Getting Off The Drugs

I never considered myself just another drifter in a lonely city. A shocked, scared an inexperienced student. A little girl fresh out of home. It all fitted so easily I never even stopped to think about the reality of it. The reality that I expected. The slight tinge of fear at the sharp and brutal realness of it all. It never hit. I always expected to be gawping out windows like I was on that school excursion. The feeling of absolute awe was never so powerful until that day. I always wanted to live in the city. I always knew that, but for the reasons one loves any city. Up until that day I was never so resolute, so completely enamoured with Melbourne. Sometimes I regret how easy and natural and normal it has all been. I just can't decide whether the analogy is that I am trying to lift a blurry rose tinted film off something altogether more harsh and real; like I can't feel it. I feel like I'm not feeling. Or perhaps there is no film to lift, perhaps the film, the illusion is that life and the city is harsh and sharp and intense - and I've just skipped that awe inspiring falsity.

The trains have stopped running and I’ve been schlepped onto this bus with these strangers in my personal space. Some blonde woman with Swine Flu and a Blackberry. What a sheltered life some people with cars must live. I am on a bus, alone, at nearly 10 at night, who would know to find me here? Exactly here. I sit here and somehow I get a feeling off this situation. I look at it and I go, god this is real, this is confronting. I should feel more.

I am hoping to jump start it, that sense of awe and hyper-reality. Is this what turns people to drugs? This sense of missing the sharpness, the confronting nature of things, of not being as sensitive and awed as one once was? I know the old line: “I just needed to feel something”. But is that heightened sensitivity just a part of childhood that one inevitably loses? And therefore the numbness is merely a normal part of growing up? Indeed it shows that adulthood for many people is a quest to regain that sense of… innocence? Is innocence this awe and sensitivity that I describe? Is that how they have been branding it all this time? Is my spark of inspiration some sick throwback to a clichéd rendering of ‘innocence’?

A lot of the time, the best glimmer I feel, is the perfect combination of a song and a moment. Sometimes it’s devastating beauty in the weather and the environment. Other times it’s outlandish and dangerous situations. Something about these perfectly real moments seizes me. How can you let this go? How can you not tell someone? It's too unique, it's too special, no-one is living this life that I am living. It is just too immense a moment for one person to sustain, to contain; to behold. I miss it, I miss it, I miss all of it. And the narrative is still there. It always was, but once I started expressing it so fluidly on the blog my mind just didn't want to let it go. The desire to share, to narrate and describe and craft. I am struck with it, afflicted with it.

I am aching to feel the artistic moment, the ultimate drug, the moment of inspiration. And it can be such a fickle, fleeting and soul tearing high. It’s true euphoria but it’s gone unless you can put it into art. And that’s so painful. Sometimes there is not even a moment to be captured; you stumble upon something perfect and artistically enthralling and energising; and there is nothing more can be done. And you just sit there, as it washes over you, convincing pleasure, respect and gratitude to succeed the jealousy. Other times the moment is uncatchable. It’s is too big, too fragile, too context dependant. You watch it slip through your fingers knowing anything you could even think of doing would be but a poor imitation. It all leaves me feeling very torn open and hopeless, yet intoxicated.

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