I look around and I'm somewhere else.
It's November 2017. I'm on the side porch of the house on Davis Street. Alone and trying to get sober for the first time. I'm sitting on the floor amid piles of paintings on cardboard and sheet rock. My body hurts. I'm filled with a grief I'm ignoring. I'm reading Hellblazer and then
It's
August 2004. I'm twenty-one and hungover on a broken blue couch in the apartment on Main St. My new roommate is at work and I'm staring at my reflection in the blank screen of the old television and I feel lost and
It's July 2005 and I'm a block down the road in an attic finished with wood panels, laying on a bed smoking Marlb lights and listening to people downstairs argue about who owes who what, but I'm watching squirrels on a power line and I feel happy. I exhale smoke, blow it out the window, and in that moment I'm happy but the world around me shifts hard to the right and it's
April, 2012. Michael and I are drunk in his car, screaming down the interstate after a show. Marilyn Manson's "Antichrist Superstar" is crashing out of his speakers and the adrenaline and euphoria I used to get after shows is still alive in me and I wonder if I could always be this happy, if I could ever be
shift hard to the left
It's June, 2011. My eyes are closed, but I know I'm on the couch, faking sleep in the house on Arlington. I can feel the afternoon sun on me. I can hear the neighbors through the open windows. I can feel the soft breeze over my skin. I'm avoiding
hard to the left again
It's September, 1991. Our new living room on Adirondack still has boxes. I took a book out of the school library on movie monsters. Dracula, the Wolfman, the Creature from the Black Lagoon. I like this new home. I like my room. I like the stairs. I feel a tightness I'm unable to explain yet. A perfect September day and I run my fingers over the pictures. I'm slow to leave this memory but I
do.
I force the shift now. Any direction. It doesn't matter. I have to get away from whatever is in that moment. Just up the stairs, where the lights are off. Shift hard to
June, 1994. Same house, but I'm across the street now, in the woods. Standing above and staring down at a spinal column half covered in mud and leaves and remnants of gore. It's evening. It might rain. No ribs. No skull. Just the spine. I have to tell Keith.
Involuntary shift to the left.
August 5th, 1993. A moment I've written about before. One I find myself trapped in often. Keith's basement. His bedroom. I'm faking sleep, trying to keep as quiet and small as possible, hidden in the dark room on the couch in the corner as his drunk father is a few feet away screaming at him and punching him and I'm trying to focus on why I didn't stay home that night. Why didn't I want to stay home with my father. Why didn't I want to play Truxton with him. I was sorry I didn't. I am trying to block it out. I am hiding from violence and fear by diving into guilt. Keith's father storms out eventually and I listen to Keith cry himself to sleep but I've been faking my sleep and I hold back crying and in the morning we both walk up the creaking basement stairs and his mom makes us breakfast in their small hot apartment and the moment ends and
to the right
and I'm watching you tell me you're leaving. November 1995. "What's wrong?" you ask. "What the fuck do you think?" I answer, swearing at you for the first time.
to the right
(no, not here...)
to the right
A fucking knife in my arm. A chair over my back. I have school in the morning.
to the right
(or here...)
to the right
17 years later. I'm watching you wave goodbye, crying. I did this. I did this.
to the right
Staring at the grass. Years have gone by. I feel each moment. I am drenched in them.
to the right
to the right
I'm standing in a cemetery watching water runoff move down a concrete basin. It's February but warm enough. I'm considering hanging myself again. I think about it regularly. I assume everyone does, I tell myself. The water trickles and flows weakly and I wish I hadn't worn a sweater. The damage I've done. To everyone around me. To myself. The time I've wasted. Squandered. It's 2022 and I'm standing in a cemetery in Austin on a day off and I know what I have to do.
to the right
I'm barely here.
to the right
I'm crying in a U-Haul. I don't know if I can fix any of this. I don't know if I can be better. I don't know who I am or where I belong. I'm going to miss my cat. I keep thinking about the cat. My buddy. Throwing her on my shoulder and walking around outside. Inspecting plants and fences and the world around us. I'm in a U-Haul somewhere near Texarkana and I'm crying about a cat and all the goddamn the damage I've caused.
to the right
Three days later. I've crossed into New York. I'm driving along the Southern Tier and I keep thinking about how beautiful it is here. How lucky I am to be home. How bright the world seems to me now. After three days of driving, I have vented I am filled with hope.
to the left
It's May, 2019. I'm in the kitchen at work. I ask a cook if he has DMT. I've been meditating for a year and I've been reading a lot of studies regarding psychedelics and their positive benefits regarding depression, addiction, anxiety, etc. "Yeah," he says, "if you want, but honestly, when it's time, it'll find you," he says. I don't buy it.
to the right
to the right
I'm spread across my bed, awash in color and sound and energy and the woman at the end of my bed shows me. Shreds me. Guides me. Over an intense, uncomfortable, and exhausting six hour journey, she says so many things. But especially; "You don't have to destroy. Just grow," she says. "You don't die. This you dies. A new life is coming. Good things are coming." I come out ashamed, broken, and lighter.
to the right
I invite you to a show and you come.
to the right
I'm apologizing to you. You're high at my kitchen table. You tell me you're sad. I pull my chair closer to yours and I hug you. I know I'm guarded. I know I keep a distance. I'm trying to fight it. My apartment is hot. It's making us both uneasy. I think "if I could just control that, I could make you feel better" but that's not true. I know that. I don't know how to shake this.
to the right
I'm beyond where I was when I wrote all of this. You left last night. You left a long time ago, but also last night. I'm back to this time travel. This dialectic nostalgia. I've showered. I've dressed. I'm on the floral couch and staring out the window again. The weight.
to the left
Outside a breakfast place smiling.
to the left
taking a picture on the stairs.
to the right
beach boys and crying
to the right
to the left
to the left
to the right
to the left
Circling endlessly. Digging for roots. Begging for answers.
I find nothing.
I come back. Here, where it's all led.
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