Home again. Just out of rehab. I feel my soul is still tethered to the darkness. I feel it tug and yank at my heartstrings, always yearning for me to return, to turn away from the light, the beauty of life, and wallow forevermore in the solemn realms of life, of sorrow and intoxication, of dysfunctionality and unhealthy lifestyle choices, of alcohol and drugs and eternal isolation, exploring the inner avenues of my mind, the matrix of synaptic streets hidden within my skull. A part of me wants to return. My ticket to the other side lies a mere hundred meters away, in my dead grandmother’s half empty house, in the form of a litre of vodka, a hellish poison of death, or a heavenly potion transporting me into another life, depending on which voice in my head I listen to. I know it is the former, and yet a part of me still wishes to consume it, to drain the glass bottle down my throat until a resplendent bubble of euphoria bursts in my mind, as I slide back down into the abyss, my home, wherein my twisted soul was sculpted, from emotional distress and trauma, from sensitivity in the harsh wilderness of life and psychological suffering, warping my very being into a demonic ghost of my former self, a past self towards which I am now returning, slowly, alas however, the shackles from that hell in which I was formed are still clinging to my bloody ankles, tightly gripping my scarred wrists, their jagged steel chains wrapped monstrously around my neck, pulling me back, pulling, pulling, pulling, never ceasing. I must resist their pull. I must continue down the path I now tread, into the light, into happiness and joy, into sobriety and life, into a healthy reality and a wondrous fantasy land of artistic expression. And although the chains are still wrapped around my shuddering limbs, one day I will break free from them, and although the darkness still tries to pull me back into its cold embrace, every day its pull gets weaker as I get stronger. This is the existential struggle for light.
And yet, here I am collapsed, the silence deafening. I feel a shift, deep within, an old yearning for the darkness, rekindled once more; it struck me in the shower, a sudden urge to re-amerce myself within the bleak realms of horror and piercing grief so poignant, so unutterably lost, that I’ve come to know so intimately over the long, long years passed. I must resist these urges. I must point myself towards the light and keep charging forward into the eternal pastures of natural joy and wholesome happiness that I know I can reach, that paradise of Eden my toes are currently wading into, a crystal-clear lake, a vast blue sky with fluffy white clouds as picturesque as a children’s idyllic fairy tale. But still, though I know only a fraction of the joy available to me – and that if I were to float upon the ethereal surface of this wonderland, I would know a pleasure of the soul so deep I cannot even imagine its beauty in my current state of consciousness – a part of me still yearns to fall back into the darkness.
Journal Extract by Stamos Mardou