And before you know it, you’re bitter, the sickness of sadness sliding down your throat and into your lungs, captured in your capillaries and pushed into your extremities, ultimately plunging back into your core, the coronal center of this world, your orbit and your existence. Bleating, until the muscles don’t have the strength to beat anymore. It’s a cautious and careful curse.
But a cunning one.
You believe you understand, but it’s all context. It’s your truth, not necessarily reality. When you turn to face truth in the cracked pane, things are much clearer but less complete.
It’s been a year of crevices and crags, of highs not thought attainable and lows abysmal. Of weddings. Of funerals. Of three failed relationships, and the further distancing of cherished friends. Of chances and choices, of evolution and decay. Of the release of my first major artistic project, and the realization that I don’t have an artistic product that I survive off of, if I needed to. Of physical steps backwards, and spiritual steps forward. Of empty days and emptier nights.
Of giving up. Giving in. Giving away for the sake of us. Time is the greatest xenomorphine the soul can buy; you give of yourself until the old you is a numb reflection of the person you used to hold dear. But the disconnection is addictive and intoxicating. It becomes you. It changes you. It redefines you into something lost, out side of the circles and the numbers of common society.
It marks your days and changes your ways.
Today is ten ten, once again. I’ll always be tied to this day, the one day in my life that I’ve ever committed my future to another, that I ever vowed to protect another with my life, that I lived the life of my parents and their parents before them and all the generations previous. I am an anomaly, I suppose; a cunning and cut-off new breed that has no past, whose given name is even the thing of a ghost story. Without a past, the future is a leafless tree in a shallow graveyard.
I am not depressed. People tend to think that I am. Depressed people don’t function well as normal humans. I can function just fine; I am just darker now, the colors of pain stained onto the cloth of this heathen existence. The nice turned ice. The frown without the ability to fully stay up-side-down.
So, nod and smile then. The sherpa can’t read the map anymore anyway; he seems to have lost clarity some time ago, drunk on the thin mountain air and the bitter milk of regret. Regardless, we must keep ascending, in order to survive and have things like computers, and broadband and Starbucks and caffeine and socially-important standing so we can attract women and followers and fans and pseudofamily. Man, do we need this.
Addicted to each other, we are. Can’t get enough of each other, we seem. So impressed with who we are. We promote ourselves through pages and social connections and butterfly-like engagements. With egos not easily satiated, we lust for each other. For what we have and who we are. Or what we can do. For the temporary respite from solitude. For now, rarely forever these days. Solitude finds you like a debt collector with an urgent commission.
We always pay. Eventually. The mountain claims more than it allows to summit. You’re just another number, no matter the latitudes.
Kick the sherpa and see if he responds. He might know the right path through the rough. But, honestly, do you trust his guidance? How do you mark the words of a dead man? Do you reckon his honesty, or lament his sentence? I would apologize to my guide, but part of methinks he’s led me a bit astray, away from the mountain and into the vast pasture of the drift.
You believe you understand, but it’s all context. It’s your truth, not necessarily reality. When you turn to face your guide and his drunk visage, things are much clearer but less coherent.
But that’s the way we like it, more drunk than sober.
More bitter than better.
Less than more.
More lie than
life.