T.S. Eliot said that
“Midnight shakes the memory as
a madman shakes a dead geranium.”
For me it’s dawn. I’m not scared of the dark. I find it enclosing and comforting, but that very first light… I hate what it does inside my skull. As if, with those first rays, the full weight of my own mortality slams down upon me like an enormous dusty tome containing the history of some extinguished civilization notable only for its idiosyncrasies.
It used to give me severe panic attacks. In fact, I admit to having drugged myself back into unconsciousness, just to escape the horror of that feeling.
Recently, my brain has devised new strategies to cope with the prospect of my own impending demise and its obvious insignificance. I am bowled over by monstrous waves of lust. Not tenderness, or affection, or love. Just roaring, raging, screaming, clawing lust. (If this is some biological trick to entice me to breed before it’s too late, it was way too late twenty years ago.)
It’s not the sort of lust I can use to write with. It’s manic and ferocious; there is no object to it, no focus for it. Usually, I either get up and do something to distract myself, or attempt to masturbate my way back into oblivion.
This morning, however, I just lay there and suffered through it. I tasted it, let it feed on my bones, felt it eat away at my muscle. How else will I learn to know it and understand it? If I don’t take the measure its anatomy and find its pernicious, beating heart, I can’t figure out how to kill it.
Fuck it. It’s probably just hormones.