My Sorbitol Seducer,

Today I feel strangely in touch/tune with the world and equally/simultaneously disconnected from it all. I admittedly wrote this line a few months ago, but I realize now that this is my static state of experience. I noticed it more when I was stoned all the time and consistently in tune with the world of incongruence and inconsistencies. All the minute disconnected details would form a coincidental network of synchronicity.

I bet it would amuse you to know I often (still) scrutinize my reflection. Most often, I see my prepubescent or teenage self staring back at me with lonely, uncertain eyes that seem to ask what the hell happened. “Where did the best years of our life go? Who are you and what did you do with our future self?” they ask.

When I see my subjective unsophisticated self he always seems just as sullen and defeated as I seem currently. I should start drinking again to put some depression in my veins to go with all that self-pity; get some creative juices flowin... I feel less creative than I’ve ever been. Almost past the point of no creation, approaching bohemian, again.

Sometimes I smile, laugh, frown, scowl or simply glare at my reflection just to see the subtle changes in the only face I can ever remember having; changes no one else could ever detect because of the slow and steady onslaught of time and the elements. I’m the only constant in my perception of self. The world has gone around the sun dozens of times, spinning around on it’s axis incessantly, countless stars were born while many countless more extinguished their light. The world and culture around me have changed in so many immeasurable ways since my earliest memory.

It’s sometimes hard to believe that this is the same world I’ve always been subject to. Further still, that this is the same body I’ve always occupied. So many of my former selves I’ve left to die in places I’ve been; places I could no longer grow and had no choice but to abandon.

I simultaneously am and am not all of my past selves, living all of those past lives in places and times that only now exist as memories; like Schrodinger’s cat... alive&dead, at the same time. I am clearly alive, but how can I be certain I did not die long ago? I’ve often wondered and argued with my internal voice about my state of experience. What if this is the waiting room between lives or a kind of ironic purgatory? What if we’re all dead, waiting to be reborn? Who knows the difference; if there is any? Dax Riggs said “All any one of us has got to do is die.” Or live, depending on how you look at it. I prefer to acknowledge the worst-case scenario. The first American male to female transsexual, Christine Jorgensen (as his former self, George Jorgensen) said of his discontent in a mistaken body before the transition, “how can a futureless life go on? Yet it does. Year after year the body lives while the soul dies.” I often imagine I’ve long since died and my experiences are but a fabrication of my last moments of brain activity. It’s actually quite a romantic and comforting thought to me. Is that macabre of me, darling?

Up to a certain point in my life (broadly, around the time I moved away from the coast on my own to start college) I would transition from situations through a very distinct break with my former life. I would leave the people I knew and the reputation I’d built to start a new chapter. I feel like I’m now at a crossroads of abandoning this pattern or redefining and repeating it.

When someone important in my life (possibly the most important thing in my life) tells me they want to be the one person outside of myself that I can always count on to be there and I know it’s genuinely heartfelt promise, it terrifies me. Am I scared I can’t reciprocate such selfless devotion while facilitating my own needs or am I convinced I don’t deserve it? Perhaps both. Perhaps I covet their genuine selflessness.

I’m so full of myself and down on my poor pitiful and unfortunate life, I pretend to do something about it... to take control and steer away from the iceberg of dependence, but there’s always someone there who will feel sorry for me because I’m so alone in the world. I’ll inevitably always take advantage of those who are closest to me, whether he or I am aware of it. I am my own worst critic/enemy/antagonist. I fail.

I’ve been thinking recently, that it’d been too long since I cried & felt really awful & powerless. I was due. My water broke. Not surprisingly, I don’t feel better. I feel awful ashamed. I do this to myself. This too shall pass. I need to disappear for a while on a vacation from myself.

--melancholic and misanthropic