5

It hurt, it felt murderous like the first time I got high and I kept saying to myself: no, I don’t want to kill House, I like him the way I perceive him now. But I went forward with the hurt.
The best phalluses are supposed to win. How else will evil be eradicated? The best men are supposed to be the gods who live forever in the physical world. The ones with all the descendants, all the true sex appeal, all the Masculinity.
A__ and H__ won’t procreate well, I know, and that’s sad, but not tragedy. The world is set up Good. When it comes to descendants and evolutions W__ won’t live as long as me, nor K__, not House, their descendents will die out due to their weaknesses, the same weaknesses that plagued the one whose charge was those generations between his legs.
The Chi is strong, every muscle in my body is tensed and tight but I feel so relaxed, springy, physical, athletic. I want to move around. I can’t wait to get back to the city and walk all those streets.
The past hasn’t happened yet. That was the next lesson. _You did it, B, you stopped time,_ I thought to myself. I wanted to chuckle or to gape, but I was in public and I remembered to be generous.
The numbness is the stopping of time, and not having memory is the implied requirement to sustain it.
Boy, did you get good at it. When you were in the horrific you stopped time. Hence, you stopped growing up. You got to allow the past to have happened if you intend to become twenty seven.
So now you get the control, now you get the choice, the free will, the freedom you’ve always wanted. You decide who you are.
If you’re hateful the world is an ugly, ugly place, and so is your past. And if you’re loving the world is beautiful, because you’re identity never changes, so instead the story has to change, hence the new memories.
Once the context changes, of course the story changes, the past changes back to the one you truly remember.
It’s your choice, let the past roll out the way it really was, and allow time forward forever and ever, or destroy the world and kill your own soul.
Identity is unchangeable, that’s why the past flips when you realize your true identity. Time begins. You step out of the past-hasn’t-happened-yet place.
Once I could feel, it’s like the past suddenly happened, I suddenly remembered the way it really was: I was in love with E___. I was just too young to deserve her. She was in love with me, desperately even. I lied when I told her I wasn’t in love with her. When I denied that year between a twenty year old me and a forty year old her. I didn’t know that. The past kept rolling back farther and farther becoming true instead of the vague, numbed-out existence I thought I’d experienced it as.
So I let it. I loved K__, and when he looked at me he saw Good Looking, I just didn’t believe him. I didn’t want to love K___. It just happened. I didn’t know that platonic love existed. I only knew the other kind, so when I saw that K__ was suddenly Good Looking, and he treated me as if I were Good Looking I got confused, felt out of control, felt like something was wrong. Just cause someone is Good Looking doesn’t imply sexual attraction. The House never taught me that, it acted as if there was no boundary.
The thoughts about E__ and K__ were sudden and I felt them more than thought them, felt them somewhere inside my bones, I wanted more explanation and luckily the thoughts on E_ and K__ continued to elaborate.
Love. It’s like all along the Bible I’d read over and over as a little boy was teaching how to sustain the high forever -- Be Good. Be Love. Always love.
Only a perception full of love is the true one. Once you get to know someone who is good they become physically beautiful so that you think you might be hallucinating, even though you can’t find the flux.
And so it was that I remembered how the good people I had known were so good looking. And how in love I was with the beautiful E__. The knockout E__, even if she was forty.
And K__ and how I believed him, realized he was Good and I began to see him as good looking. Then I got confused like I always had. It’s true that no matter in a platonic or sexual context that someone you love will always be physically good looking to you. And out of love you only become sexual with the appropriate ones. I never knew that.
I’ve kept myself in an ugly world with stopped time and stopped growth because I was so afraid I’d find someone Good Looking and not be able to stop myself. So afraid that I would inherit the House’s evil.
Like how I had sex with Trevor and El__ just because they were good looking to me. It wasn’t like they gave any signs of wanting sex, we were all little kids.
I never knew any separation between sexual and platonic. My relatives felt that if something was good looking it was appropriate to rape them, to start a sexual relationship with them, even their own Baby Boy ..
It’s like: I love this skin, these arms and legs, because they’re yours. That’s love, a place where platonic love is only a line away from sexual love. The two so close to each other it’s frightening.
But it does exist, and the boundary is Me. The boundary is Good. Good on the inside. It saves the world. Love saves the world. Love changes the physical like a wordless spell, destroying the lie of the physical altogether, so that the world becomes the Soul Place, full of Hims and Hers, just like how the Soul Place was between me and Trevor and El__.
Adam wanted to leave and go to his apartment, one separate from his wife’s because he was a superintendent and the apartment came free with the job.
As we rode and talked I noticed that it was like Adam had two faces. The side of his face was the true one. A New Jersian, with an athletic baller’s way of moving his hands in conversation. This is the who Adam he knows himself as, this is who Adam knows is true. He was good looking with attractive, teen-idol-like eyes. All I had to do was believe him.
Adam was talking about something, about weed itself and what it was like.
_I wish I could write down the thoughts I have and what is happening to me when I burn, you know?_ he said to me.
His other face was me observant and analytically aware of every physical feature, every flaw and every physical advantage, so that he looked tired, as if he had just come back from a war.
He seemed separate from me and there were small shadows in his mannerisms that insisted his Masculinity and that I was an unnatural novelty.
Hence I knew the first face was the correct one. The side face. The one seen emotionally, not analytically, with love instead. The world without love IS Horrific.
You were the beginning of the generations between your legs all along. Maybe you’re a Nation, maybe you’re a Race, maybe you were the first, maybe you’ll be the last. Everything before me has been erased because it was Horrific and I am Good.
Adam was talking, we’d actually been talking the whole time. He started a story, then paused, then started up again, but then paused again.
_Oh, man,_ he said, _I just totally completely forgot what I was going to say._
We laughed.
It was the second time he’d done that. A ‘stoner moment’ he called it.
I had kept the alcohol win in my mind, so I never got inebriated, despite the fact that we were drinking liquor the whole time we were at his apartment.
The sun came up and I realized I’d won. There was officially nothing to be scared about when it came to weed. Maybe I’ve graduated to that level of Brave.
Adam’s wife was furious when we got back to their apartment. The only thing that calmed her -- she said later -- was the fact that despite Adam seeming so out of it, I seemed alert and just fine. She interpreted this as maturity.
I asked him why she was so surprised at how we stayed out all night. Didn’t she know we were going out, she acted like she did.
_She doesn’t really have friends,_ he said, as if that explained it, _She doesn’t get it. And she doesn’t like me smoking weed. She doesn’t understand that part either. When she smokes she just gets all giddy and giggly, you know?_
I told him that when I got high it was like a reset button.
After his upset wife and softly questioning mother-in-law left for work we kept his son occupied and hung out on his back porch while his son played around.
We slept while Adam’s son took his afternoon nap, then hung out in the back again as his wife and mother in law came home.
It used to be I could barely talk, and the idea of carrying on a lengthy conversation was frightening. Now I can effortlessly converse all day long, and best yet Adam seemed pleased with me, like I was turning out to be way cooler than he had expected.
It was an adventure getting me back to New York. His wife implied something about how my traveling alone was different. ‘Yeah, some people find solo traveling total loserville,_ I said, easing the sudden awkward moment.
_No .. I don’t,_ she said, apologetically _I’ve always wanted to, I just never had the guts._
I didn’t know whether to believe her or not, her personality could be so overbearing, but it really didn’t matter to me much.
Adam secretly wanted to drive me, but had to thwart his wife whom he knew wasn’t going to let him. So we had to play this game where over the phone she would suggest a bus stop or train stop and we would supposedly arrive just five or ten minutes late, until finally Adam felt comfortable suggesting he drive me in, and she finally agreed.
After that we went back to his apartment and smoked another blunt. The highs were so seamless with real life it didn’t matter to me that I was getting high again, because I knew whatever it taught I would keep forever. Meanwhile one blunt wasn’t enough to really take me anywhere so this high merely repeated what the last had taught.
_This has been the first time I’ve really gotten to talk to someone about the deployment,_ he said. _I feel so free .. _
Whenever he spoke of my affect on his life he used the words ‘free’ and ‘freedom’ a lot.
It was daylight when he dropped me off at the hotel, the weed I’d bought off his friend in my bag.
I let him assume I was catching a train home soon, but actually I checked with the desk clerk, then walked to the train station without my baggage and changed my ticket so that I would leave on Friday instead of today, which was actually Tuesday.
I was getting better, I was healing, and I wasn’t cutting it short, at any cost.

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