You look out the window. It’s not yet the end of the world but you can see it from there. You know you’re all alone and no one’s around. Your eyes gleam lunar wild and you lock the door because you start to hear the gremlins and goblins come out. Suddenly you notice that the rug is actually made out of Ewok fur and you hear the cat outside, plotting your demise because you haven’t fed it for two days straight. You feel the rush of natural morphine, seeping and swelling in your veins. You feel the circuitry in your brain sparking and glitching. Soon you begin talking to yourself, arguing and changing sides. You’re sampling again, medicating in darkness, invoking secret passions and fears, and becoming conscious of the level of sex and rage you’ve tried so hard to lock in. But despite all of this you feel safe in the danger because you know that it’s all yours. In fact you think it’s wonderful, freeing and necessary. You hiss and fret and laugh, and soon you’re happily greeting the madness with bared teeth until someone knocks on the door and the shadows slip away.

At the office you become the kind of good little boy or girl you’re supposed to be. Behind the partition walls of your personal cubicle, you wipe away the coffee rings and the dead skin, rub the monitor clean and blow hard on the keyboard to get the bread crumbs out. At lunch you hide your symptoms away with antacid calm and you never let anybody see you do anything but smile. But when you pass by the bathroom mirror, you snicker a little bit. You realize that the person you’re looking at is the most normal person you’ve ever seen; and then you think to yourself, this person is so full of shit.

Some of us may only get 3 minutes on stage, 500 words on the page, or 15 minutes of fame, but that doesn’t cure us of our sickness, this spell-binding malady that cost us that oh so precious normal life. Because however myopic or unspectacular it may be, we are meant to stand at the edge of the world where the music is strange and the colors are violent. Celestially destined like a comet’s path, we are bound to travel into the abyss—frozen, soundless and alone. We may think about quitting at least once every day, but rare as the fingerprints in our hands and the storm patterns in our eyes, it is only when we get close to the sun that we streak the heavens brightly in our own special way.

And then we return to the void.

Where we begin is not important, not even where we end, because the greatest of us are not remembered for when they opened or when they closed. The greatest of us are remembered for when they magnificently challenged, fought and won; because that was the same time they also changed our lives.

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