How to Suck at This (audio)

Caressing a fresh smoke between my lips, I suck a beautiful deep drag and savor the way it clutches at the insides of my tender lungs. Delicacies. Harsh pressed against the helplessness of soft. The fire is blazing hot as my eyes take it in, the dancing scorch of orange flames which lick the wood and crackle with a low simmering noise. We play old records and talk about what it’s like for me to trade sickness for health. Self harm for clarity and affection. It is almost frightening how alien it feels. I am still working on how to align all the complicated parts of myself. I am still searching but I am less deranged about it.

I dig the richness of the sound of vinyl. I run my fingers through my hair and wonder about my own sound. I am curious about my own inner tapestry in a way I struggled to fathom before. It would feel poetic I guess if I didn’t have the itch beneath my skin to annihilate myself and everything around me. But the fucked up thing is, that is poetry to me, too.

They say you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone and I think that’s just about as true a statement as there could ever be. There is the reverse way of saying the same thing which is that until it’s gone you don’t know what you’ve got. You see it depends what’s gone. Was it good for you or bad to begin with and how did you decide. Can you trust yourself to decide.

Can you re-imagine a future where you become someone else entirely, or maybe more accurately, you become less of what everyone else seems to expect of you and more of the self you already are, though it is too often quivering like an abandoned animal left for dead. It’s a bit of a bitch to get sober, depending of course on where you start, but if you do manage to do it, a lot of shit comes to the surface which you had until the present moment been able to numb or bludgeon back to invisibility, as it were. The trouble is just because that shit was invisible does not by any stretch of the imagination mean that it did not still exist at all.

I pick up a heavy metal tool and slowly readjust the logs, think about what it means to breathe. To be here at all among the wilderness, the uncertainty. I know it’s random and undeserved. Nobody asked to be born into this madness so I will thank anyone who seems to think I should be better at this to fuck all the way off. As I scratch and push the coals around, suddenly just the right amount of oxygen rushes underneath and sets the whole thing raging bright, flashing and hot as the light reflects upon my face. It is so glaring and fierce it almost scares me. I take the last drag of my cigarette before tossing it into the fire. It burns to ash in no time flat. Everything that ever hurt me seems to sing in the hissing of the wood. I feel the eyes of future me turn black and white and back again. I watch like a stone and stare right back.