admitting to averages
i'm sitting outside, smoking a cigarette and feeling the phantom blood pooling in my gums, feeling the pulse of it in my fingertips. i listen to the crickets and the occasional truck passing by on the main road. i'm overcome with that familiar 1am urge to make something of my life, which i know i wont right now. but i care that i feel it.
i've been told many times that my big feelings are a blessing, even when they bring me pain. that without the depths of my capacity to be upset, i'd not be able to have the equal depth of joy. for a long time, i believed this. i understood that all happiness is a product of its contrast with sadness, with grief. i advocated this to other people who felt as big as i do.
i don't think i believe that anymore. to slightly paraphrase perhaps my favourite ursula le guin quote;
"The trouble is that we have a bad habit of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain."
i dont think pain is necessary. i think it is a very dull world, to believe that. it was a coping mechanism that served me perhaps for a little while, but with every new suffering and every new joy it seems more and more obselete. they dont need to, should not balance each other out. i dont want to live a life of averages.
i bounce the butt of my cigarette off the window and watch the shower of sparks mirrored in the reflection. the angle isnt what i intended and it lands in the pile of dried leaves by the wall, where they're perpetually sheltered from the moisture that seems to cling to the rest of this yard. it stays there, and the residual glow brightens. i hear a soft crackle. i watch. and then it suddenly snuffs itself out.
there's always a thrill to the thought of burning it all down, and equally to the fantasy of wrenching it all back from the flames at the very last moment.
a friend asked me once, if i would change myself if it meant suffering less. if i had any desire to... be less. and i said no, of course i wouldnt. this depth of feeling is who i am.
i've rethought that answer maybe a hundred times since then, to a slightly different conlusion every time. i think... i think it's still true. i do not want to change the depth of my feeling. but neither do i think all the evil in the world is worth it. its not our capacity to feel that needs to be changed.
this is the treason of the artist also; the refusal to admit that this is the way the world must be.
change is difficult, and painful. masochism and melancholy go hand in hand. sometimes that which feels good also hurts, and that which hurts can also feel good. but bittersweetness doesnt add any flavour to things, not really. maybe its a motivator, at best. look at how good this could be, if only i wasnt so bitter about it also.
we've changed a lot already, in these brief lifetimes. i dont like all of it, but that doesnt really matter. it was important that we knew each other for a little while. who i was will always love who you were, and i hope the reverse is true also.
but this pain isn't serving a purpose anymore. i think it is time that we let go.