10

After walking back from the museum, I impulsively bought a ticket for the musical Next to Normal.
It was an intense musical, which I hadn’t known existed. Whenever I thought ‘musical’ I thought ‘show tunes‘, but this was the opposite, the score modern, intricate, emotional.
So this is a musical, I thought to myself. All my favorite movies are like this: with a strong score, like in Requiem for a Dream and The Hours. I didn’t know that my favorite kind of story was a musical.
I had wanted a distraction, something to fuel the abstract thoughts, but instead got a show that cut right to the heart of me.
Not only that, but the play might as well have been about Trevor. Hopefully I won’t jump off a building after the show ends. I guess in the end Art is the ultimate psychic. I guess it would take the ultimate to deal with me.
I did the same thing as the lead actress’s character, Diana, the matriarch of a supposedly perfect-family: I numbed myself out so as to survive, then I changed my mind. I was no different from any other supposedly-perfect family members, the kind I used to judge and be jealous of when I was a teenager.
Diana reminds me of the lead in The Many Lives of Pippa, except she’s more damaged, less celebrity-film looking.
Why do I have to write everything down? I think it myself. It’s because Apollo lived the horrific -- but no, Dionysius did all along, not Apollo -- he felt everything, as if his toe had been stubbed a million times over eighteen years, he was fully present all along -- but Apollo is the reason for the survival -- but he was little kid, I’m not anymore, I can take the memories -- don’t you get it? It’s one thing to Be. To be who you always were and always will be -- Him. It’s a totally different thing to Survive.
The play is so about me it’s unnerving. For awhile it’s about the difficulty of remembering. I guess all heavy stories will always be easily relatable to me. I get sucked into the heavy, get stuck there, like how I was stuck in the intensity of Red hours after the play had ended. I want these fictional characters to be Real and seem reluctant to accept that I don’t live in a 2D world, but 3D instead.
Seems like those characters are the only ones who could ever know me, could ever SEE me. It seems unnatural to leave the 2D world behind, like I’m choosing to be alone forever. To just step out of the horrific, and then step out of the next level above, and the next, and the next, ascending, ascending, leaving, leaving.
During intermission the theatre switches back to the church again, the one I went to when I was little. The memory game has started up again. I’m back to life again, the 3D. Maybe it’s addicting, I think to myself, The passion implied by the word horrific.
_Are you writing something about the show?_ a man near me asks as the intermission begins. People get offended when they see someone writing. I’ve learned to write in the dark, so I know I look experienced, writing without looking. Still I don’t get why they act like it’s so unique.
Trevor remains on my mind. You just have to trust, B, you have to trust that the dead are eternal, so they’re not really dead, and that’s okay. It’s okay for there not to be any such thing as dead.
At one point in the play Dr. Madden says: _Sometimes patients get well enough to follow through on their suicidal impulses, but not well enough to fight them._
It was always a tightrope, my recovery, same as Diana’s.
In the play Diana is cured when they ease her memory with electrocution. ‘They’ being the West, whose idea of success is really numbness.
Since she has little memory, there is little color to her perception, she doesn’t feel compelled to be Real, to feel, to express -- the opposite of a soul.
Her power comes from her not remembering -- same as mine did. I started out with Apollo, I started out with no memory, then began writing.
She can fight now, fight for herself, fight for her own memories, her own psyche, her own spirit, her own life.
I wonder how many people in this audience really know what she’s going through, what she’s experiencing. I figure if I asked each member of the audience if they knew what shifting was they’d all look at me blank expression.
_What happens if the cut or the burn or the break isn’t in my mind or my body but my soul?_ Diana sings.
Finally, she chooses that she is separate from her story -- connected -- but separate from her dead son.
_Maybe I’ve lost it at last,_ she continues singing, _I’m dancing with death, I suppose, but who knows?_
With Apollo there to always catch Dionysius, Dionysius never learned _the feel of solid ground,_ he never grew up.
Hence, the weed, the tumultuousness, and the writing. I’m playing catch up.
The moral of the play seemed to be: Moving forward is the price you pay to feel.
The daughter in the show has this scene where she’s Robo-tripping and as the play closes it gives me an idea.

__________

　
Robo-tripping makes me talk more. It’s not like the good weed high, where perceptions and awareness is the game, it’s a game of looseness and choice. An athleticism is required to move around gracefully, but if you don’t feel like going through the trouble, that’s cool, too.
My roommate asked a lot of questions, even deep ones, wanting to know how I saw myself in five years and everything. I didn’t want to come across as offensive to him by turning out to be high, and a cheap high at that, so I was careful.
He seemed irked that I was so talkative with our newer roommate when I wasn’t talkative with him when he first arrived. There was no way for him to know I wasn’t high when I first met him and was tripping out I was so high when I met the next guy.
I told him I was going to spend the night at the Irish pub around the corner. I was supposed to ask him if he wanted to join me. He was the older of us so I missed it. I forgot that I had hit that age where now I was the socially powerful one, I was the relevant one.
And this is forever. This moment last forever, because your soul will remember it. Those lines flow through my head whether I’m high or not but especially when I’m high. Time demands a new definition.
_I’m not really like that,_ I want to tell the roommates, I want to tell K__, I want to tell W__. It turns out I had only one identity all along: the one who remembers.
The nose thing is happening, where the human face becomes animalistic instead of separate from the animals.
At the bar I feel more comfortable, now that I have escaped the roommates. The real world is hard. There’s no one to talk to. Every time someone looks or talks to me, they’ve got a boyfriend and I feel like the unwanted rooster in the hen house.
This is why writers kill themselves. This is why Ed Harris calmly leans himself all the way out the window in The Hours, because they want to teach this in word: that this is wordless poetry. They feel it’s the most important thing a person can do, yet it can’t be done, or can it? Then bang! the bullet to the membrane.
What I need most is for someone to understand, even though I can’t articulate the wordless poetry. That’s what this Robo trip wants. That’s why it keeps pulling people into conversation, like some expert, like some grown-up version of a kid who studied Larry King Live every night of his life. He’s searching for that connection.
If Adam of K__ or W__ were here it’d be like I was babysitting them, so that’s not really what I want. It’s more like I want a woman to SEE me. And if she can see me then I know she knows what I know and we can be in the wordless poetry place together.
At the bar, with FIFA on the TV, and all the noise around me, my writing in this notebook must look a little bizarre. I wonder if Her would be weirded out by me writing.
This high keeps stretching each eye’s peripheral, so I keep looking to the left and to the right. If I’m not careful I’ll just keep turning around and around and around. The robo high is challenging, not smooth like the weed. It spins and stretches and blurs things, while still I have to follow the rules. When I look in the mirror I have that stark animalistic look I see in others.
_Excuse me, what are you writing?_ a guy near me asks.
The girl with him looks like a classic Irish lass, except that she’s from Croatia. He’s from Amsterdam.
Me and him go outside to smoke cigarettes. Something in me tells me to really look at him, notice how ugly he is.
No, I tell myself, this is my new friend, I’m not going to look at him in that light. The three of us have fun but I notice he starts looking at my torso, and then back at my eyes, like he’s checking me out, but really he’s deciding if he can have me around his wife. I guess he decided no.
I went back to the hotel room so I could shower and get ready for the walk to the train station.
The roommate who had kept trying to talk to me with no luck was lying in his bed nude, his underwear halfway down one leg. Obviously he had masturbated. Please don’t let it have been to me ..
Hate makes you That.
Love makes you Him.
Hate is where you smirk and pretend to be That to their infuriation.
Love is where you stop playing games because you’re older now.
They’re gone, B.
They’ll never find you.
I promise, I got you out of there.

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