Habit
"I dated this chick, right, and she loved me, she cared about me, she worried about me, she wanted the best for me."
"That's fucked up."
"I know. I had to end it."
Abbots Habit, July 28th, 2009
Months later I’ll be sitting outside a coffee shop on Abbot Kinney Boulevard on a hot July day, talking to an artist friend of mine about love, and where that takes us. Love, she insists, does not happen after thirty. What happens then is merely familiarity and comfort, a cosy feeling of acquaintance, a false sense of intimacy and affection that serves to stave off the void for a little longer. It is, perhaps, telling, that this friend is an ex-heroin addict, someone intimately acquainted with the void and the filling of, someone that has now gone sober and crawled back from the mouth of hell to sit in paradise on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, to acknowledge that whatever happens in this sober life, whatever perception we make of our own experience, it is always, somehow inadequate in comparison to that chemically induced manipulation of our senses which passed for pure ecstasy, and that having filled the void so easily then, we will spend a lifetime merely gesturing limply towards that fact, disabled and mute without our tools of alcohol and drugs to rely on.
We sit, she and I, contemplating life on Abbot Kinney Boulevard on a hot summer’s day, sipping iced coffee and smoking cigarettes, at peace with what we know, what we have learned from our stories, our narratives, our past: that real life is always inadequate until the retelling of it makes it glorious, victorious, tragic and beautiful. That real life is never enough for us writers and artists. That we have to capture it in the realms in which we rule - conquer it, dictate it, crush it, reform it: and yet in the end, we are always, ironically, its slave.
"That's fucked up."
"I know. I had to end it."
Abbots Habit, July 28th, 2009
Months later I’ll be sitting outside a coffee shop on Abbot Kinney Boulevard on a hot July day, talking to an artist friend of mine about love, and where that takes us. Love, she insists, does not happen after thirty. What happens then is merely familiarity and comfort, a cosy feeling of acquaintance, a false sense of intimacy and affection that serves to stave off the void for a little longer. It is, perhaps, telling, that this friend is an ex-heroin addict, someone intimately acquainted with the void and the filling of, someone that has now gone sober and crawled back from the mouth of hell to sit in paradise on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, to acknowledge that whatever happens in this sober life, whatever perception we make of our own experience, it is always, somehow inadequate in comparison to that chemically induced manipulation of our senses which passed for pure ecstasy, and that having filled the void so easily then, we will spend a lifetime merely gesturing limply towards that fact, disabled and mute without our tools of alcohol and drugs to rely on.
We sit, she and I, contemplating life on Abbot Kinney Boulevard on a hot summer’s day, sipping iced coffee and smoking cigarettes, at peace with what we know, what we have learned from our stories, our narratives, our past: that real life is always inadequate until the retelling of it makes it glorious, victorious, tragic and beautiful. That real life is never enough for us writers and artists. That we have to capture it in the realms in which we rule - conquer it, dictate it, crush it, reform it: and yet in the end, we are always, ironically, its slave.
MIMI IN NY | 9:14 PM |
