3

It’s like a fight between me and life, arguing over two different worlds. Life says I have to play by its rules. It insists that when I stepped out on stage, insisting my bet, I signed a contract, agreed to carry a cross.
Life accosts me, it says I have to play by its timetable, experience experiences as it says to.
I say I can have numbness, amnesia, drugs, even multiple personalities -- with drugs I can experience anything, the world I shift to is so vivid, it’s like a hologram.
Life and me shouldn’t be fighting. I feel like my crimes against Life are too many to reconcile now, to work out now.
Life says: I will send you a person to be at home with, in my own time.
I say: I’ll just get high and go to sleep so that the dream is so vivid I really truly experience what it’s like to be at home with another.
When I’m on the drug, it’s like I’m working, I’m experiencing something, I’m having an adventure. When I’m off the drug it’s like I’m just alone, and that’s it, just alone.
Life says: No, you’re breaking the rules, you cannot be happy alone.
I say: Yes I can, and I’m proving it, and this is real, not a trick.
Life says: That’s unfair, everything is set up for the opposite.
I say: Deal with it. I’m done with pain.
With strong drugs and a strong imagination I could experience all of Life fully without ever escaping the prison that Life actually is with its limiting laws of physics, etc. But what about Truth? My soul is true so why can’t it play?
It’s just a dull hum in my head -- the high -- who knew it could be so relaxing.

__________

　
(Monday)
　
I slept for 13 hours. It’s already two o’clock in the afternoon; it was great. It was raining the whole time.
My house is like a glorified back porch; even though I’m dry it’s like sleeping in a hammock; it’s still raining strong.
The hum is still strong, I’m still relaxed, and the rewiring is still going on. It’s like a relaxed, calming question and answer session with myself.
Are you happy? Yes.
Are there still two worlds? No, I think it’s one.
I think someone would only want to be around someone who was happy on their own. That way they always feel free; there’s no chance of codependency and all that ugly laziness relationships can encourage. Huh.

__________

　
(Four day high wearing off)
　
The high was like something real to reckon with. As if I wasn’t alone. Something real and personal and all my own.
It’s like I got used to being invisible. Got used to being unseen by myself.
So I accepted that the best I would ever have was a good story, as opposed to a good life.
It’s like I just understood I would never have another person. Especially since I knew somewhere deep down that sex had become horrific for me.
Sometimes I suspect I chose the story, not just accepted it. Like I chose to always have that buffer. Like the way I always keep everyone at a distance, reinforcing it by being overly independent, as if it were normal to not ask for a ride but take a cab, no matter how pointed the point I was making.
The way the only people who really know me are on an anonymous website; people with whom it’s understood I’ll never have to meet in real life.
Sometimes I think the ten years of rape was the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me, even though in the end I know that’s wrong. There was something Real and shameful and invisible about it that no one could see -- that I had been raped -- it was as invisible as me.
It was something no one wanted to hear about. Something they felt it shameful for me even to mention or hint at. As if my expression of it was bringing into the world originally.
As if it was shameful for me to affect what they had already decided was the definition of Life.
This was Life and I existed, my story existed. It was like a fight I was having with every adult, with all of American culture, with all time, with all humanity.
The horrific exists.
Maybe I accept my invisibility because I understand no one will ever understand what rape was like.
No one will ever understand what it was like for me these past twenty odd years, so instead of showing them that, I give them the story.
Of one year marriages, café’s full of Coen brothers characters and impromptu trips around the world. All I can say is that I come from horrific, and I expect the truth of it not to have to be articulated, but seen in the truth of my movements, and my bearing, and my masculinity. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe that will work.
It’s why relationships haven’t worked for me. They really believed me to be the person I allowed them to see -- one only of story and not movements, not intimacy.
I first experienced that with the darker-skinned Americans at some of my first jobs as a teenager. No matter how good I was at other things, or bad at certain things, I was always the white stereotype, and nothing would ever change that.
It makes it so that my being there, or my walking away quietly and never appearing again, ended up being the same thing.

__________

　
Got more pills. Am thinking about a true 16 a day regimen.
I’ve decided the rewiring takes priority.

___________

　
(trying to sleep, my mind and body restless, my mind racing, my legs thrashing around, due to the pills.)
The boy wants to remember the night Smokey came. The night L__ (who I now call my Mom, now that I remember her having me penetrate her so often) showed me how to spell my name with the little magnetic letters.
We were watching TV. She had to stay up because she was waiting for the men with the dog to pull up in the driveway. It’s dark so I think it’s the middle of the night, but of course it’s not.
The leg thing. Memory? Combative, tensed, exhausting, not letting me sleep.
Physically it’s like I’m still that little kid on that couch with Mom, with twenty odd years of experience memorized in my head but I never shifted with it, I just kept memorizing.
Something physical happened and I’m trying to heal it with words.
Like a knife wound being spoken to.
My mind draws a picture of the Druid on the hill in Ireland, saying words, bringing rain. I know this is my heritage.
I know I have runes inked on my shoulder.
I wonder about the power of words. Maybe I already know the true set-up. It should work. The words should physically heal.
That’s what I’ve been doing this whole time. Trying to use words to heal something physical. Him raping a baby boy.
Words to heal something physical .. Like a spell .. Like a pagan .. Word to undo the most violent of memories. Like those days in the apartment, learning heritage. So now I’m a god, a sorcerer, a druid. If it’s required.
I’m writing my own bible, my own words, and when the inebriation is gone I’ll have faith to make the difference.
Who knew that Rape was the black hole of the universe? That sex was the end-all? Something separate, intangible, wordless, soulful.

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