The Aurora Borealis

Everything is clear – the air is crisp, the cold is cutting, but it has a sweetness to it, and the light is milky, the sounds are hazy, every scent is tainted with the Nag Champa in your lungs. In that moment, you know just what you want, just what you need to do, and you're glad of the rules you have to break to get it done. You're giddy – it feels like you're in a movie, and you do stupid, risky things, and somehow the world fails to collapse because of it. For a while you know you're safe, and there are no consequences, just an endless parade of danger.

Euphoria puts it well – drugs are cool, but it is a very narrow window of cool. Having lived through this realization and watched a few people fail to, I was surprised to find just how much this show made me miss drugs.

Some of my fondest memories involve creative combinations of decriminalized substances shared by close friends. Afternoons spent ineffectually redecorating a friend's house to the tune of Russian 00s pop punk and Crystal Castles, dancing, and stopping only for microwave pizza 10 hours into an accidental fast; nights spent at strangers' houses, getting introduced to the same people over and over again as they forgot who I was, and finally getting kicked out in the morning by somebody who couldn't remember the word for “exit”; the quiet moments right before dawn when my multi-stranded high faded into drowsiness, and the sunrise lasted for days.

What I miss, really fucking miss, beyond the obvious, is the feeling of having a singular desire, a need so all-consuming that chasing it requires no effort. We always do what we want, but rarely is that also what we crave, aspire to, or need. Addiction shrinks your world until there is nothing left to object to it – but what's left is beautiful thing, if only for a moment. Our distal, long-term ambitions usually conflict with our near-term cravings and instinctual reactions, and the result is that most of our lives are spent in waiting. Most of time, our days are meaningless and entirely disconnected from our values, but we hope that somehow they will assemble themselves into years worth remembering and a life worth living. Addiction takes out the trash, it erases all superfluous action, dawdling, all wait, it ensures all you do serves a master plan, and reminds you of the all-important truth that today is the best day of the year.

The sanest years of life may well have been those where I risked the most. I can barely remember the last three years of my life, all repetition and fear. When I got clean I fell ill for entirely unrelated reasons – suddenly, I was no longer in charge, my risk-taking no longer defined my life. Over time, I developed existential vertigo, I began dreading every crosswalk, every dark corner, and eventually every morning. I relinquished every claim on my fate, I was too scared to move. Everything became an opportunity for loss, – of safety, of excitement, of life, of self – so I tried to shield myself until there was nothing left to shield. I deprived myself of all I couldn't stand to lose, so when loss came anyway, I had nothing to show for it. That's been the state of things for a while.

I wanna live like an addict again. What addiction accomplishes through a narrowing, I will do through a broadening. “Holistic addiction,” there's a suitably new-age-y term, maybe it'll catch on. I don't want to pacify internal discord – if I am to be consumed by desire, that desire must be so encompassing that no part of me escapes the lust. Addiction ensures its own survival, it allows for internal divergence only as long as this divergence doesn't prove fatal to it. I welcome discord with open arms, and whatever consumes me will be forced to answer to this multiplicity. It must do away with doubt, allow me the pure, righteous moments of certainty that fuel every worthwhile quest. And it must not be too pretty, too good – I demand obsession and hysteria from anything I call an addiction, it must drive me to fail my fellow man and lose sight of decency, to sacrifice more than I can spare, and sleep only when my knees buckle.

There is also this: addiction externalizes the search for meaning. My actions felt divinely inspired when I sought a high, but what I sought made me passive – the goal was to sit back and watch something happen to my consciousness, to the entire world, doing nothing at all. I was in the driver's seat until I arrived. There is place for that, there is a place for every human thing, but I need to stir to consciousness pot myself. Passivity is the death of wonder – we create as much as we discover, and when we lie back and wait for life to happen to us, we ensure our half of the conversation is white noise, and the world has nothing to respond to. The world won't be beautiful until it finds a friend in us.

I must be a creator if I am to be an addict. It is just as well, inspiration is always a high, though not every high is inspired. If I write this piece or that story, that is all very well, but authoring the day, that is the ultimate act of creation. We are forever seeking life – we read tales, and watch them, and play them, we tell them, we hear about them. It has been said that story is a metaphor for life, but it is life distilled, stripped of numbness and use. It is no accident that storytelling is the foundation of all art. Alas, a creator isn't worth his weight in dirt without a muse – it seems I must go and live.