Breaking Young Divinities

Chapter 14

Life is not a gomer's "box of chocolates." Life is not merry. Life is not like a river. It does not flow. There is no circle of life. There is no enriching spiritual cycle. What life is, considering what little meaning a life has, is a line with a beginning and an end. Some lines terminate sooner than others.

These lines all have a unique twist somewhere along the way. Most however are almost the same, as if they were sewn from a single pattern, and merely tailored to fit at the hem and at the waist.

At what point do I give up on myself, abandon my own specialness, and accept that my petty existence isn't unique? I have to admit that my line is the same as all others, except at the hem and at the waist.

For a few weeks after the funeral I moved around in the world in a state of mindless incoherence. I did not feel, I did not think, and I did not hurt. Neither did I cry for those weeks. Then all at once I was snapped back into reality. It was a stinging slap across the face, and suddenly I was hit with the burden of feelings.

I managed to survive this emotional bombardment by making television my melancholic indulgence – it was like some kind of drug fix that went straight to the brain. Escapist science fiction like Star Trek managed to lessen the impact by taking me to worlds and conflicts so much beyond my own that I could not help but be swept away. Observant shows like Seinfeld somehow did not help. They only made me question my own sanity, for thirty minutes, every Thursday night – an unpleasant sort of mental enema.

The soothing blue radiance of television notwithstanding, I felt increasingly burdened by my own mind. I turned to creative outlets like drawing, writing, and poetry with little results. Every drawing was warped, because I cannot draw. Every piece of prose was self-indulgent. Every poem was self-pitying. For example:

"Disenchantment"

Where should I go, when I have no hope?
What should I do, when my spirit has sullen
like a blue sky cast-over by cloud?
What is it called – that which the world has replaced
in the hearth of soul? - Disenchantment.
I have not seen its face,
nor have I heard its cry,
but like a haggard banshee
it follows me constantly.

Reading it now just makes me want to puke. I could only write so many of these woe-is-me bits of poetry before my brain exploded inside my skull. I still remember how those squished clumps of oozing grey cells spilled out of my ears and washed down my shoulders and splattered onto my desk. I gave up on poetry after that happened. Thank God.

Poetry ceased, drawings became ineffective, and Star Trek had worn thin. So I lived in a perpetual state of moping. On one sullen afternoon I was at home alone – Mom was out a lot – when I decided to clean the kitchen as a sort of make-work project. It was the same kitchen that I had cleaned seven years earlier to gain my mom's favor. I sorted through the dust-caked pots and pans, and it seemed to me that nobody else had bothered to clean it in all that time.

Under the counter, hidden well out of sight and probably long forgotten, I found a few bottles of alcohol. There was a half-empty bottle of rum and some unopened peach brandy. It's obvious what I did next. I had myself a little bit of rum, and poured it into my mouth happily.

It went down horribly, like jagged stones or razor blades, and as soon as it went down it came back up in vapors. My nose turned red, my eyes burned, and my entire head felt inflamed. You know how horses fire steam out of their nostrils on a cool morning? I did that. You know how whales blow jets of water twenty feet into the air? I did that.

So I finished cleaning the kitchen, but with less steady feet. I took note of where the bottles were kept, in case I needed them again. It wasn't long until I did. The next day, in fact, I enjoyed them once more. It was difficult to swallow and I had to hold my head to keep it from exploding. But I felt relaxed.