There is no appropriate way to begin, thoughts, a random flow, a stream of conscious clutter drifting in and out one word eclipsing the next in a heated race to the surface. Starting something is overwhelming at times. Where to begin? What to say? I tend to collect these things for a while then spill them forth with little or no restraint. There is no planning involved, just the rupture of a dam that mysteriously crumbles.
Once upon a time I was in love with a needle, I poured my soul into a spoon heating it up and recycling it into my veins. There were hours of rapture, nothing, everything, empty, and asleep. Life is easy when you measure it in grams, or less. I say it’s easy, that is a lie, nothing is easy about living to die, getting closer every day to nothing. At first there is relief, pressure subsides in waves of toxic euphoria, then there is pressure to find relief, euphoria fades to normal, normal fades to despair, you forget the quest and reach for sleep, sleep to chase, fear, fear of being awake, fear of feeling once more.
Feeling, something, anything, becomes as foreign as an alien language. Feeling becomes pain. Pain becomes everything, taking form in word, look, existing. You wake up with one goal in mind, “how can I stop myself from feeling today?” It is a losing battle. You either wake up or you die.
On waking you rediscover the world of the living, moving in and out of their ordinary lives, meeting and speaking, amusing themselves with this or that. These people are a mystery. What makes them function? How do they relate? What motivates them? Where do they hide? I found it difficult to transition from one world into the next, the overwhelming desire to disappear now replaced with an equal desire to belong, but how does one belong?
It is tempting to blend in and at first I attempted to do so, a tactic learned in the dark past. When you are nothing you can become anything, or so you think. Upon waking I began learning the intricate pieces that make me a man and so I began the metamorphosis to becoming human.
Now I find myself here, with you, with us, looking around at others who like me have changed, discovering the spectacular. We have overcome predefined roles and expanded our universe as it were, we are awake. When I was asleep I never knew what living was, now that I’m awake I never want to sleep.
“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer…
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil…”
