Minnesota is this time capsule � every time I come back, everything is the same, or at least consistent. My Portland life seems to change drastically every 2 months or so. Some things here are really frozen in time, like my bedroom. When I was in high school I was constantly redecorating it, but now it preserves a moment in my life that just happened to be the last moment I lived here.
And every time I come back here I learn the same things over again that I already knew. It�s a place with one message for me. You don't need anyone. (or anything). When he left, he did something that, years ago, would have crushed my heart, but this time I just felt myself lift up and float away.
You don't � can't � need anything. Nothing belongs to us except in our memories. And you can leave all you want but the only thing that changes is you � which explains why this place is always the same no matter how many times I reject it.
You can't need anything. I�m always searching for *enough*. I know I�m enough � but � I could be MORE ENOUGH. And oh my god, I�ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere. I saw something flash open then lost it. I keep trying to add things. Then everything drops away and I know that it's just me.
The older I get the more I realize two things. 1. How vast, varied, complex, and absurd everything is � how much more there is that what I see or know. It exponentially increases in size and strangeness. 2. How totally independent I am from everything, how much I am just a cell of completeness � RED SELF. The world is coming into focus and separating itself from me. I�m interconnected with everything but I�m a free agent, there is no bond stronger than the single tautology of me. Red self.
Heroin is an instantaneous method for becoming whole� It�s not that it feels so fucking amazing, it only feels amazing after you�ve agreed that it is amazing, when you need it, because it makes you safe and complete, because it�s easier than trying to decide what�s really important. Heroin isn't the problem. Thinking you need something is the problem. �We choose our addictions. They want to locate the horror in the remedy [heroin], but the horror�s in the zeitgeist� � the psychological pattern of need, the position that you are not enough.
Heroin shuts out the world. Pupils contract to pinpoints, like your eyes are saying: no, I don�t want to see anymore, it�s too much. Sometimes, now, the world makes me think � how could I shut this out? Deny it? Ignore it? Heroin keeps you inside yourself, this insular place, as comforting as home. It doesn�t just shut out the world, it erases your obligations to the world. But where else does joy come from except through fulfilling obligations to the world? The things that heroin shuts out are the only things that life gives you.
Home is like an opiate � comforting and boring, nothing exciting about it, but it feels so good, in a bland way. Heroin is like the home you can always go back to.
And I wish that I was made of stone. So that I would not have to see a beauty impossible to define,
a beauty impossible to believe,
a beauty impossible to endure.