2

I keep hearing sounds, they scare me, I keep thinking they’re from downstairs but then realize they’re coming from the television.
The paranoia’s kicking in. I’ll just be Brave and maybe it will open up for me.
When I allow the sound the way I first heard it I imagine a stranger coming up the stairs with a weapon.
All it is, is a shift. You’ll act appropriately, you’ll be Brave and Good, if a man were to come up the stairs with a weapon. So the paranoia is just a scary Shift. The marijuana is always teaching me to be brave, one way or another.
Just relax. You’re from horrific, every scary thing is familiar. Be happy in the horrific. No way. It was impossible, wrong even. I had to pretend to be smart, to be older, to scare them. That’s how I felt back then. Not how I feel now. Just remember then.
Sex shows up as always about this point in the high. I look in the mirror and figure out that Timothy (and other people, regularly) glanced at my stomach because the six pack does ‘stick out.’ It’s flat but the muscles still stick out. I always wondered about that, thought it was something bad they were glancing at.
I’m switching from not dominate to dominate.
No, I’m switching from boy to guy to man.
Gay, Bi, Straight.
Oh, I get it. (sexual abuse)
I dominate now because I’m a man, now.
I keep forgetting I’ve been having sex all my life.
So just start the sex life (the sex all my life) at twelve, and keep everything a secret.
I’ll tell the truth anonymously, then I’ll choose to forget again.
Just say you’re from horrific.
Remembering is forgetting. You choose to put it in the back of your mind, (which is Forgetting).
Once you Remember -- all the way, meaning dealing with it -- than you put it away. And you dumb down.
Being high is exhausting on the body. As my limbs began to feel like lead and my eye lids started to droop I could see all these mirrors, how every one I knew was just a mirror, every scenario, every situation, W__, K__, Adam, Timothy, J__, Ms J__, Br__, M__ .. People find who they need to, it goes both ways.
People stay because they need to, they go down paths because the people they need to know and reckon with are down those paths, it’s how the whole world functions, loves, befriends: needs.
Needs seeped in deep reasons and secrets, most forever unarticulated.

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I woke up Sunday afternoon, after having stayed up till the late early morning.
There was a film on starring James Caan where he played a widower in a romance with a divorcee. I had forgotten how in the eighties women had to be so skinny ..
This high took me down the same path as always, just faster. I played around with the timing of the joints. The pain of having it peak and then slowly move down is so physical. To feel how much pain I’m always in. It’s wonderful.
(watching an old sitcom called Amen, where a parishioner is always trying to get her man, the preacher, to finally marry her.)
The other person is the one who tells the story. They do it naturally, on their own, in their heads, like how I do with my friends. I believe them, give them the benefit of the doubt, rationalize for them. So Two is one.
The other person believes their partner’s story. It takes Two for one to live fully. You love yourself when you know your story, instead of just feeling it.
Right now, I am my own brother. I go so out of my way to be my own protector, my own defender, because I’ve been on my own since I was a baby.
So this is church. So if you can always live in church .. If everyday could be Sunday.
I remember each instant I first chose to be good.
The memory where I chose to be fair (playing card games), the memory where I chose to be gentle (the dying mouse), the memory where I chose to be violent, etc.
It’s like they’re dead. L__, A__, H__ and R___. When I think of them that way it’s easier to see them with love.
When they’re not dead I can see in their eyes that they can do so much better, be so much better, could have been so much better, but when they’re dead I understand that they did the best they could, the very best they could.
When I think of them as dead, it’s like I’ve murdered them, fought and won the soul fight, just like I know I already have. So they’re dead, and you chose not to kill them, out of forgiveness, and time not being real ..
Wear your pain. It’s like wearing sex. Allow your body and face to express. The How would be scary but you’re Him and know How.
When I was a boy expressing was dangerous, could look like self-pity in public overly-truthful in the House, but now I’m older, I have the intricacies right.
Difficult memories arise. Moments in my past behavior want to make me cringe but I see it differently now. That’s what it’s like to have mental illness. That’s what it’s like; those moments were simply what it was Really like.
I remembered a Sergeant I came across while deployed. _Extreme child abuse .._ he’d said, _Well there’s some books that have come out recently about teenagers who have PTSD,_ he said suddenly excited, as if he found it fascinating, _Yeah, they used to think that only soldiers could get PTSD, but now they’ve found that kids who have been beaten and abused so badly they when they become teenagers they’re already suffering PTSD --_
At the time I found him so annoying. But I didn’t know PTSD was this difficult, was so difficult for me as a teenager. No wonder he was in such awe of it.
I had a mental illness.
What PTSD does, is it makes you into a boy again, as if maturity never happened. It erases everything you thought useful. It demands a new set of definitions, wordless ones. It demands more out of life, its definition, and the definition of the Soul living it. It requires more. It offers more.
I started feeling sleepy but then got a burst of energy and decided to smoke another joint.
The idea was to see how fast I could get down the path: the fear, than the bravery, then the new concepts and ideas, than the memory game, etcetera, etcetera.

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(next morning, waking up not high)
It’s hard to get out of bed lately. It’s like the not-high self has to be remember and be comfortable with what the high one discovered.
Do you feel like Him? Do you have that much self respect? Can you be wordless? Live wordlessly? If the answer is no I have to make a plan of what has to be learned, I’ll get high, and go back to church.
So I wasn’t in love with K__. I would just get confused sometimes, so I thought I was, because everything is sexual chemistry. I had no boundaries yet, didn‘t even realize ones were needed. It’s okay to know that I would’ve been with people in another time, another place.
So I’m still in church, just the longer part. Where I round out the direct sentences I wrote while high. Add the words a layman needs so the Boy I am will understand.
The smell of pot reminds me of House, pulls me back to those sweet post-deployment days of shifting, shifting.
When I show my How, when I show myself, when my true expression really is on my face, that’s How. It’s my most intimate thing. No wonder no one can see me.
There’s nothing wrong with being the extraordinarily sensitive one between the Two. It’s an amazing, impressive thing, to feel life so wholly. There’s nothing wrong with being the non-dominate, because in the end the dominate one is in such awe of the other, the other becomes the dominate.
Thoughts in my mind, processing things.

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