My head is fucking killing me.  Like a drill is beating and boring through my skull.  

Every time I look, I forget to breath.  I forget to taste or touch or smell. Even my ears hear the wrong things.  

Always the way it is.  I never really loved anything that didn’t scare me.  

 

“She’s like talent.  And you don’t talk to the talent,” Gabby reminds me.

But I used to.  When I thought I was hot shit.  Back in Hickville. But out here in the mix, it’s a different story.  

 

It’s a constant struggle to divine the real from the fake.  From the fake that looks increasingly like the real. And it’s all the same feeling now.  

It’s impossible to tell the difference.  

Murky like my head.   Only the pain is sharp.  

 

 

 

I think about Amanda and how much I still want to photograph her.  “I’m not happy with the way I look right now,” she confides.

But she looks like a real person.  Still beautiful, but real, too. Like a soul opened up and laid bare.  The kind of thing you wear on your sleeves in your youth. The kind of clarity you’re still seeking.

But maybe it’s just something left over from before.  Something that refuses to fade or disappear, and continues to live, despite every effort to snuff it out.   

Anyway, the weight of years keep adding up.  

 

If I forget to take the drugs for a day.  I’ll wall myself off and try to avoid talking to anyone.  

Even when I’m working.  Quick and to the point. Get them square and then get them out.  

 

Summer is come and beautiful women wear less.  

My roommates prepare to move out.  

“We have a friend who’s looking to find an apartment.”

I shut them down right away.  I’ll live with one of my friends instead.  Or a stranger I can stand.

 

It’s all the same thing.  

 

 

Day in and day out a left-of-center throbbing aching creeping pain.  Invading my thoughts. Cutting them off short, a train plunging headlong over a cliff and into a gorge below.  

 

 

 

 

 

When everyone is gone, when it’s completely empty – I like that.  There’s a kind of loneliness you only see in a reflection. A kind of peace that only inhabits an empty house.  A kind of beauty in the darkest black.

 

She looks like a dream.  Like a doll.

 

I can turn up the music and make the pain flow outward, into new corners and compartments.  Tingeing memories with a dark ink.

What is one pain compared to another?  

 

“Some people buy heroin,” a customer tells me.  “But buying gear has got to be a better choice, right?”  Then he lists every piece of gear he’s purchased for his camera.  

Like a fucking chimp at a typewriter.  Eventually mediocrity will overwhelm.

But you’ll never save the world with that attitude.  And it’s one little insignificant insect that proves the dissenter and changes the hive mind.  

But there’s nothing to compel.  

 

 

On a hot night in Brooklyn.  Another holiday spent working.  Another night spent waiting for tomorrow.  

And the pain leaves, like the last shades of velvet dark before a new dawn.