I listen and the voice is of a world collapsing endlessly, a frozen world, under a faint untroubled sky, enough to see by, yes, and frozen too. And I hear it murmur that all wilts and yields, as if loaded down, but here there are no loads, and the ground too, unfit for loads, and the light too, down towards an end it seems can never come. For what possible end to these wastes where true light never was, nor any upright thing, nor any true foundation, but only these leaning things, forever lapsing and crumbling away, beneath a sky without memory of morning or hope of sight. [beckett]
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from my paper diary:
gabe and i are sitting at espresso royale.
WHEN I HAVE KIDS:
-make them learn portable and/or commonly available instruments, like piano, or violin or flute. so they can be street performers or hobo musicians.
this keeps running through my head: it's coming back it's coming back it's coming back it's coming back. (my self, my love)
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yesterday i left the house for the first time in 3 days. it felt so liberating to be done with that paper, although i have to write 2 more. i decided to have the next few days free because i'm leaving soon. my family and i went to the uptown art fair. i kind of floated around. it was sunny. i really liked this one guy's photographs, and i went up and asked him stuff about his printing techniques, and how he makes money selling photos at street fairs. my medication must be working because i didn't forget how to talk or forget where my body was. it was nice. i felt like a normal person. ha.
then i walked to muddy waters to meet joanie and we ran into t., who i used to know but i hadn't seen her in a long time. it turns out she was doing heroin for 6 months and just quit a week ago. i was trying to imagine how she must feel. it was very unpleasant to remember how i felt a week after i quit, both times. it scared me just thinking about it. we traded horror stories. it was weird to talk to someone about it in person, especially someone who's relatively similar to me, and had a similar experience. i didn't feel like such a freak.
i wrote this to someone in an email recently: the hardest thing I found about kicking was that, no matter how addicted you are or how much you don't feel it anymore, it's still keeping your moods stable for you. if you had a graph of your mood, it would be almost a straight line instead of lots of peaks and valleys. i forgot how volatile life can be until i kicked the second time, and i almost couldn't stand having to control my own emotions. everything affected me so much, and i had no control over that either. i hadn't realized that i had been effortlessly avoiding bad moods. i thought i was having bad moods at the time, but it was nothing compared with real-life moods, and i just didn't *care* as much, stuff didn't bother me. it's been a month now and i'm just starting to feel better for real. i'm amazed that it's taken so long to get used to a normal way of regulating my moods.
i said that to t. and she understood exactly. it's nice that someone understands.
so after that joanie and i walked to gabe's house, where people were playing croquet in the yard. i taught virginia how to knit, then i stole her project from her and knit for a long time. it was peaceful. a lot more people came over and we watched "drugstore cowboy" which is about heroin addicts in portland. hmmm. it was a little strange to watch. too realistic. not the robbing drugstores part, but other parts. after the movie lance kept trying to molest me but i got him to give me a back massage instead. i took pictures of everyone in the kitchen. i always feel like i'm taking too many pictures but in the end it's never enough.
gabe and i went to bed but we stayed up until 4 talking, and got up at 8 to go accomplish things, like going to espresso royale and looking at books. then we came back and i rode virginia's bike to the west bank to buy yarn at the yarn store, because her knitting had inspired me. after 45 minutes of looking at and touching every kind of yarn in the store, i got some dark blue/green yarn and wooden needles. then i went to hard times and read beckett. a guy next to me was reading a book in arabic and i was jealous. i remember when i tried to teach myself arabic. now i want to teach myself russian.
i just officially bought my tickets. leaving 6:30 am thursday, arrive at 9:35 am in portland. and i realized c. can't pick me up because he is probably at work then, so i'll have to take the train. i wish sam still had his cabdriver job, where he made no money but drove his friends around all day.
"It's so nice to know where you're going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there." [beckett]
there is no way to describe how much better i feel now than i did a few days ago, 2 weeks ago, a month ago. it's so amazing, like slowly waking up out of a nightmare. very slowly. the nice thing about the low parts is that it feels so good when it starts going up again, getting closer to the asymptote.