To Drink

I drink because my reality becomes unbearable. Not any harsh conditions, or regular tragedies, no. Just the mere walls of my house and the texture of the days. I sit in my room, with the sun outside, a makeshift idea of belonging. There are books around me, like companions, but they are honest, in that they show no purpose. Do I drink to find purpose? Not really. I drink to escape the mild suffering of a purposeless world. For some time, liquor makes me escape the sensations I otherwise am imprisoned to. Reality is not a dream. And even if it is, it is a very powerful one. I can’t just wake up to a different kind of life. Reality is more like a drug. They say that we consume drugs to escape reality, which they never mention, is a supremely powerful drug itself. Neither is a dream. Dreams are beautiful, nonchalant. They may tell us important truths, but we can rarely tell. Dreams, however horrid, are like exquisite architecture. They are light, even fluffy, without matter. Reality, and the escapes it provides, is of a different nature. Raw, untended, and routine. Drunken escapes are a part of reality. Yet, they subvert it. Like a small faction, steeped in the mother’s ideology, attempting to break away, yet never capable of doing so. Radicalism then becomes a way of comfort. A solace not against meaninglessness. A solace more against the cold response awareness of purposelessness receives. I drink to care.

The sun burns outside. The trees sway to the sound of traffic. Wide, light green leaves tremor to a disgusted wind. The stray sounds inside my house inflict blows. It is a pleasant home. It is filled with kindness. The kindness exerts a force. It produces a burden. A pleasant burden. A rather robust burden, yet one that can be shrugged off in a moment’s rebellion. Liquor helps me remain middle class. If I stopped drinking, I would collapse into deeper radicalisms.  

I come from one city to another. But my room remains the same. The stillness of my mind is unperturbed. The mathematics of survival unabated and careless. Long journeys seem to occupy specks in my otherwise enhanced consciousness. If I could replace the stagnation with journeys, and the brief travels with physical stillness, I would invert myself into a different worldview. There would, to put it simply, be different concerns. There would be mild worry, of reaching somewhere else. Wherever else. Journeys fill up time in an easier way than sitting here observing the stoop of the narrow tree trunk outside.

Some people fill up their rooms with their ideas. Mine is always bare, unknowing, empty. My lean ideas occupy the darkness of a nebulous mind. They are strands. Which visit me in the dark, and then move away. They are nothing. What could the rest of the world have to do with my ideas? What good or bad could it possibly do? It surely will never make any difference, except as entertainment for those a bit like me. 

My mind is like a gloomy river. Its banks forever shift in the soil, into the forest, then return to the depths within. It is at times an angry river. A river bloated with dead intentions. It is also an old river. Perhaps it flowed within another before me, with whom I shared some routine similarities. I sit here now, alone, amongst the inconsequential sounds of a house at daytime. But I am also, at this very moment, a swirling, heavy river. The rains have filled me up. Nearly into a person. I have my own distorted intentions. My own lack of understanding. The river never really empties out into the sea. It never leaves. A river flows forever. When we walk to the sea, we walk to a different idea. The river remains, a tumbling meditation through ancient lands. I drink to the river.

We speak to the wind in many ways. We sit in the evenings and converse silently. Or we listen in the night, to its atonal melodies. We face it on a journey, or on a mountain. The wind faces us everyday. We don’t worship it anymore. They way we no more worship the sky or fire. Have there not been old men grieving our negligence, our arrogance? Yet we do worship them, I think. Often, in our desolate lonelinesses, we think of the wind or ponder the barren skies in a way that amounts to worship. We worship it all, yet never realize. I drink to forget. To worship.