Artificial Sun
Dear Reader;
Perhaps I have been absent for too long- indulging the usual summer manic driven ambitions. I drove to Utah, then back to Montana, and promptly began studying Calculus.
Ho hum.
My stepmother once told me that I had a very adventurous life! I should say so. But on this trip, something was different. For once, these adventures were not about pursuit of the unknown- the quantity always vastly greater than the world visible to my naked eye. I saw the most beautiful things in the West, watched them pass by from behind the steering wheel- such as the glitter and noise of Denver on an early summer night, just as the sun was sinking and heat radiated from the sidewalks.
And everything just washed over me, a dull zombie.
So one day, as I prepared to drive off of a cliff in Escalante-Grand Staircase, the Garfield County Sheriff's Department intervened. I was taken to a hospital in Provo for 24 hour observation, but stayed 11 days while experimenting with various substances. Eventually, the psychiatrist determined that I have complex partial seizures in my temporal lobe. He sent me home with epilepsy medication.
I stayed the weekend in a homeless shelter when I missed my bus. My bed was made with a home-made quilt. I smoked too many cigarettes.
Apparently allergic to the medication I was prescribed, I stopped taking it two weeks ago. The mood swings and wild dreams returned- and I slip slide from the taut mask of artificial happiness to the loose, filthy comfort of private hell.
So it goes.
I daydream and night dream about Seattle- Greenwood plums, my old bicycle, the frenzy and twitch of Capital Hill, glowing under a hundred thousand neon lights- and about you, Dear Reader, and our past lives together.
Couldn't it all have been different?
