18. The Pharmacy Key
Because where we come from, you understand, things like kindness and concern are award-worthy acts of humanitarianism. It takes us a lot effort to feel and emote anything real and sympathetic because we are dead. We are pissed off poltergeists in our skeletal world of tour buses and dingy amplifiers; we are ghosts, haunting the busy venues and crowded bars of countless cities across the South, just trying to make enough movement and noise so someone will notice we exist. We are angry and we are floating, always floating, turning ourselves inside out and hoping someone will see us.
There is something unnerving about meeting a person who is just like you, someone who is your emotional and mental mirror image, and it isn't because you've found another person who shares and believes in all the same fucked up ideas as you. It's scary because if you are rejected and pushed out by this person you are so wholly immersed in, this human who is part you, well, then what? If you can't even stand yourself, where do you go from there?
Rejection of self is the loneliness to which he and I should be banished to, but we are too shallow to be truly lonely; we are only bored. We try to escape it occasionally, by engaging ourselves with other human beings, by sex and eroticism, but we only find boredom once again.
I'm a realist.
But he continues. "You aren't a realist by any means, kid. You can't feel love because you can't see people. They aren't real to you; they are characters playing a role to fulfill some self-mutilation cycle you require. Need and want, these don't equal love, darlin'. They are mutually exclusive; they have to be. Empathy is non-existent to you. You have ostracized yourself from what life is really about; you live in a purgatory you've created. When you stop lusting for companionship and salivating over acceptance, you will find love. Until then, you are a social parasite. Beautiful and sexy, but a sycophant all the same. A succubus and a pariah."
He adjusts his leg slightly, the one that isn't broken, and he says, "That red head boy that you've lost your hit over... You make yourself sick because you think you love him. You think you love him because you think you want him and you think you need him. Why does love need to be a commodity, an item to be attained for you to be happy and sated? Why isn't just wanting enough? Why can't you just have an emotion and own it as it is? Why even pursue it to it's end? Love is the story, it is not the final chapter.
"And you know if you finally get him--" He's looking at me directly now, glaring at me coldly with his dark eyes, "--if you sleep with him, you'll hate him. You know you will. You'll despise him because he will have deigned to come down to your level. He will have been so low as to love the unlovable, to indulge you despite your insane idealism he knows he could never live up to. But you want him, so I'm sure you'll have him, and then you'll be disgusted by him. He'll become just another guitarist you've roped in; another name in your 'musician's-bedded' collection. You and your friends will trade pictures of his band like they're baseball cards or some shit. He'll end up as nothing more than a name used to justify yourself and what you do. He'll be your next great trophy of emotional persecution. There, my dear, is your satisfaction, and there is the death of your desire."
Then we both lay in silence, listening to the muffled footsteps in the hallway beyond.
Thinking about satisfaction.
Mourning the death of desire.
I loved him then for saying it all.
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