02/03 2026
Having pain is one thing. Having to endure everyday life with it always at the foreground, now that is humbling. I watch documentaries of people in tremendous pain from being dopesick, and I think I finally understand. It's not about pleasure. It's about the dissolution from pain. No kidding, of course. Oxys became the top drug in the US for a reason. Rather a living death than pain, especially the unpredictable kind that sneaks up on you from behind. And I'm saying that honestly. Rather a living death than pain. It's not a choice.
Because time never moves as slowly as when you're in pain without end. A night turns into a week, at least, and work turns into a hobby you flee towards to avoid your main occupation: pain.
After a while I honestly get afraid. That burning, excruciating burning which makes my eyes light up and water while the blackness starts to envelop me from the edges. I have a divine experience every waking moment, though I can only gaze straight into hell. He's a wicked devil who likes to play with his food, before he chooses to torment them. He gives a glimmer of hope, only to pull it away with a smothering blanked of fire which burns, burns, burns...
It gets better, of course, when you relax and don't tense up. Of course it does. Only when you fully submit to evil, does evil abate.
But even worse: it makes you turn inwards. You retreat to where the sun has already set, no reaching out from here to there. What is she thinking? Who even is she at this point? You're lost.
I've been thinking about freedom lately. It's a fickle thing, and I'm unsure we can ever catch it, despite it being the only thing we truly crave.
We crave freedom of expression, to be equal to one another, even though we oftentimes give up equality to our brethren just in the hope that I gets an inch more of it.
We crave freedom from our addictions which keep us shackled to who we tell ourselves we are just to keep ourselves from changing.
We crave to feel free as a bird and float in the open blue sky. We crave to be inside the cage, without any other choice than to find beauty in the pool of rainwater left behind by the storm.
Perhaps most of all pain, yes, pain. Freedom from pain.
It's a warm summer's day clinging to the humid air which drips from the eaves and runs down the street. There's those shackled by their feet who lie in the shadow the building makes to rot, because sometimes there's a gentle breeze. The music is enticing me all the way from over here. There's simplicity, like the notes from a tin roof on a rainy day. There's beauty, tremendous beauty all around. The melody is freedom, the trumpet sounds echo, the banjo drifts, the voice is far, far, far down the depths and back. It is the seasons, the reasons, what it means. The freedom. That drive from here to there. Most of all, the freedom.