a painting made me tear up once at the MFA
i don’t need to do anything at all.
Sometimes I have these moments. Something clicks and everything that ever was is okay. One time I was in a therapist's office and describing how grateful I was to be feeling sad, and that getting to feel that at all was part of the experience of living, so it’s a good thing, because I’ve experienced long periods of nothing but emptiness, being entirely numb. I remember being in the corner of a high school buddy’s room, right before peaking on some lsd. There in the corner, I was crying. It felt like I was falling infinitely, deeper and deeper and deeper still. The catalyst? a music video for Tessellate. The point of the video was to put a modern twist on Raphael’s School of Athens, it’s a rather famous painting, depicting the three great painters among a large cast of philosophers, mathematicians and scholars etc. In the modern version for the music video, it was drug dealers and instagram girls, prostitutes, gangsters, you get the picture. Every time the black guys were the focus of the camera, a shark could be seen swimming around the background. I saw this imagery and thought “but I’m nothing like a shark” being likened to such a predator made me weep. So down and down I went, falling into this infinite hole, until my friend noticed and asked “dude are you alright?” I looked up with tears streaming down my face and said “yeah no big deal, it’s just the acid” and then suddenly it was all better. It was just part of the trip!
I remembered that because tonight I was listening to a particularly otherworldly mix of some Travis Scott songs and somehow worked myself into a panic attack. Before it’s onset, I imagined reaching out my hand to grab theirs, and I felt their hand holding mine. I was teleported to a memory, clear as day, then the grief sent me spiraling. Suddenly I was falling infinitely again. But then, a thought/feeling struck me. “It’s okay, the grief and terror is okay too.”
I’ve long been focused on trying to cultivate a way of being where I’m okay with everything and nothing bothers me. This instantly falls apart as soon as the slightest thing upsets me and I’m back to square one, it's infinitely frustrating. But what if it was okay to be filled with grief and terror.
Anyway, I don’t know shit about fuck, but I’m glad to be alive, and I’ll be happy when it ends.
Once I was doing shrooms with a former lover, I asked her how she was feeling and she responded
“I kind of want it to end”
My heart shattered.
She was talking about the shroom trip, I thought she meant her life.
