I'm doing 28 things
i am happy now.
it hasn’t been this way long.
i remember one day, i was standing outside and i looked down the street that leads to my house and i had the absolute realization that i hated my life. not an anger fit where you just scream it or bitch about it. like, when you look at someone and realize you’re in love with them. there is a shock of feeling..a burst of realization and you couldn’t know anything more trully if you saw it staring at you vividly, but lifelessly, like a statue.
that day stands out..i have forgotten christmases and i have forgotten birthdays and i have forgotten deaths and i have forgotten births but the day i hated my life is something i remember with the kind of clarity usually reserved for first kisses or a favorite t-shirt or last kisses.
there is such painful, simple finality in a day like that.
“it was a day like any other” as they say.
but now here i am.
one year from when i thought everything would be better than when it was. one year from when the doctor’s gave me happiness in pill form. one year from when life was a dream..or wasn’t..I haven’t really worked that out yet.
and it is better. so much better, i do not know sometimes how it is that i persisted through some of the muck that there was or if i even persisted at all. life could be a dream, i imagine, if it wished itself to be..but i digress
So it has been that from the kind of listless indifference you get from watching your neighbor mow his yard, i have ripped a slice of contentment. an oblong happiness, fledgling but aging with me. from darkness, not light persay..but a dull gray glow, that pulses warmly and without much banality.
and i must say i understate the improvement massively,
but that is neither here, nor there..it’s a nighttime thing.
for tonight i am not person of blood and bone, but a formless collection of memories, like one of those bizarre jello molds that traps whatever abstract sweetness the maker saw lying around.
and you know something?
when i look at those memories..those warped fragments of the supposedly useless time I spent depressed,
I miss them. I miss the extremes.
i miss feeling that deep, deep, deep, deep low..deeper than hell but then, so deep that it felt like i had discovered in the darkest parts of the earth this fissure that just oozed this filthy rich creative energy.
and i guess, in the typical ironic format of life, i learned to grow content with being discontent and euphoric with being miersable. because though it was all worthless, there was this bizarre extreme that i did not notice then but recall almost fondly now. i think there is no greater motivator (or lack thereof) for artistic blood than depression. it’s why van gogh was a genius and then committed suicide and why hemingway was a genius and then committed suicide and why jeff buckley was a genius and then committed suicide. you can feel this extreme that goes beyond hell in terms of misery but at the same time lends you the experience to put misery into terms that the whole world can understand (and generally find to be beautiful). more proof? think of the most beautiful songs you have ever heard. are they happy or are they sad?
i’m sure none of what i say makes any sense..but then again, creation should never be meant for exhibition’s sake :)
besides, a blob of memories can’t do much more than ooze anyways..and that’s pretty damn gross.
whatever the case, i suppose what I’m trying to say, like everything else in life, can be cut down to one simple blog-friendly summation of the last 4 hours of my existence.
tonight, i miss misery.
