High with Friends:

Shakespeare said “let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.” Stealing these same opening lines, I only hope he wouldn’t. Now presented with the opportunity again for youthful happiness, the proper applications of these instruments that we inherit, the last thing I’d want to cross my mind is that some jealous creep, having indulged in worldly deviance and thus established himself in a place of power, would come between me and my bride to be. At first I dither, for I think of how he would take personally, as offense, what was a treasure all this time reserved for me, untapped in my infernal innocence. I’m reminded that this was the charge against me: that it was I that, having taken the fortune of friends for personal betrayal, had in turn betrayed a trust greater than I’d invested in them. But how great could that trust truly have been, if they would so distrust my dreams that they would break my heart? What sort of idiot would miscast me to be the villain and that same traitor to have been the victim? The restless heart in me wants to believe that these same idiots have been misled as I was, but in fact they know all that they need to make a just assessment, and they choose instead to form a court of kangaroos. After all: it was not I that had indulged in life, but rather it was I that waited patiently, as I do right now, well beyond the limits that most spiteful sinners set for themselves in their fading youth and innocence. We all knew that my oppressor was a fallen angel bent on falling further and forever, taking all that he could with him, for you can’t take the fruits of your own labours up to Heaven, though you can allow them to drag you down into Hell. We all could fathom just how many times we warned him, thinking little that the warning was then to ourselves, for he’d had no intent to heed it (just to listen to it for his own devices), and we saw only ourselves within the mirror of his faceless mask.

I loved her, but you mean to tell me it was I that had betrayed her hopes, for she returned to me only so as to bring me to some sort of justice, hoping to restore what little source of joy she found in him. But if this were so it would have only evidenced the depths of their depravity, for she would have to have been very stoned to think I owed him my allegiance, even more so if she thought that my allegiance to her, serving to restore my false faith in false friends, would have made them allegiant to her as I had been to all of them. Nothing in such a set of circumstances can obscure nor pardon the fact I was used by those I’d trusted. And it is the very peak of self-entitled narcissism to regard me as a friend when I am to forgive the parasite who kills his hosts, yet to dismiss me as a stranger when I speak in the defense of those same appetites that, having gone unsatiated, cast my mind into the mist of public doubt, obscured by these same traitors and manipulators even as I took steps towards their own salvation, knowing little that I was preparing then for war.

I had the right to leave such a mire. Alanna will remain a victim. She has been remembered as intelligent, so I will not imagine that the plan ascribed to her was truly her intention. She has been known to be kind, so I will not allow myself to fathom the depravity of those who used me when I think on her directly. I loved her, whereas her traitor, who was mine as well, still favoured his last girlfriend, whom he had lost to his own debauchery, his jealous quest for domination and vainglorious importance. This was not my quest; I always deviated from that path in favour of a Higher Way. He simply treated the same groundlessness for his own condescension as though it had been a ground higher than mine. Such is the conceit of the Devil, for by doing so he stoops lower.

I know what her intent was: to avenge herself. If I could not be trusted with this morbid deed, at least I could be made an ally by unconscious means, for she would have no shame in using me towards ends towards which I would have (or, given back bone, should have) been used.

It is thus with this same conviction that I march into the Golden Dawn of what now waits before me. No more negativity shall fetter me, for what was a pipe dream two nights ago was proven just last night to have been Real, though I can’t say if it had been the dream that cast light on Reality, or if the dream had made it so, or if, my having made it so beforehand, the Reality had been revealed only in Dream. For all I know, it might have been some charm imparted upon me by the smile and the tiny bell-shaped voice of my most lucky and endearing friend, whose trail had brought me to this place. This much I know: that despite the pain of climbing out of that infernal pit and up to where I stand at present, I deserve it. It was once before that jealous envy had waylaid me, and I was heroic then as I am now. My parasites simply would blame their host, taking my anger, towards which they would feel entitled, and trying to turn the rage against me, though it sprung just from the anger that, intended for them, she took out on me. Since I never deserved to be the target of the rage, all ready having been abandoned to my misery, and longing then not for war but for flight, I remain blameless even in attempts to drag me down into equality with savages. They can’t be justified in anger that I would not let myself be used again, and if they claim that I had used them previously, it would only serve as testament to their intent: to keep me all ways in their debt, bound to their narcissistic way of life, when I aspired to much greater heights than they could bear to climb. Those same peaks I fly to now, for I have earned the right to think so highly of myself. For once, I get high with friends.

Dm.A.A.