And so?
Perhaps this morning is a good time to shut off my surface and conscious thinking.
Yes. I think now is a good time to turn off the tough switch and, for now, I will take myself to the depths of streaming consciousness.
No thinking. Just let my words go.
Okay?
I wonder how this all came to pass. I wonder when it was, exactly.
When did the first become the last and the last become the first?
Or when did the so-called average surpass and move beyond the highly regarded scene of popularity?
I remember.
I remember the nights out and the pretentious crowds and superficial, or surface level beauties who swore that it would be them who inherited the earth.
But where are they now?
When did this change?
When did the beauty of youth recede like an outgoing tide in a stagnant bay?
When did the clear waters turn murky and become disregarded and foul?
I say foul, as in the stench of a new lifeless category. I say this as if to recognize that skin-deep beauty has faded to gray and that a special rottenness decayed and degraded our fake beauties with truth.
I remember.
I remember before age stepped in and changed complexions from smooth to wrinkled; and alas, i see this now and I understand that the truth of heart is our only beauty. That is, if we choose to be beautiful.
(Or ugly)
Physical nature fades and one can no longer rely on the wealth of their looks.
I say this now and I will say this again.
No matter how beautiful someone is on the outside, if they are ugly on the inside, then they can only be average at best.
But I remember.
I remember being drawn in.
Yes, I was fooled by my assumptions of purity and I believed the lies that seemed as beautiful as can be.
I remember the nights and the places. I remember the crowds and the club scene Downtown. I remember the front doors, sectioned off by red velvet ropes and how the beautiful people were allowed their free pass.
I remember the average or the so-called common and nearly peasant-like people who stood on the outside of the fancy New York City club scene, ritzy as ever.
They stood on the outside and watched the upper crust and social royalty enter into the elite sections. They were greeted by red carpet on top of the pavement, penned in with gold stanchions, holding the swoops of red velvet ropes.
I remember the general or generic, unclaimed beauty who seemed plain or everyday, which is seldom seen or recognized because this beauty more than the glitter and glamour of the assumed elite.
I was shown this in disbelief, the difference between real and fake beauty.
I learned about this, years ago, and I was taught how plain beauty could be more beautiful than the commercialized versions of elegance.
All these years . . .
I was wrong.
So painfully wrong.
I didn’t know.
I was unaware.
I was taken aback and blown away by the softness of skin and the curves of my desire.
To me, this is beautiful.
And yes, beauty has curves. Beauty has confidence and untouchable spirit, despite the accused or assumed flaws. This is truly beautiful. Hence, this sort of beauty comes with a high that sent me beyond the white horse that used to rule my bloodstream.
And yes, beauty is addicting.
At least, beauty like this is addicting . . .
Or maddening, like the stirring craze a junkie assumes when the last of their meal is gone and the height of euphoria is about to crash. In comes the shakes and the sick ideas of how the high dives into the excess of despair.
Next is the anxious fear that somehow, this beauty will disappear. And next, the fear spins our thought machine into red-alert emergencies.
Now what?
How does one experience such height or such beauty and then go back to regular form of everyday living?
How do you see someone who makes you feel impenetrable or strong, alive, and wild? Lastly, how can one feel this feeling and then go back to the lowness of nothing?
This is what beauty is.
This is when you know someone is truly beautiful.
You can’t live without them.
All the world can go to hell and then, the last can be first and the first can be first, or as it stands out to me now, everyone can be first and I would be fine to be last, so long as I had this drug.
Her . . .
Just let me have this feeling, or this aliveness of beauty.
Let me have the view of this; all seen in the deep pools, otherwise known as the eyes of her soul.
To hell with the red carpet.
To hell with the social debutants.
To hell with the elite and the social status climbers.
Fuck the leaches, or face-lift plastic surgery and silicone lives of those who used to steal the scene.
Where is there beauty now, 30 years later?
However, I do remember looking from the outside and wishing that I could be “in” and beautiful too.
I remember standing on the outside of the red velvet ropes, hoping to be picked, and if I was, I found myself uncomfortable and hoping to God that someone would value me as “enough” and say, hey, I think you’re beautiful too.
Well . . .
Am I?
What is love?
What is beauty?
I agree that both are beautiful. Yet, I have come to understand that both love and beauty does not remove the presence of ugliness or hate, but rather, ugliness and hate exist enough, but never enough to overcome the holiness or the perfect essence of her, she, or the way she makes me feel.
This heaven is better than the bags I used to buy on B16 or up near 134 and Willis.
Love and beauty is enough to drown the bouts of our weary shame. This is enough to ease the insecure fits which defy our truth, and make our own beauty disappear.
Do you understand now?
The opioid sensation of love and the high of beauty or the substance of her, her flesh or the look in her eye, do you get this at all?
Or am I just crazy?
Either way, I understand.
I understand how the absence of this can turn the body sick and make my limbs ache.
I see how this can leave me wanting or searching, —or much like the obvious patients at the methadone clinic by 36th Street, can see why people slowly nod off in the sad loss of tragic disappearance. I mean this in the absenteeism of the spirit’s morphine or figurative Dilaudid, or Demerol.
Either or, this is the pained search for the perfect aesthesia which is used to euthanize the mind from its painful memories.
“Do you love me?”
Yes, mistress.
“How far would you run for me?”
To the end, my mistress.
“Would you live for me?”
Of course.
Would you die for me?
I already have, my mistress . . .
I swore I would never be this addicted again.
Until . . .
When did the world turn?
When did the love we share become so drug-like and when did the withdrawals of beauty become so far gone, so lost, and so ugly that lonesomeness devoured the soul?
I remember. . .
No one wants to live or die alone.
Not me.
It is a hot morning in the substance of my early July. Our so-called purgatories have allowed us another day to decipher the weight of our, “in-between” moments.
I am one step loser to something.
I swear.
There is no room left for indecision. There is no time left to waste or to leave our thoughts open to interpretation.
Just say it.
Say what you mean and mean what you say.
Shout it.
Scream it.
Just please, do not go silent.
I used to stand on the outside looking in. And I know that feeling.
I know that mishappen feeling or that misfit, or unfit expression whereas, I understand the lonely idea that I, being me and living my life as I am; I would never be seen, nor invited, or included or loved.
I used to wish that someone would pick me and that I could “feel” this in my heart.
I don’t want a temporary stay. . .
I want this to be real and therefore, my highs would be unending
and so would we.
I remember my losses of comparison.
I remember how my insecure thoughts and shame brought on my self-fulfilled prophecies.
And too, I remember the look and the feeling of redemption as it was delivered to me by the most beautiful look of all.
Her. She. You.
I have heard of people being judgmental about how people are after breakups.
I have heard people say you “just” have to move on as if the pain is “just” that easy to overcome.
Pain hurts.
Or, are people to removed from our pain to understand this?
It seems that way,
at least I think so.
I have heard the judgments of nodding patients, awaiting their legal doses of synthetic anesthesia. I have watched people spit at and look down on the socially sick. I have seen people line up, down the street, just to settle the sickness and legally satisfy the absence of their filthy heaven.
I was walking with someone. This was long ago,
We passed someone who was nodding down slowly in their junkie-like spiral.
They asked me, “How does somebody let themselves get like that?”
You’d be surprised how easy it is, I said.
I am long and far away from my early recovery days. I am far from my worries of nodding down to the pavement in dirty clothes. This is not a fear of mine.
But, and in the same spirit and depth, I understand what it means to go through withdrawals and be just as sick.
Some people live.
Some people love.
Some people never lose.
Some people always lose.
Some will never love.
And some will never know the highs that come with this . . .
But come to think of it —
they’ll never know what the withdrawal from love feels like.
Trust me when I tell you this.
Heroin doesn’t even come close to this kind of height
(or withdrawal).
She is out there.
My love.
I know it.
The Written Addiction 