j'ai vu l'éternité

“Until you get comfortable with being alone, you’ll never know if you are choosing someone out of love or loneliness.”

If you persevere, in time you will have an entirely different problem – not that life is meaningless, but rather that life has almost too much meaning. As the scales fall from your eyes the world rushes into focus, presenting itself with a kind of vibrational eloquence that can, at first, be almost overwhelming. Everything shimmers, everything clarifies, everything wrestles for your attention. Trees feel super-real, their roots plunged into the earth, their branches stretching to the sky, birds are flesh and blood souls, fragile with life, the sky unfolds and rolls, the ocean crashes, people fascinate, books are beautiful, children are whirling dynamos of chaos, dogs bark and cats meow, flowers shout, your neighbour glows, and God runs like a helix through all things. The world awaits you, humming with meaning. You are alive with potential. You are not dead.

And in that first post-heroin spring, my ageless dope body was gone. I’d traded it for a body that was like an empty hive. In the spring the missing swarms flew back through the sunset to fill it up again. [...] Not that I missed the dope body. I was sick of having the kind of problems that demons have—sick to death—but the scale of the human problem was breathtaking. It took my breath away, standing in front of those colossal sunsets. Red and purple. The memory of bedtime when I was four coming back in that color. The memory of my first kiss coming back. The way my bedroom smelled when I was ten and I was sick.

All I knew to do was keep putting my feet to the rocky ground, waiting to register something in the body instead of the brain. Because I wasn’t. Fifteen or so football fields up the trail I understood I wasn’t feeling. Not just drug-numb to moods or heartaches, I mean heat, cold. Tasting. That deadness of tongue and skin and eyes that doesn’t technically blind you, but you’re not seeing. Like the man said, the day I ran out of the pharmacy with my first ticket to oxy-nowhere: Blind blind blind. It grows on you till you’re darked out and don’t care. Something in me was wanting to grind my bones against this mountain till the body picked a side. Give up the ghost, or get back in here. [...] But I felt some things. The deer family that left their tracks in the muddy trail. As much venison as I’d eaten in my life, I felt I was some percentage of deer. I felt the kindliness of the moss, which is all over everywhere once you get out of the made world. God’s flooring. All the kinds, pillowy, pin-cushiony, shag carpet. Gray sticks of moss with red heads like matchsticks. Some tiny dead part of me woke up to the moss and said, Man. Where you been. This is the fucking wonderful world of color.