If Your Friend Jumped Off A Bridge (audio)

That voice in your head right now, can you be sure what it wants for you? When you pour the coffee when you add the sugar when you notice your feet are freezing even though you are wearing wool socks. The night descends inside of your bones at the beginning of the day. When things aren’t right, which is to say normal which is to say the same which is to say habitual, your whole routine is shot to hell. You scramble the eggs and sort through the thoughts like separating the laundry you now remember you left wet in the washing machine last night but, wait, more importantly, what is today? Is there something special in it that perhaps you forgot about?

The letters.

The letters you weave together to collect words into existence to make the voice make itself. You forgot to send the letters off in the mail, again. I love the sober community or at least I think I do, right now they are all just heads on a screen which is full of heads and bodies and a crippling cascade of advice.

Sober sob stories. Condolences.

Some of us make it and some of us don’t but maybe death is a doorway or a gateway or a trap or a trick or an illusion. Try not to think about that. Try to take the coffee and the eggs and the cold and the letters and one day at a time. I want to tell them I’m just in it for the sober sex which is quite honestly mind blowing. I want to say today feels like the greatest day of my life since yesterday and that tomorrow burns in me like a triple sun, three large suns orbiting one another. It is very hot. It is very menacing the way they smile.

I cannot stop the words and I cannot imagine telling anyone about any of this. I remember what he said when he said ‘ . . . you are not the voice of the mind – you are the one who hears it.’ and how that has irreversibly fucked me up. When you are a writer you are always in your head unless you are fucking your lover or eating the eggs or downing the coffee which tastes like the high point of your entire life to be honest, but even then it isn’t so easy to disengage from the voice. You need it or it needs you.

But what would you do to fit in with the chatter. If your friend jumped off a bridge would you do it, too? My mother would ask me that when I was small. Because the fear is that you are just like everybody else and the fear is that you are not like anybody else who ever existed or ever will. And the fear is in the holding on to one of those beliefs or the other but never both at once.

Your mother cannot understand that you would jump and you would not jump. It is possible to commit opposite acts simultaneously not in the body but in the mind. You look at your hands and see that they are holding a coffee mug and they are buttering the toast. And you are also ending your thoughts and you are also following them as they multiply. You listen to them and you do not listen to them. You get up and you stay in bed. You can jump and you can not jump. You can pick up the glass and not pick up the glass. You are doing so right now.