Meliority

For the rest of the semester, I am going to have a 22 year old roommate whom, it seems, is in the national guard...

But that probably means he isn't an asshole. Hopefully it doubly means he is inhumanly respectable--and respectful. I'll meet him in person tomorrow, and I move, most likely, Sunday afternoon.

But I am encircled by a sea of fire--my head burns. My mind aches and my conscious yearns. Though I only need suffer two more nights--if that--of listening to the current roommate 2 feet behind me swap spit with the asian, I am yet caught in a moment of tremendous weakness.

If things don't work out with my new setting, I will be escaping back to Chicagoland very soon; I will try Semester 2 again next Fall.

I've never really been one to just give up--I've prided myself, all through highschool, being a man who not only refuses to give up, but when defeated still steps as many more paces forward as I can until I am worse than bruised, bloodied, disfigured: until I am ravaged. That's how it happened with Jane yesteryear.

Somehow I emerged alive. Not only alive, but renewed amidst my scars. More confident--perhaps. But I only emerged after peering into the abyss again.

"And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you," said Nietzche. He is right. That darkness mutilates common reason, and turns logic against itself in a way I doubt even the most fantastic magicks could.

It isn't even a ponderous place. The pondering is done only after emerging--and it is more a readjustment, resettling among humanity, than pondering new enlightenments. But it is enlightening... in a strange, dark way. It enlightens with space and time, after emerging, after lifting a peer or contemporary against its eternal non-image. Contrasting what isn't the abyss.

Last year, after reading Heart of Darkness, one of my classes called it, "The edge." For two weeks we discussed what edge this one was, and what might happen were one to journey beyond it. Subtley, I tried letting each classmate know, some way, that I already had, by then, gone beyond the edge. Anger and disgust drew me there, mixed with just a little love that first time. Half my mind was trapped fully from love the second. And the third--

the third time was very interesting. It was that instance that had me realize anyone can grasp some concept of the abyss. Because it was the world itself that drew me there in February.

I lost five days of memory in a hospital bed. My parents insist I existed, and even communicated, throughout the course of those five days, but all I have as proof beyond their word is a stack of papers with cryptic lines written in my handwriting on them.

It gave me a weird sense of immortality after I learned what I survived. After I learned I wasn't expected to survive the first nights. The doctors were telling my parents, when I was in critical condition, that they had no idea whether I would live or die. And I was walking less than 10 days later.

But my immortality was a shallow kind--if I was indestructable, what reason would I to pursue anything of societal value when still supported by some network of people? So I watched television and thought about everything that went wrong in highschool. That's when I finally moved on.

For a time, it gave me a strength. Seeing Ragnarok, even amidst finally deciding that, yes, that other girl is a vile serpent, if a little more innocent and a lot less cunning, gave me even more strength. But College has sapped me back to where I was, I would wager, inbetween my initial dismissal from the hospital and my checking back in for further complications.

Right now, I am apt to give up.

I am hoping, for the sake of not fucking up my academic plans, that this new roommate can convince me why I should remain.