Bleed to Grow to Bleed

There was a man I often talked to in a town I lived in. The village idiot. On most topics of conversation he was a total ignoramus. Couldn't talk crap about anything related to popular interest; that's probably why no one ever bothered to talk to him. We talked in Vic Park once, and he came up with amazing insight on life. He was pessimistic, I agree, but maybe that's why he was able to push his reasoning that far. About love, or true love, he said, "The day you wake up beside your lover and you realize you don't love them anymore, that's the day true love begins." I thought it was real effing smooth, like 'Nice mantra, dumbass.' Then after a few odd relationships, it started being less of a joke and more of a hope.

Then another day, he talked about his glory years, and he looked at me as though his youth was me, I was him. Except I wasn't, and that seemed to piss him off a little. He said, "One day I woke up with like 6 other people. We were all pretty much naked in what looked like a Parisian renaissance apartment. I got up, put some pants on and downed two warm tequilas. I was really messed up. Didn't know what day we were, where I was, or who were the people waking up. I left the apartment, bought the morning paper and never took acid again."

The last time I saw him, before I left town, he said to me: "When you're so messed up by booze, or crack or whatever, you're so messed you don't even know if you belong in this world, and you feel like shit and you want to sleep forever, you remember this. The times in life that make you feel like that are the times you become what we're supposed to be. They're like growing pains, except you can't grow up in the mind without going through a shit-storm of confused ideas and anguish. You have to bleed to grow."