Sanity
Do we find happiness in our banal routines, or in the breaks we take from them?
Sitting. Drawing colored lines, reflecting on 1994. Everyone, at age 14, became animals, friendlies into aliens. I remember a kid that used to be on my old soccer team now made fun of my ears and took pleasure in it, and that concept changed my world view. EVERYONE was an enemy now, except my brothers-in-crime from the beach. I withdrew from them all, I was too young, not mentally tough enough.
Once a day, I stare briefly at a cylinder container of Lysol wipes, which I carry in my bag everyday, along with an empty pack of Marlboro Menthols. Occasionally, I’ll open the cylinder, and remove the clear jar with the purple lid with a butterfly on top, and observe the green contents. Sometimes, I’ll even steal away to open it up and take a smell, and I’m back for a second, in that glorious moment just before break up, when it seems you have all the trees you’ll ever need, and life just seems perfectly aligned to the righteous path.
Drawing. Staring blankly back at colored lines.
Writing is keeping me sane, healthy, even if it’s just these minuscule paragraphs and scraps that I compose on my graphed notepads while I ride the subway home, even if its about the people I observe, or my own reflections on how my life used to be, or how I might wish it would be, or how much I long for my addictions to wrap their cords around my neck once more. I have to pass the test of temptation. I am not lulled into the sense of safety provided by sobriety. I crave it, but I see and hear my friends speak in tongues only the stoned can hear.
I smell a tea, a strawberry tea.
Nothing spells relief better than that unwrapping of a strawberry phillie, or the opening of the tube of a strawberry White Owl; to has a reason to keep the right hand thumbnail a little longer than the rest, the crack of the cigar, the gutting, the licking of the leaf. I miss trees.
I think about going back to it every day. Several times, at that. It’s my reason to leave, to run, my way of escape. It makes me not want what I love. It holds me back.
So I stare, and I long for it.
