From the Numb to the Black

In my teens, I practiced the art of alcohol-induced amnesia.  I was not very good at being a human being.  I wanted to be everything which I wasn’t, and I wasn’t anything.  I was a girl who had no sense of identity, thus I tried to fit into everywhere (subsequently fitting in nowhere).   I attached myself to people who were narcissistic and greedy and apathetic; we were probably all the same person, just posing in different bodies.

And then I died …

I would wake up, periodically, in strange places, soaked in my own urine, or in bed with a complete stranger, or in someone’s yard … disheveled.  Only people who have been dead can understand this passing on to a different dimension.  I never intended to be a debauched soul, but such things happen.  Depression is a dish which does not pair well with alcohol, drugs, and self-loathing.  And death does not cure anything.

When life becomes a hurdle you simply cannot clear, you crawl under the hurdle on your hands and knees, most likely in a trail of your own vomit. 

I always thought that once I was dead, the suffering would end.  The endless parade of meaninglessness would pass, and then I could go home.  And while the density of the parade does dwindle, the stragglers keep coming.  For the record, those stragglers are often the worst – they are the leftovers, the souls who cannot move on, so they are left to wander about a zombie-trance, looking for something which they cannot even name.   Peace, perhaps, or maybe just a quiet corner in which to rest.  

Jean Paul Sartre once wrote that “hell is other people,” but the missing component in that phrase is that each of us is an “other”; sometimes hell is the place we create for ourselves.  WE create our own personal hells, in hundreds of little ways.  We see the darkness in the world, then we try to build a defense mechanism against it.   There is no defense against the universe and all its components.  Some people are born with the gift of ignorance, and the rest of us keep running into the literal and metaphorical wall, caught in an eternal maze of confusion and doubt.

I will …

I shall …

I ought to …

I cannot …