It finally feels right, this method of slowly severing the umbilical cord of social connection. To throw caution, and dried eyed tears, mind you, into the wind. To cut off all interaction with every single human being that crawls on two legs. One by one, I’ve picked them off the cherry tree, without either one of us knowing it. The conversations began to dwindle as I continue to find excuses in secluding myself, insisting I spend lunches in hiding, hard at work in order to avoid eye contact and restricting my intake of both physical substance and hurtful words. All of those whom I used to brand my acquintances, well they aren’t called those anymore. Now? Now they’re simply known as strangers. It’s been months since I’ve upheld a single conversation of effort, because I cannot seem to bring myself to pay much attention to the words that pour from their noses, nor can they seem to understand my naturally pessimistic and cynical outlook on life. Even I don’t understand it. I just want to be alone, and I just want to get out. I’ve never really had any friends, and I know for a fact that I won’t ever find any. Who’d want a bastard such as myself? I guess I’m just done. There’s no point in saying goodbye if no one cares anyways. I could write a million eulogies in my own blood, build my own grave from scratch and stone, commit a full-scale apoptosis in front of my entire school, and still nothing would be noticed, the way no one notices the way I silently slip away into tiny holes during class or slowly but surely sew my mouth shut with barbed wires a little more each day. But it’s okay. I’ve got literature that needs to be read, work that needs to be done, thoughts that need to be scribbled down and flesh that needs to be mutilated. I need to be punished. Perhaps I complain too much as well, and so this is why no one bothers to genuinely say hello anymore.
I attend a psychiatric ward in disguise, illuminated by expensive fluorescent lighting. I stumble through the hallways, half-awake and disillusioned. Surrounded by voices, and I cannot tell if they’re the buzz emanating from the animals that prowl the lockers and slam my cold body into the walls, or if it’s the childish voices pricking at my ears again. I’m practically dead, and no one knows it. No one gives a second glance. I spend every waking moment lost in my head, trying to keep the claws from grinding out my eyes. I’ve replaced lecture notes with suicide letters. I have a whole notebook full of them, don’t doubt me on that. I skip classes just so I can avoid interaction with the disgusting beasts that slither along the waxed floors. Everywhere I turn, I see them. Tall and slender, creeping along, whispering to themselves that there’s just gotta be something wrong with me. They all resemble the same thing. No face, just total blackness, and when I reopen my lenses, I find myself on the opposite side of wherever I may be, with no recall of how I ended up in such a predicament. Every time I turn my gaze upwards, I see ghosts hanging by their throats from the rafters, dripping hot fluids onto the floor and staining them with hateful words. There’s nothing I’d like more than to join them. Oh, how I wish I were blind. To slip into a permanent, self-induced comatose. To deteriorate my only visual connection with the world, to jab and jam every sharp object into my pupils and dig them out, one by one, until my face leaks and all my thoughts seep out of my newfound eyeholes. And while we’re at it, why not take a stab at the ears too? Let’s screw in a TV dial to the side of my head and have the volume turned to an even number (because it always has to be an even number), to drown out the alters that are calling me to abuse myself again. But even if I make an attempt to dull every sense I possess, there is no escape. The nightmares will continue to follow my scent. I’m vulnerable, and everything I do only amplifies the pulses. I snap back somewhat into this alternate universe (some know it as reality), but already I’ve begun fading again. I’m sitting, I think, head slammed down on the mahogany desk in who knows what class. My mind draws a blank, as every warm being feels muffled to the touch, and the only thought registering is how loud the voices sound today, how tightly they’ve closed their lifeless fingers upon my throat this afternoon. Oh dear. It seems I’ve forgotten how to walk again. The only discernible objects within staring distance are these emaciated hands, shaking quite violently and turning a beautiful shade of violet. I need to try and withhold some sort of restraint, lest I refrain from choking the creature that settles beside me. I need to hurt again. I have to gently peel back pieces of flesh and tendon, cut out origami cranes from the delicate network of veins that intertwine around my scalp, crotchet kitty cat patterns out of every single cell that I dissect and separate from this surface epidermis, before I ultimately fall apart at the fragile knees. The painful flashbacks, they dance in the blackness, wrapping themselves around a pole to the blare of cackling groans, just for me to feast upon in ravenous, passionate hunger. Why do they tease me at a time like this? How carnal of them. They’re conspiring against me again, criticizing my every move and attaching puppet strings onto my arms, applying splotches of ink to cover up my permanent scowl, and readying me for tonight’s matinee show. Mass destruction wells up inside of me, prone to drip out in starburst flames. Anxiety, paranoia, unconsciousness, and again I collapse. Nerves begin to break down and die, and the phantoms creep on over with a needle to sew my eyes shut again. Another episode has gone and passed, like a midnight rerun of some dusty television show that everyone’s forgotten. I’ve slipped into a phase of incomprehension yet again, so don’t bother conversing with me anymore. I know this stage isn’t dissipating anytime soon, so you know what? Save us both the trouble and don’t bother communication with me ever again. Leave me be with these ventriloquists as my only friends.
You know those days when you can just fold both hands tightly together and prop them behind your head, and kick your feet up on any dusty old school desk, and just say piss off to every demon invading your mind?
Yeah. Today was one of those days.
It was quite refreshing. I spent every waking moment with music talking into my ears, and the wind running fingers through my greasy hair. I was completely drunk up on literature, and there were no assbaskets around to bother me with their insufferable remarks. I filled my internal gas tank with nothing but sweet coffee as I rolled around on the stale grass that tends to grow around here, sunshine caked on my fingernails and slightly charring a good portion of my aching body. I stood atop a mountain of glazed rocks, the breeze shaking hands with my chewed up arms. I amassed a picnic with no food, held conversations with no one in particular, and gazed longingly into the distance with no end in sight. I got lost in the world today, and not a single damn was given. I paid no attention in any class or to anyone, because today, no one needed it. I forgot all about my problems for a split second every time I leaped and bounded across a sidewalk, my bony hands jammed deep into the depths of my lint-filled pockets. Today, I stood a little bit straighter than I usually do. Today, I ran a little bit faster even though no one chased me. Today was my bitch.
The weatherman came on the news this morning and said that today would be sunny with a chance of perfection.
And for once, he was actually right.
I managed to keep my mind a bit more firmly screwed in, bolts and all. The hallucinations took a vacation, and I have yet to miss them. And you know what? I think I even dared to let a few genuine laughs pass through my teeth today.
Sigh. Temporary bliss.
Fuck people. I don’t need social interaction.
Why go through all the awkward pain of strained conversation and meaningless eye contact, when books can be your sole lover, when theological colloquy can be your closest confidant, and when the moon can be the single bearer of all your secrets. Deceased authors won’t ever judge you. Newborn flowers won’t grow tired of your company. The forest will always be faithful to you, and handwritten letters will always be eternal.
Intertwined in emotion, we may laugh silently, enriching our misfortunes with sheer irony. The wind will listen to every story we may have to share. Fiction will always be a close companion. They’ll keep you in good company, even if just for a short time. We may fight and argue to the point of implosion, we’ll tire of each other constantly and break up, as all lovers do. But in the end, only words will come back when everyone else has given up.
Literature has become my only friend.
I had a dissociative episode while driving the other day. It was one of those calmer, more dazed kinds, where everything goes all fuzzy. All I recall is my mother’s persistent babbling in the seat beside me, but it sounded more like a constant buzz in the head. It didn’t feel real, like I could take a sudden swerve and I would merely pass through the cars and emerge unscathed. My thoughts turned into barely audible whispers and I felt my knuckles turn white while clenching the leather handle, although the rest of my skeleton melted within. All the vehicles ahead turned blurry, and I kept fading in and out of darkness, despite the seething sunlight glaring through the windshield. Apparently, I kept jabbing in and out of the lane, but the car horns had a strange and distant echo to them, and their mechanical intonation matched the volume levels of the voices in my head. I felt like I was in some sort of split reality. Everything kept pulsing and hurting. But somehow, I was still sitting in this driver’s seat, in this strange world, whilst at the same time far gone in a different place entirely. I was on auto-mode, speeding down a highway with no discernible vision and no license. I had completely blanked out.
Lately, from what I’ve managed to piece together, every time I drift into one of these dissociated states, everything feels far more real than when I’m supposedly “checked in” to this world. I’ve heard some call the latter “reality”. But I really have no clue anymore.
Anyways, I managed to drift back into consciousness when I almost knocked into a bus and practically gave my mother a heart attack. I figure we probably wouldn’t have passed through it unharmed, despite what I may have thought previously.
I’ve finally lost my mind.
You see, the thing is, I simply don’t know how to trust or feel for anyone anymore. Not after seeing how utterly disgusting the human race is. I find no comfort in any single warm body, no means of genuine compassion in any single soul. No matter how long I search, I will never find that satisfaction that comes with social interaction. I have yet to find a single being who brings me content. In the rare exception that I do find a mind who captures my attention, they either aren’t interested, or, more times than not, they reveal themselves through careless actions that they are, indeed, just rude bastards like the rest of us. Every time I’m told a story in sympathetic tones, I feel no emotion, except maybe seething abhorrence from your wasting my time. I now show absolutely no enthusiasm towards all matters in which I perceive as trivial, and display nothing but apathy towards the subject of death and despair. Your neighbor just died? I no longer care in the slightest. I’ve ceased prayer. I’ve stopped trying. I’ve morphed into someone with so much hatred for those unlike me. I’ve developed nothing but absolute bitterness in regarding that all people are primitive and hold intellect that borders otherwise upon sheer idiocy and immaturity. But maybe it’s because I’m so dissociated from the rest of society. I have so much anger, that whenever someone attempts conversation with me, all I do is stare blankly in their unfeeling eyes, and imagine just how badly I want them to die. It burns my insides, and yet I feel no shame. In fact, I don’t think I feel at all. However, there is no level of loathing that could compare to how much I myself want to disintegrate into the earth and disappear forever. I know no one can save me. I know no one will. People may try, but they will give up. They always do. And maybe I’ve finally come to realize that I’ve given up too. I don’t want to be saved. I deserve to be hurt, to be strangled and tortured and bled. I want to punish, and be punished.
I want it to end.
Sometimes, during chapel, when we pray, I look up and I like to peer upon the sea of heads bowed down. I count how many people whose name I can remember, making mental calculations of where they all sit, and how fast it would theoretically take them to run down to the floor. And I imagine myself standing up from where I perch, and slowly walking down the bleachers, toward the pale coloured tarp. And I envision pulling out a gun of sorts, and crying tears of uncontrollable silence, though for no particular reason. And I”ll point the nozzle to my rotting brain, scream out an apology I don’t mean, and pull the trigger just in time for everyone to look up. A resounding gunshot will snap at the same time the word “amen” escapes from the lips of those who believe. And I will have successfully collapsed by then, and induced a crowd of mass chaos toward the gym floor, now painted with the quantities of my thoughts.
I really like chaos, you guys.
I feel like it would be such a grand show to put on. It’d be the biggest adventure the school has ever seen.
“Insanity”
The nature of what society dictates we are meant to be will never conform to my liking. I will never be what they want, or what they need. There are infinite limits to the mind, and to constrain it would only be further agitating it. The mind is not an anchor. It does not stop at a set depth. They say the sky is the limit, but my mind perceives the sky differently. The vast oceans of the heavens do not hold the clouds to shroud my thoughts, nor do they stop at the stars. In my mind, thoughts aren’t words. Words promote foreign boundaries, and no matter what language you’re screaming in, no combination of letters can express the sheer explicitness and terror of a single, human thought. These permanent ruminations blind me, and each breath I take further impales a feeling of insecurity deep into my subconscious. These prodigious contemplations become so intense, it almost becomes unbearable. They become shadows that claw at our minds, feast on our every waking emotion, and drive us to the brink of sleep deprivation. The holes in our heads begin to crack, and life’s meaning seems to leak out of our ears in little trickles of smoke. Finally, we lose control. We lose a grasp on a sense of perspective and we begin to forget who we are. It is then that this internal warfare begins to drain and wash over our faces, painting our delicate eyes with pale colours that don’t have a name. At this point, we start to truly fear what the mind can conform to and we see what it is capable of, and only then do we seclude ourselves in a certain kind of isolation where no one can find us for days on end.
And this, my friends, is when we begin to realize that we have truly gone permanently insane.
(Source: ab0mination)
In class today, our teacher inquired, if our house were to be suddenly set aflame, what five items would we make an effort to save? Some said family, some said other, insignificant materialistic things.
The thoughts I had put upon my page were short and solemn. In silence, I penned my answer in the form of a single word:
Nothing.
That’s right. Nothing. I then began to write how, honestly, I wouldn’t want to save anything. Not even myself.
Am I crazy for thinking this? I mean, you take this hypothetical house that’s being engulfed in ash, and I would much rather run back inside, seal myself up in a burning room, and sit in silence as I allow the hands of smoke to take me somewhere far away. I’d think to myself all of the things I should have said and all of the things I wish I had done. I’d close my eyes, squeeze my breath together, say my prayers to every single god I don’t believe in, and just welcome blackness with open arms. Perhaps this seemingly morbid mindset will change if you ask me this question again tomorrow, or next week, or never again. But as of this moment, this scenario just seems so…peaceful. This whole grand adventure of dying in solitary silence has a certain calmness to it.
I don’t know what to make of it. I guess I just like to find every opportunity to envision myself dying. Not the definitive action of it, per se. Just the occasional “what if?”
Tell me. Am I crazy for thinking this?
If you’d let me, I bet I could make you happy. I’ll hold your hand and make you pancakes in the morning, and dinner by candles at night. I want to read to you and build pillow forts with you. I want to watch movies in bed with you, play video games with you, geek out over books with you. I want to watch the sunset with you, cook for you, fall asleep with you. I want to mess up your hair and gaze into your sleepy eyes. I want to make coffee for you on rainy days. I’ll write anonymous love letters and sing your favorite song off-key. I’ll kiss your wounds and nuzzle you all over. I’ll take you out somewhere nice, somewhere far, far away from here, and we could have an adventure with nothing but a camera and a car. Let’s just get lost. Just give me a chance to show you that you are enough.
Sigh.
All I want is someone to make mixtapes for and write lots of poetry to. That’d be amazing.
I’m so unhappy. It’s unbearable torture, especially when you don’t even know why.
And naturally, no one else gives a flying fuck.
I know only I can help myself through this. I have to fight all alone.
But tell me. How do you win a battle you’ve already lost a long time ago?
How do you pick up the broken pieces to tape together again, when there’s nothing left?
How do you learn to love when everyone else hates you?
How do you learn to care when no one else does?
How do you learn to live when you can’t even find a reason to?
