perfect for one to see due to its blinding perfection. Even pop culture managed to illustrate this phenominon in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where merely to see what the Ark of the Covenant held within brought death.
In my teen years, I found the relentless assault of ignorance unbearable and sought a relief in the form of mind-expanding drugs and terrible but awesome surrender to whatever truth might be revealed by simply subduing whatever boundaries I found internally. I saw things then that I could not imagine, I could not predict, I hadn't the capacity or experience to understand, and ultimately showed me the frontiers of my perception.
Had I known it was a one-way trip, no pun intended, I am confidant I never would have begun exploring in the first place. It turned out to be a ratcheting process of sick-making depth, a bathysphere within which one deposited a soul and slashed the mooring cables. I saw, and the more I saw, the more I wanted to see. The answer to why turned out to be 'because'. If you think you understand that much, you do not understand what I'm attempting to convey. Not that it's your fault, it's not, but the search for truth reaches a point of no return with a celerity that posesses only one practical characteristic, that being an unavoidable and unstoppable momentum towards its goal.
What was at first an exhilirating adventure of self-exploration rapidly became a forced march towards
I'm too drunk to continue. Too drunk and too frightened. I don't want to see any more. I will continue to see, but I am well past the point of wanting it anymore. This degree of sight is worse than blindness.
Come up to meet you, tell you I’m sorry
You don’t know how lovely you are
I had to find you, tell you I need you
Tell you I set you apart
Tell me your secrets, and ask me your questions
Oh lets go back to the start
Running in circles, coming up tails
Heads on a silence apart
Nobody said it was easy
Oh it’s such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said that it would be this hard
Oh take me back to the start
I was just guessing at numbers and figures
Pulling your puzzles apart
Questions of science, science and progress
Do not speak as loud as my heart
Tell me you love me, come back and haunt me
Oh and I rush to the start
Running in circles, chasing our tails
Coming back as we are
Nobody said it was easy
Oh it’s such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be so hard
I’m going back to the start