4

(Monday)

I come from horrific.
The others that were there had different stories of having got there but in the end it was all the same.
There is no such thing as more horrific or very horrific there’s just horrific. There is a final depth of hell and not one level deeper, it has no other name.
I live in the wealthiest land in the world, a spoiled culture within it, little hope for articulation of the horrific, of the experience. Markings scratched on papyrus, instead.
They stayed despite themselves because they assumed they deserved to in some way forgotten somehow but believed. They thought my boldness sacrilegious. It’s one thing to come from horrific, it’s another to be horrific enough to leave. To have the audacity to stay sane despite having such a horrific mind in your head.
The death before dying. That’s the price paid before I could become horrific.
The other baby boys and baby girls there had been thrown across rooms, dashed against walls, seen their loved ones sliced up, had been beaten, starved, abandoned, raped, many by their own parents.
They said the fiery passion I mistook for divine truth was actually rage, hurt, unacceptance -- ordinary, petty, soulless laments.
I had to leave the ones I loved and reach the next level, where I loved again. And they told me again, this level of hell we deserve, though we don’t remember why. And you should heed us. I loved them but had to leave them, so I could reach the next level, it was a rumor I could feel, some dream I once had maybe, that there was another level above this.
Level after level, love after loved ones, long ways gone, till I left hell altogether and was in the lowest level of heaven. Love after loved ones, level after level, till I got to the top, to find my soul and the truth that I was a god all along.
My soul just as eternal as any other God. Just me and my soul, seems like it should have been a given.
Seems a horrific price to pay for an eternal soul, horrific to leave each love and loved one. Maybe I would have forfeited it, if I had had the chance.
To choose a love and loved one. To have stayed there on that level forever, despite rumors felt of higher levels and a humane place.
Maybe I would have forfeited it all, to have been truly alive for awhile, all the way alive, instead of struggling in some ritual of a beautiful horrific private soul dance.
Maybe all along that was the fall from grace.

__________

　
The rewiring was just a small detail before: only a few sentences within the last time I wrote, where I was sitting against the refrigerator, my mind remembering, articulating this time because I am older and can, articulating feeling, theories, perceptions -- processing.
The rewiring’s sudden precedence has taken over my life. Sixteen pills a day encourages it so it is the new requirement.
I took all evening driving around, collecting pills, acquiring enough that I can go at least seven days.
Coincidentally, my supervisor went on vacation for two weeks. I don’t make anywhere near enough money to do his job for him and we both know it.
The rewiring causes me to get into a daze. It’s not like I’ve left this world and am daydreaming; more like I don’t mind the silence and the stillness. I’d sit in his office, in the nice office chair, just thinking.
It’s like the world had finally slowed down to a point where I could begin perceiving it properly, properly enough to satisfy the boys -- the baby, the little kid, the adolescent.
Didn’t the boys know what world this was? They were too young, they blocked it out.
How can I explain to them horrific, it’s details, what it’s like? What spell can I tell?
All that I have done for them, carrying them from the deepest level of Hell, all the way out. All four corners of Hell I have known in that House and in the community around it.
It’s not that I was afraid of death, I was afraid the boys would be cheated out of life. It was a responsibility of mine, not a compulsion. Yet they don’t know the danger -- they don’t think in terms of safety. They just want the How. They want their natural movements, their natural attitude, their natural thoughts.
Drinking isn’t an escape anymore. Nothing is. At the end of the deployment where I started shifting in the wake world instead of the sleep one, I chose to be Brave -- that’s what destroyed my options for escape.
_No matter what the truth is,_ I thought to myself that first time I smoked marijuana, as I was shifting from 1989 to 1992 back to 1985 and then to 2004, _No matter what the memories, no matter what my crimes, no matter if it turns out there is a God the Father, and no matter what he says, insists, demands -- the boys are holy. The baby boy is holy. No matter what._
And the words have stuck in my head all the weeks since. Ever since then drink makes the world drunk instead. It just throbs and throbs and throbs around me, more and more and more noticeably. Like a Vibration, as if I’m one Vibration, one holy Rhythm amongst a universe of Holy Rhythms all connected by the one Strong Beat that is the Universe.
The only time I get tipsy is when I’m not aware that there’s alcohol in what I’m drinking. I guess it can be chalked up to sloppiness, unawareness. Since I had been numb for so long, I hold onto the awareness with a grip that might border on horrific-ness, as usual.
The rewiring was so helpful I felt no need to write.
I lived in the moment instead, the story irrelevant, the How strong. The words flowed through my head instead, not noisily, easily. They seemed old, honoring, like a ritualistic remembrance of the past. The past didn’t seem to have anything to do with the present moment, yet the boys did. The distinction felt effortless to make.
The rewiring came and went, an hour here an hour there. The rewiring was so helpful I demanded more, so I started carrying a soda bottle with me in my cargo pocket, strong with liquor. And the world throbbed strong.
Since I stayed so aware that I couldn’t get drunk anymore, I did all my workplace tasks as usual. I just paid less attention to them, listening to the rewiring instead, letting it do its work, allowing my mind to be twenty seven instead of just my body, getting my mind used to the idea, letting it know each of the twenty-seven years, letting it process them, instead of the way it was before, where I had more like ten tears instead, with vast spaces of memory loss to blame.
I assumed that when I fell asleep drunk at night I woke up sober in the morning. Since I couldn’t feel drunk it was hard to tell.
I still took the sixteen pills a day and the dull hum in my head remained strong, relaxing. But by that time I didn’t know if it was due to the pills or the drink.
On Thursday I was asked to drive to two different cities to pick up some items. I had driven the work van a lot in the past week, mostly to go into town with the guys for lunch. I had been drinking heavily for a week, but it wasn’t until that day that I noticed my mouth wanting to hang open, and my eyes looking smaller, feeling smaller, like the lids wouldn’t open all the way.
The rewiring had been telling me everything was wrong. It asked me questions -- I asked myself questions now that I was old enough to answer them -- like why do I have such a savings account, a deployment-enhanced GI Bill, and am still working some job that has nothing to do with me, in a town that has nothing to do with me.

I drove fine, but the way my face was relaxing bothered me. I kept forcing myself to close my mouth, open my eye lids all the way, but it wasn‘t the eye lid that was the problem, it was the skin below the eye, it was tight, making the eye look so small.
I got to the first stop and picked up the item but on the way to the second stop I felt nervous so I pulled over at a gas station, left the engine running for the air conditioning, then crawled in the back seat and slept for an hour.
Twice there was almost an accident. Once was where a car pulled out in front of me from a parking lot; some young punk. The other was where someone was in the wrong lane. Both times I handled it well, but found it confusing; I might not have been drunk but I knew my blood alcohol level was outrageous.
I got the second item, and returned to work. My supervisor got an email from someone at one location where he mentioned that he thought he had smelled alcohol on me. They were a bit freaked. So was I. I thought I had everything covered. I brushed my teeth regularly, etc. I forgot that in this heat I’d be sweating the smell of it. I easily denied the charge but it still frightened me that I had made such a mistake. It frightened me that I had not eaten all day and hadn’t noticed.
When I got home I decided to detox. It was ridiculous for me to have this much savings, such an amazing GI Bill, and be wasting time working a job I don’t need and find so infringing.
Before I started working I didn’t need drink or pills, I could remember effortlessly. I don’t mean the memories themselves, that was assumed, but the true coloring of my perception that truly remembering caused.
Going back to work so early was detrimental. If I feel the same after I’ve detoxed, then I’ll politely put in my notice on Tuesday. I’ll navigate a way so that I don’t have to give a full two weeks notice. I’ll call them out on having me come back to work so unreasonably early.
It was Memorial Day weekend, so I had four days before I had to go back to work. Maybe I won’t literally tie myself to the bathroom sink upstairs this time, but I know I’ll be very uncomfortable, freezing under a blanket on the floor while sweating profusely and having one vivid dream after another. Shifting to one year, than another, 1992, then 1987, then 1999. I’ll be Brave.

__________