In My Secret Life

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I thought I would quickly slip out and score, if not come back without the guilt and soldier on to another wholesome day.

Another day. I would drink myself into oblivion to reach it. Fuck that. I was on my way.

We must have drove around for hours, in circles chasing it, him with the freedom and adventure of the uncouth night. And I, fueled by desperate hope, paranoia at the edges. I was more primitive than I knew. I was nervous - fidgety and shady, and I tried to assure him that this was how I dealt with that sweet sweet prospect. Something about Hollywood, the moment I enter it - it makes me sick, it entices me. I can feel the depravity and freedom of the streets, and feel my stomach turn.

Each stop brought frustration amid the gnawing ache of misery. Ten minutes was never ten minutes. Each prospect gave noncommittal assurances for minutes or hours, when what I needed was now. I was running out of cuticles, in spasms sputtering. Each minute couldn't come soon enough. The waiting was the worst. I had invested my faith into those I wouldn't think twice about in a state of normalcy: Family, will, a wholesome burden strongly borne, and a contributing member of society. But I had strayed. I was one of the people on the street, an extra in a scene that someone else wrote. The storytellers create the scenes and paint the streets. I was apart of it inasmuch as to disappear without any relevance to the larger story. No one knows me here.

I was at its mercy. Wherever it would beckon, I would follow the trail and wait. When I couldn't take it any longer, I would wait some more. Patience had nothing to do with it. Virtue was a word that sounded good and worked in pamphlets, or assumed relevance in desperate self-reflection. That could wait till later.

My nerves were shot. My insides were, to say the least, bubbling. Feverish and tearing away at my nails, I would puke after each cigarette. This was - or somehow assumed through physiological rewiring - to be my calling. To others the stage, recognition, and the resulting self-realization was what compelled them to regurgitate.

I'd give up food and water. I'd sell my soul to keep from walking away empty handed. Each passing thought, each delayed moment, would turn my corrupted hunger into a whimper. The childish howl and thin despair - one who doesn't know, but wants. He can't understand but yearns for what he needs.

Walk away.
Run (back)
into your mother's womb.

Shame was muddled along with memories of days when I was decent. As long as I had a choice, the prospect of attaining what I had intended, I would resign myself to powerlessness. Everything else could go to hell.

And then the wait. I called for it in my head, I cried aloud as for a solitary number on roulette. Though I was still in control of my fate. A concentrated wave of energy directed at the target which held my dreams. Ambitions and goals lingering like the memory of a love you once knew... And he walks out the door with it, coolly. I couldn't bring him over to me fast enough. The foul stench of success that I've come to know - ratlike, I couldn't wait to get it home. I practically shit myself the ride back.

I had given away bits and pieces of myself for it...but now I have it in my hand!
The world could explode and I'd still find a little hole.

You easily lose yourself in it, not like a beautiful tragedy, but gradually and without pomp and glory - bits and pieces stripping away at your soul, till there's nothing left to sell.