It’s funny, the transformation. It really is. We all have different ways to deal with our emotions, and to deal with relationships. When I get in my feelings, I get lost in my head. I get upset at being tormented by old issues, and respond by really feeling myself, by getting cocky. That sort of douche-y shit.
It’s just an act, to be frank. You have to find a way to pick yourself up when you’re not feeling well.
I’m much more happy than most of these essays I write, but most of the time I don’t write when I’m happy. It’s not as powerful. And to be honest, you all don’t even really read my happy stuff. But I ain’t hurt by that, you read what you want to read, just read something.
I’m by myself ninety-five percent of the time, walking around the village and the LES. You’ll probably catch me with my camera snapping photos at people that don’t want it. But those make the best images. I’d rather capture anger and frustration than nothing at all. Fuck a picture of a building.
I wonder if she remembers the stuff I can’t forget. I wonder if she realizes I’m as stuck as I was months ago. She probably doesn’t, though, I flex too hard to the outside world. I mean, that’s all she sees. We don’t talk, I made that decision. There wasn’t much for me to do in that situation but extract myself and restart. I changed my style of dress, I gave up on my major and the money, I got real artsy. Like hitting reset when the Nintendo would freeze. But do you remember when we studied for finals at your friend’s place in FiDi? Up in that penthouse lounge? I still have the address in my Seamless from when I ordered you some teriyaki chicken. When I updated the app—when they changed all their shit up—apparently it set that address as my default. Got a call saying my Sesame Chicken was with the doorman of that building. Once I connected the address to what it actually was, I fell all back into it.
This was a few weeks back. All I learnt is that you’re never completely out of it. The reset button doesn’t always work.
Some time ago—I actually have shitty memory and forget more than I remember, all the girls know this, but it’s nothing personal—she wanted to talk to me so she hit up my phone. I responded by blasting Dreams & Nightmares and getting higher than the Burj. I danced around my apartment’s common room. Every damn thing made laugh. I’d already had a dope day, and this was just icing on the cake. There was no more anxiety. But that’s when I knew for certain that I was still an addict.
You can get addicted in a way to that feeling, and to the person that gives you that feeling. And I, unfortunately, have an addictive personality. I’m a man of many obsessions, all competing against the others for my time.
But we spoke the next day, when I got the nerve to actually respond. It must have been clear quickly that I still wasn’t clean. Clean of that drug. She seemed legitimately surprised, though, which means I’m doing something right.
It was, to me, so naïve to think I was chill only because a few weeks had passed. Hell, I spent the entire months of March and April faded, that awesome combination that kept me going and kept me smiling, trying to fill that endless pit. I was faded in class, at the gym, at 8 in the AM, and all throughout the night. If you saw me once during those two months, that’s where my head was at, and the only way I could stop myself from shaking when I was alone. Sure, there was a hell of a lot more at work than the shit between the two of us, but it didn’t make anything any easier.
I wonder if she has any inclination that I cannot get anything else out of my head and that anything, and everything reminds of me of our brief past. Yesterday I saw a picture of DiCaprio in the Wolf of Wall Street, and I thought of being in her bed, watching it on a Friday when I had food poisoning and she was at class. She brought me food, she brought my weed and placed it next to my bed, she attempted to sleep but never complained as I shivered and breathed heavily out of nausea next to her.
All I know is that it ain’t like this for her. That’s why it is what it is: a fight against yourself.
A fight against yourself trying to go clean from the drug she gave you. But shit, what if I don't wanna be clean yet? Man, I don't know. Hell, for me, it's all about preventing it from turning into anger eventually.
'Cause I don’t have any more energy to yell.