Fall of ’22

Everyday I peel myself out of my outstretched mattress on top of a mattress in my studio apartment, sometimes night, sometimes day, sometimes one turning into the other. Almost always after a consecutive period of no sleep.

I roll myself out of bed to resume the debacherous tasks in front of me of not feeling like shit. Involving copius amounts of foreign substances that go in my body in some form or fashion. It's been months since I got home, and the two weeks that I promised myself I would drink to decompress has now become no less than eight months.

How odd to go from your largest challenge in life being staying alive, to your largest challenge in life becoming living. Destroying yourself because of the things you saw while staying alive, because of the things you did to stay alive, and because of the people who didn't live. What a mind fuck.

Life is full of contradictions but few as stark as the realization that the self destructive streak in you is the literal ying to it's sources yang. The ebb and flow is more like a light switch to a Amazon warehouse, than a wave on some shitty beach on the Eastern Shore that barely laps at the pebble covered excuse for itself.

I would like to preface anything I write here by saying that I have found it incredibly difficult to write, and I will probably look back on this and frown in disgust and embarrassment despite not expecting anyone to ever read this -- I have a special talent for loathing myself in any and all fashions beyond the ones that are extrinsically validated. Because I don't approve of anything I am or do, nor do I feel like I deserve to feel as bad -- to have to write about it -- as I do.

I miss the youthful enthusiasm that I once had for life, I miss the zealous nature that I sought out what I liked, and fanaticism with which I did it. I miss feeling like people would be by my side no matter what, and understand what I needed from them. I miss feeling like my girlfriend would never leave me after four years of her putting me through indescribable bullshit that would drive most people to cut sling load, but me to stick around and eat out of her poisonous hand.

I miss me, and who I was before this insanity kicked off that I so willingly plunged into. I miss what my life was which is absolutely fucked to say considering that it was not anything to write home about in the fucking slightest.

I wake up. I remember and behave like a chimpanzee muttering and halfway yelling obscenities and telling my own mind to shut up while pacing my apartment. I shut out the memories of everything that I had before the war, and everyone I had who perished there or who left me in my darkest hour after. I hear a noise at my door, I have no clear line of sight to my front, this forces me into a peephole patrol crackhead like figure who stares out the tiny baby's first fucking porthole of a view I have available, I cuss at nothing in particular and chug back towards my next station.

I open my laptop and on my way to my desk look around in dismay at the state of my belongings strewn across my apartment.

I seek out connection in shared experiences among my community which can be hit or miss -- but has provided me with my only form of real relief that I've found beyond large bottles of clear liquor and stimulant abuse.

I lift weights but only at the house because leaving my apartment and these four walls that I call a house is too daunting for me due to the level of suspended tension and hyperawareness of what really lays in wait out there being a constant in my life.

Every single day I wake up and feel like shit, I drink, I feel like shit some more, I get drunk enough and feel average. I reach out to someone I can relate to in hopes that I experience the fleeting feeling of relief associated with my old life to some degree. Often this happens and I feel for a brief hour or two or three even the familiar excitement, shared comradery and joy. Then the curtain closes again, and I can't find my way out.

I drink more. I buy more booze, I do more dope. I listen to more music so loud that I can't think but then still do. I lift weights. I sweat ridiculously due to the lack of alcohol in my system and the tap dance of a cocktail like uppers and downers falling off rhythm thereby failing me.

So I grab the bottle and grimace as I raise it to my lips, or pour it into what used to be my protein shaker and mix it with whatever's available to chase. I hear another noise, and have to go check it out lest I allow someone to get the drop on me.

Documenting all of this is incredibly disturbing to me as it puts down on paper what I already knew but now can see in front of me.

I don't know why or how or where I broke. I can't tell you the defining moment or pivotal spot or place in time during my experiences where it all came cascading forwards like a waterfall in my mind. It didn't. It just streamed, trickled, and dropped tiny little fat fucking water drops into my psyche until one day I found myself here writing this godawful fucking whiney diatribe of a text.

I've spent my whole life dealing with trauma and emotions one way, talking about them and trying to dump them on people I could trust as quickly as possible and as much as possible. Much to everyone else's annoyance and conversation fatigue.

It doesn't seem to have done much good, and increased them in an intensifying way that was outrageously uncomfortable. I tried that for these first eight months. I've given up on doing what the popular talk therapy contemporary band waggoners recommend. Maybe the old guys who used to tell you to shut the fuck up and suck it the fuck up were right all along.

I'm done talking about this shit from now on, I've tried on numerous occasions and received beyond negative feedback. Complete abandon is what I was met with by the people that I expected the most from, which wasn't that fucking much to begin with.

Ever since it drained in the light, I skulk in the dark. Trying to suppress my emotions. Separating the emotion.

It feels right though, to separate it in this moment. To abandon those that abandoned me and will, to further my own and forge my own -- path in life. I don't plan on talking about my experiences anymore. I don't plan on ever using my current habitual and physically dependent use of alcohol as an excuse not to fulfill my obligations to myself. Not to anyone else, who see so fit to place them upon me.

I'm going to work towards getting on the road. Finding the land I want to buy and once I have enough money buying it.