posted on March 20, 2003 @ 9:47 pm
�she looked at me and her eyes were erased of everything but tears.�
�. . . other times i try to tell myself i must accept certain private inevitabilities. i will live a life of continual deep fatigue, for example. i will carry in me, like a poison, like a virus, rancor for most things, and while this condition will not improve, nonetheless i will learn to live with my rancor as if it were a minor irritation. there will be many achievable things that i will not do and then there will come a time when i realize they are no longer even achievable.
other things seem to be awkward truths rather than inevitabilities. it occurs to me that what i lack in balance i make up for in my familiarity with fear and unease. and occasionally despair; and that this itself is a kind of balance . . . for no reason i can think of, the thought comes to me that the outlook of my life is narrowing, that things are closing off. i don�t think this truth but i feel it, sourly, in my stomach, and it�s as if my breath has been taken away from me, as when a roller coaster begins its plummet. whoosh. the outlook is undeniably narrowing. the horizon is shrinking. it�s hard to swallow, and my heart starts to pound.
. . . the tv is on�it�s something beautiful and interesting, a documentary, say, maybe david Attenborough and the great sperm whales. maybe cheetahs chasing down a zebra . . . i light a cigarette. there is nothing wrong with the world and nothing could ever be wrong. and then i feel�bang! just like that�that it would be better to be dead. what the fuck is going on here? life is a circle and death will make it a line, snap it suddenly away from repetitiveness, fling it out into the void, beyond geometry, where at least there�s relief from the friction of things? what the fuck is going on?�
�. . . for a while, in the gray between sleeping and waking, for seconds, or even a minute, it can feel okay to be alive. and then you wake, properly.
and it all comes rushing back. you ask the question, who am i? and the answer is always the same. i am nothing but need. i will hate today like every other day. it�s so hard to experience beauty when it all stands in contrast to a greater unbeauty.�
�but for now i drag through the weeks, one foot in the past and one in the future. i feel i am nothing but a dividing line. i don�t know who i am. they tell me there�s nothing wrong with that. they tell me today is all i have, and for the first time it begins to make sense. at times it seems like such hard work, to make it through each day. they say, of course, it�s early days, everything is new, what did you expect? you can�t sit on your arse and slide uphill. and i come to realize that all my small todays, the way i act, will lead into my tomorrow.
when i was using, it was like, tomorrow everything will be all right, so today doesn�t matter so much. i thought if i could hold y breath for long enough, then finally tomorrow, full of light and pollen, would arrive.