Starchildren

Relying upon the tiniest fractures in my mental health, I compare myself to born rock stars and insist that I, too can be an artist.
My comrades and their personalities loom over my memory. I hear them speak, and continuously imagine how I’d respond. We interact like diffuse call signs that inhabit a signal of such intensity that it bleeds over into neighboring frequencies. Spasmodically, the quiet is interrupted by a voice, albeit heard or imagined, and I conclude that it’s good to hear voices. It turns out that I do listen to people. Listening to others hasn’t always come naturally. For many years I lived in a bubble; not even fear was enough to corral me fully into the community of those who communicate in subtleties. It was as though I were separated from the world by a protective membrane that reduced the significance of people’s messages. For me, many things people said carried little importance. Fear ultimately needed drugs to help jar me into wakefulness.
It took more than a few good trips to get me going. First was braving the company of other people, like Halloween when I was nineteen. I put on clown make-up and we went downtown. Generations of the Moscow circus dripped into me from the collective unconscious as I cocked my head to the side, rolled my eyes and waved hello to people. When we headed back to the car that night I looked at all the pink glitter spilled on the sidewalk and lamented the end of the magic, only to find the ground had falllen away and I was happily balancing for dear life on the thin trail of sparkle that held me aloft. And there was more. Monogamy. Sex. True contact with another human being was an epiphany to say the very least. By learning to appreciate a woman, despite all our differences, I learned to be a man. Beyond the innocent trips, however, were waiting experiences that would take the breath out of my lungs and the blood out of my belly. There was the first bad one, which was pure. I suffered from raw, unparanoid anxiety. All I had to do was come down. Much later, after enjoying more of the sort of trip that transforms a life came the really bad ones. More than once I saved myself from permanent psychic emasculation thanks only to the terror that had paralyzed me before before I could seal my fate. Through a laborious process I came to understand that listening attentively to what people say could be a powerful technique.
Drugs isn’t what creates a star. Nonetheless I’ve come into contact with many starchildren where drugs are to be found. In such places alliances were formed, some few of which even survived the light of day, and still endure. Such relationships exist as proof of inspiration beyond hallucinogens; I have verified the existence of such a life. I anticipate reaching that point any moment now.
In the past there were friends who practiced their art without ever caring for a drug. Few artists intimidate me because my greater fear is instead of those who have never needed anything to expand their vision. Taking acid helped me separate myself from them. Fucking superartists be damned.
Contemplating stars becomes tiring. I heard that since the seventies there’s been an increasing number of children born with extra strands of DNA, even with psychic powers. I’m the starchild among starchildren who chose to enter life one hundred per cent human, with no cosmic advantage. So then, for me awareness of the truth is more like a memory. I’m afraid to draw on the magic of the world around us, afraid my touch isn’t delicate enough, that when I try to part the veil and reveal the painting of energies beneath the surface that it will only tear like an overstretched polymer. The fear of sobriety is the fear that my cherished insanity has burned down to the embers. Feelings of inadequacy stem from the sensation that I have quite unfortunately found myself to be whole.
There is a friend who seems broken within, harmed irrevocably in one massive strike, early on in life. Since arriving in our city she has become a veritable legend, and I have adored her. The woman’s soul has sustained a trauma, and the energies that escape from it react violently to the exterior world. They form a cyclone of atom-splitting force. Like a shooting star, her life is like a path of fire, seemingly destined to skid along the atmosphere of our world with her dramas and elogies. The power within her surges in constant augmentation because of an error. Her mind has not been able to compute the total effect of what she once had to suffer, even through so many years during which she’s gathered such formidable intellectual strength. Now it is the total effect that she has on us that we cannot compute.
I’m glad that nowadays I can at least envy my friends their glamour. Back when dance clubs where awe-inspiring and I believed in appearances I could stumble right by the starchildren without ever realizing that we actually coexisted. It took me years to observe who were those that made themselves into the princes and queens of Saturday night. Way back there was a fellow I believe was of old country nobility. Like a gothic godfather he granted audiences in a private spot at the end of the bar. I recall the night I entered the restroom where he was conversing with another, a sort of punk general of the old crystal meth regime. I know nothing of their personalities and believed their personas down to the quick. I didn’t even eavesdrop on their chat as I pissed, for that would have been a lack of respect. I wasn’t just clothes. My girlfriend from those times had been friends with the godfather (who wasn’t so old) and they had come up tripping together. Whatever I believed about him was less than first-hand and more than a reputation. Sometimes I can’t imagine who the real stars might be. These two guys I remember were really just a couple of geeks like me who understood all the same sci-fi and role-playing game references. The difference lies in the subtle degrees to which each of us has suffered. It remains to be seen if starchildren truly suffer, or if only they know how to suffer with true dignity. Between the fellows I remember and myself, one has only to gauge the magnitude of the glamour that surrounds each of us in order to determine the exact degree to which our spines have been respectively twisted. We’re similar in so many ways that one could extrapolate the nature of the derision we’ve been dealt by observing our posture in various social situations. Do I stand up straight at a club? Do I stand up straight at work? Does a cigarette in hand excuse a hunched neck? Possibly. While I have come to enjoy a bit of proper mystique by this point, I know what has had to happen and what I’ve had to put myself through in order to gain access to some power within.
There is an inner being of pure light that is protected within a shell that is ultimately vulnerable. Some of us have been sheltered. The egg is cracked, battered from outside until light escapes. Pure, evolutionary drive is what pours forth, and it is of a nature meant to be contained. With no recourse but to bathe in it, abused startchildren who know not how to properly heal themselves begin to evolve uncontrollably, and by the time they have found equilibrium of their personal volition they have become like superbeings limited only and particularly by the state of their imagination.
The wise among the surviving starbabies have learned. It is nothing less than our dream-mind that makes any meaningful thing possible. Their lives have been determined by the wishes they managed to make in a distant past. Those among us who do not prefer bitterness may remember what our wishes were, the old ones, from when we wished hardest.