buffalo divine eden № 7

quitting drinking isn’t the hard part. it’s realizing you have to learn all over how to live life like everybody else. or worse, you never learned how in the first place. hence the drinking. you know you must be missing something. everybody else seems to get it. but the secret eludes you. so you have a drink. it’s a social lubricrant, right? maybe this will facilitate a human connection. and you find yourself in a corner fighting off the spins wondering if anyone else knows you’re on the verge of an existential panic attack. 
go home. away from here. somewhere where your pathetic inability to establish some sort of human contact isn’t brought into such sharp relief. where it’s not so painfully obvious.
have a drink. hell, live a little, have six.
build walls around yourself. somewhere they can’t hurt you. rage against god, yourself, old loves who never understood you or appreciated you, who couldn’t or wouldn’t save you.
as if you ever let them in so they could.
but we can’t have that, can we? no sir. then they’d see you for who you really are. a little boy still terrified of rejection, of failure, of ridicule. never grew past that one. they’d laugh, and who could blame them? you know you deserve it.
you would have left you too.
what about God? Jesus loves everybody, right? maybe that’ll do the trick.
but you still have to make the first move. he’s not a maid. he’s not your fucking errand boy. this is give and take here. and you know god’s never been fond of doubters anyway, so why bother? so there you are back where you started. if you could make the first move on a phantom you have your doubts about anyway, you could make the first move into doing something about this little dilemma of yours.
but you can’t. you don’t know how.
go on, have another drink, it’s alright. stumble your way down to the circle k and get another bottle. don’t want to run out, now do we?
you drink and dwell on these things until you’re cursing god and punching the walls and crying so hard you can’t even breathe. you want to die, you think maybe you’ll kill yourself.
ah, but that’s the ultimate irony, isn’t it? if you had the balls to kill yourself you’d have the balls to lift yourself up by the proverbial bootstraps and this scenario would never have arisen. oh, the irony.
come on now, think. you can figure this out. you’re smart, you got straight a’s in school. use your head.
but you already did that too, didn’t you? that’s how you got into this mess. you’ve rationalized your neuroses into a labyrinthine, impenetrable fortress, and now you don’t know how to get out. you’ve been building it your whole life, you just didn’t know it. this is your life’s work. your masterpiece. you thought you were doing it to protect yourself. you didn’t know. you didn’t know.
you didn’t know you’d placed your heart inside a rubik’s cube- that you built- that you can’t solve.

was talking to an old drunk at a meeting one time and he said “you’re smart. i think you’ll find a lot of us are. it’s our downfall”.