I Have Considered

A glimpse into addiction

Catastrophically real. Surreptitiously untrue.

 

« I have your blood under my nails” �" the words evaporated from her lips.

Who has not asked themselves               at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?

I surrender and find refuge in words, the mappings of my wounds, the tracings of the flesh and blood you devoured, and spat out. Near to the wild heart of life, silence had also taken a seat that night. EVERYTHING. And this word is peace, serious and incomprehensible as a ritual. EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING is vague, light, and silent. You will find me in the splinters of EVERYTHING, into fragile shards. Interconnected galactical spectre of splintered self.

A consequence of me.

A reconnaissance of me.

Me.

Answer.

Resonating me.

Silence. Swallow.

“And I can’t be running back and forth forever, between grief and high delight.” Salinger said.

You have arrived.

This is the hardest thing I have had to do but the only thing worth doing. To leave. Walk away. Save myself. I have tried to save you, rescue you when the only one worth saving was myself.

I want to put it off but why, in the hopes that today you will say it all, all the spew of words I have waited for? I make amends here.

Tonight, tonight. I could go back to my old habits, demons, or I could be alone. I chose you again. I opened the door, let you in. You ravaged the place and left as if nothing. My own personal hurricane. You were a heart-shaped knife.

“There’s good self-consciousness, and then there’s toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.” Said Foster Wallace.

A lifelong prisoner on the island of myself. Am I an addict? I want a cigarette. I am tired. A glimpse into a Wikipedia article on Love Addiction… the Love Withdrawal:

This longing may result in extreme debilitating pain, obsession, and otherwise avoidable destructive and/or self-destructive behaviours, including violence (to others or self), increased feelings of shame, depression, impaired emotional growth, chronic emptiness, loneliness, and loss of intimacy and enjoyment in life.

Chronic Emptiness. An apt term, adequate, let’s explore:

A common symptom of emptiness is the feeling that life lacks meaning.

Emotionally numb, despondent, isolated, and anxious.

The attempt to fill that void in unfulfilling ways.

Am I a Borderline Personality?

Impulsivity and unstable sense of self.

Let me be honest, instead of veiling the truth with intellectual bullshit, even if perceptive. I resent you mother, for having emotionally manipulated into espousing all your causes at such a young age, to have constantly positioned me as your rescuer and saviour, never allowed to feel for myself, with no room for ME. You became my cause perdue. The ultimate victim, because you’re my mother. You projected, built me in your image. Projected so much that I have become eclipsed. So much so, that I am sat here, wondering who I am, what I want. You are my chronic emptiness. I have turned into a chaser of an impossible maternal blanket. A love so ideal, that seemingly only attainable through extraordinary obstacles and struggles. I want a cigarette.

And here’s the abject truth. You have probably done it all unconsciously, like all those who came after you. This is why I forgive, I make amends, for your emotional blackmail, for your “ways”, for who you are, accidently. It tortures me. It gnaws at me. It fills me with that unredeemable feeling of GUILT. A counterbalance of the emotional black hole with your seeming sacrifice �" that ultimate victimhood. Glorified, ultimate victim. Captive rescuer. Trapped in your loving claws. You squeeze enough to mask the suffocating embrace, you squeeze enough to feign love. I fill in the gaps with my over-active, over-compensating need to forgive you, and forgive myself. No, to punish myself for being unable to detach, release from your grip. I seek you in my destruction, and simultaneously I chase ‘I’, the reflection of a semblance of ME in those girls I encounter.

I obsess, incessantly visit and revisit moments, guilt, shame, compulsive behavior towards punishment. For what?

You in punitively go unpunished. So, yes, I kill you, over and over again. Revenge fantasies. I mourn you. Seemingly detached and together. I mourn myself. Without you, with you dead, I can BE.

A rebirth. No, a birth. What will become of me. You have swallowed me whole, now you are spitting me out in pieces, and I am left with the dicing task of re-assembling, or assembling.

Desire and its founding conditions of lack.

Release.

I am unconvinced�"a black miracle- dissatisfied. And then you’re in trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally, deadly serious trouble, because this Substance has finally removed its smiley face mask to reveal centerless eyes and a ravening maw, and the face is yours. You are in the kind of a hell of a mess that either ends lives or turns them around.

Turns them. Around.

Excessive and addictive. Fight or flight. Seek a balance that is bound to sway drastically one way or another, or just give in?  Moderation and balance. Everything until exhaustion and then move on to the next fix. Addiction. Moderation, how absurd. Awareness? Sure. A circuit of destruction, either of the self or the thing itself. Destruction and addiction. My companions. No, cliché. I wonder what I want. Yet, anything desired, is cunningly, or masterfully obtained through discipline, ambition, will-power, to be exhausted, and then becomes that stuffed toy that gets discarded in a frozen position it will lie in until the end of time. No half-assed job here. How dull, this notion of middle-ground, of balance. How unsatisfactory. The narcissistic embodiment of All or Nothing. Watch me burn, ablaze, I am that building on fire. Dare I say Phoenix. Should the Phoenix be the emblem of addiction. I ramble, indulge. Bullshit, in so many words, so so many words. Addict. Not just one cup of coffee, ten. Not one beer, five. Not just an English BA, a PhD. All or Nothing.

“I am not what you see and hear”. �" Foster Wallace said.

The fear of falling remains a constant, yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up, can understand the jump. Not really.

And so it goes…

A compulsive and unhealthy relationship to their own thinking. Addict.

A closed circuit. Chronic Emptiness.

I don’t want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.

It is the desire to kill. Death Wish. To suppress my tormentor. The constant existence in panic. The ultimate victim. I want to suffocate, exterminate you. My guilt. The thing that gnaws at me. Arrested development. I want to murder you., No, kill yourself. Disappear.

An identity crisis for the identity-less. Search, search, search. Destroy. I am agitated and dissipated.

Addiction to one’s thoughts is a proponent. Being here, as much as desired, seems to means to be constantly caught up in a storm of expectations and aggression, or agressivity. I want a cigarette… less. My Avalanche. When it comes to a stand still, it suddenly reveals a strange beauty, and its monstrously gigantic dangerous nature, comes to a standstill too�"an enormous landfall, revealing a sublime beauty. Nature, or a moment of quiet after the precipice of eminent death. You survived, and looking back, you can only admire the Thing that could’ve swallowed you whole. You survived.

“In moments among my various agonies, I noticed the beauty that surrounded me, the wonder of things both small and large…” �" Strayed said.

I considered my options. There were only two and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.

And so I walk on…

Generational. Do we pretend or vow to rectify the generational mal-etre that ensues?

Power begets Power.