(no subject)
"This isn't a good time to break down, go all quest-for-freedom on my own ass."
see cut for semi-autobiographical short story. i haven't slept at all yet :)
This isn’t a good time to break down, go all quest-for-freedom on my own ass. This is just not the time. And yet it is happening anyway. One’s fragile mental state can shatter at any moment, and yet it seems fond of spontaneously combusting at exactly the moments when it is most damaging to us. Why is it that I can no longer hold myself together, that the duct tape which is keeping the socially functional part of my brain has now chosen to dry up? I will never understand, I suppose. I will never understand until I am locked up and forced to understand. Until then, I will lock myself away in my private enclave, my cocoon. I will remain here in a vicious cycle of insomnia and procrastination. In this box I have made my home, I will listen to melancholic Aerosmith songs and not complete important assignments due the next day. In this cocoon, I will console myself with childish games and bad hair metal imitations. It is 2:53 am, but I will not rest. I will not lay myself down to fall victim to my dreams. I will remain wide awake until tomorrow dawns on me, forcing me to enter a new day.
I feel that my mind is slipping away from me, but what can I do. I must carry on. I must slip away from my cocoon and pretend that I am happy being me, that I am okay with being alone, that I don’t mind my prom date bailing on me at the last possible minute. I will use my act, so carefully developed and honed over the course of my life to pretend that my tiny useless world is not crashing down around me. I will pretend that my heart is not spazzing to a newly erratic rhythm, that I’m not hearing death rattling in my closet. I will pretend that I am confident, and spontaneous, and intellectual and that I possess admirable qualities. Though my seamless act may crack at times, it remains impenetrable to the high schoolers’ eyes. They cannot see me, not even if they wanted to. I am but an empty shell of a person, just another face randomly encountered in that trance-like passing from class to class. I survive for four years on the basis that not one of these thousand people will ever know me. They are incapable of caring for or respecting anyone but themselves. I am no different. How can I respect those that cannot respect each other? I cannot even respect myself, and thus I am equivalent to them. Nay, I am less than them. I cannot ask them to care, I would not expect them to care. I no longer care. How can one be worthy of caring when one cannot even care about oneself? Yes, this is the rubbish my logic has been reduced to. Too many nights of 4 hours of sleep, surviving on breakfast bars and weekends of boozing. I have sustained myself on a lie, and so it shall remain.
I shall die encapsulated in a lie. And it won’t even bother me. I will be placed six feet into the earth by unfeeling undisturbed eyes. I have made no impact, no impression. I am a phantom, a shadow, incapable of leaving a mark, not even a single touch. I have done nothing in my time here but waste time, mine and others. I have wasted precious oxygen, vital for the survival of productive beings, wasted space that could have been used for some worthwhile purpose. But no more shall I be equated with the lowest of low beings. I will be lower than previously thought possible. When I go though, it shall be of my own hand and of my own choice. I fear unexpected death, but I do not fear the fate I have chosen for myself. I have control this time. I can reach for my rum and my pills whenever I should so choose, count my line of 20 orange capsules and break free of my cocoon; a beautiful butterfly at last. I am flying, away from this earthly prison, to soar with angels, or to associate with demons. I have made my choice, and no doubt it is a wise one. I see more than they think, I know more than they know. I will paint it black, and the sun will never rise on my four walls again.
***
As I dive-bomb into my world of depression and hatred, I am reminded of a long ago child. Not much has changed about that child, for she is still the misfit who never really found her place and never finished her work until the last minute. She still has her fiery temper and rabid imagination. She has dreams of being someone else, and narrates to herself the way her life could/should/would be. This child worked to find moments of glory, told herself to savour these moments, because these would one day be her memories. These memories of years past are tinged in a sunlit glow, whereas memories of recent days are tinged with a hint of distrust. These memories are forced, they have been preserved in my mind only because I have told myself “Hey! You could tell someone about this one day. Remember this!”. These moments have not been of pure exhilaration, of bliss, of pure unadulterated happiness. They have been tainted by the silent nagging at the back of my quickly crumbling mind, that nagging feeling that tells me this feeling will not last. Just as quickly as my moment of glory has arrived, it fades back into the darkness of the night, and is quickly replaced by a desire for darkness and anger. This needs to stop, and it seems that it is back to the drawing board.
I need alcohol. Volumes upon volumes, truck loads upon truck loads, infinite amounts. I would live the life of a rock star, wearing denim and leather and cuffs and boots. I would throw parties and even though I knew that the people around me were not true friends, I would feel part of the circle for those few hours and I could carry on living. I would be too drunk and too euphoric to notice. My life would be one of excess, of glam, of rock. I would die at 27, but it would be okay for some reason. I would die no older than the uncle I never met, no older than those rock stars I never met who became victims of their own circumstances. They would stop for a brief and fleeting moment to comment “What a shame” and the move quickly by. My music career was nothing revolutionary, despite a few Top 20 cracks and a style all my own. And I would have as much alcohol as I wanted, a permanent high, no need to come back down to the meagre existence I endured before I was swept off to California to live in the sun.
It is 5 am and the sun is working at rising again. I don’t know why it bothers. I’m not done my assignment and it likely doesn’t make sense anyway. Oscar Wilde once said that the “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” And it isn’t. It never will be. My life is a serious of impure truths and complexities. For me, the complexities lie in the everyday, finding a way to function amongst failing hearing and elaborate death fantasies. My truths are actually lies, and I have based my life on a falsely narrated fantasy of the way things would have been had I acting in such and such a way. Naturally it doesn’t make sense, but I’m certain that it would if the whole world were on acid or something equally powerful. I’ve wasted too much time and too much of my life in this place, I decide. The time to get out is now. The time to go to California is now. Who needs to graduate when there is a shining beach and the promise of a brand new tomorrow on the western horizon? Certainly not I. So that is where I will go, with a bottle of pills in case I don’t make it.