Dying Star

When I finished my last post, it came to me.

Until now, I had thought I just wanted to feel one more time a trance-like state I was privileged to know for a few moments over a few days some fifteen years ago in the company of a snowball-throwing marajuana addict from afar. I had supposed it was a delayed response to an experience that had been, as I imagine, like a hit of heroin before dependency takes over: something so eye-openingly wonderful that you devote the rest of your life to doing it again.

I believe that men are afraid of this power. It seems to me that they know that such a power is a furious enslaver of beings and they run from that just as we try futilely to banish drugs from the streets. Like law enforcers seizing drugs one piecemeal packet at a time, they take every opportunity to chop sex up into commercialised cliches of crapness and scatter their toxic shit all over our faces via the calendar on the wall, the redtops, the music industry, in-flight magazines, whatever.

But I'm not a man and I seek the pure stuff, not because of the enslavement but in spite of it. At the heart of that once-lived hit is escape. It's not a state of being that I crave but a non-state, a non-being. And having devoted my later life to not-being, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised or shocked that I have no discernible identity according to our whispering health visitor. Having failed to hurl myself into the black hole, I'm just a star among zillions of other stars, unmoving and remote, quietly burning itself out beneath the shine that others see.