I could not even begin to explain to you how confident I am feeling right now. I am on an entirely different plane of existence. If you saw the blood spilling from my nose onto my leather at the end of the night you might call it narcissism. Do not get in the water with me. I am about to turn the lights off.
I feel for my keys and open the lock on the bathroom stall. I could move mountains. I tell people I have found God. I am a liar. My tongue should be cut from my mouth. I lied about being baptized to be enrolled in Catholic school. I am pretending to be looking for something staring straight at me. The door opens as if the gates of heaven were before me as smoke and coloured light spills onto the floor at my feet pooling there before covering the rest of my body. There is singing in the distance. It ranges from awful to horrible. Tonight is karaoke night. The choir of Christ compels me. All of the women here are breastfeeding or expecting. People do not change. They get older. When you openly hate yourself it is very sad. It is easy to find trouble here. I emptied my chequing account using the ATM by the doorway. I have cash. I am tired of having to convince people that I know things. Do you know how the universe will end? I know. If you can stomach it, you are in for a real treat. I think everything has already been said except this moment in time that I found myself here for. Why do I even bother doing anything at all anymore? I am in Gethsemane pulling weeds in the garden ignorant to any other tragedies that may have occurred here. Letting me back into the wild was a mistake. I am a different person now. I am no longer afraid of the dark.
I am regaining consciousness as I stare at the ceiling. I am in a crib. I do not know what year it is. I close my eyes. Years pass. I want to go as deep as I can in this dive. I have removed my rebreather and have lungs of iron. I am asphyxiating at the bottom of the ocean. I am in the dark on a sinking ship treading water waiting to die. I am not prolific. I do most of my writing in my head. If you heard what I was working on it would blow your fucking mind. I am waiting for an advance so I can finish it. Rat Killer. The book is called Rat Killer. The music is very bad and it is loud in here. From a publisher. Like HarperCollins or Knopf or something. Reading. I do not even know who I am talking to right now. How embarrassing. That cheque would kill you, Colby. Who wants to buy your work when you are dead? I am no longer sick. I no longer lie in bed wondering how much weight my ceiling fan could hold. I know. I wake up and water is running over the side of the bathtub. No one is knocking on the door anymore.
I taught myself how to read in the first grade. It was raining outside and we were kept inside for recess. The book was about bumblebees. I remember it well. It was impressive to my teacher. I had such a bright future ahead of me. Words excited me. In a way that most definitely would not make sense to most people. If I heard a word I did not understand it would eat away at me until I could look it up in a dictionary. I needed to know. My parents never cared about what I read. They knew authors. I was not allowed to watch scary movies. I could read anything in the library if I could carry it. I scared myself many times but I quickly knew what to stay away from. I learned to understand books. I learned to love the library. I understand the importance of the institution.
There was a time when there were only a few kings. Now I am amongst sheep in need of shepherd pretending to be Solomon in the flesh. If you are unwilling to appease God then logic should suffice.
I am trying to better my life but Canada feels like a hopeless place to be. Everything is expensive. It is cold. I will never own land. Bees long dead before I can offer them flowers. I am dying inside. I buy three items at the grocery store and it costs me forty-five dollars. Three hours of work and not enough to pay for a full meal. I am walking the streets of downtown Vancouver. It is cold and it is raining. Homeless lie in the streets. Garbage piles up. It is expanding. The rich hide in their towers reflecting the sky above. God will come for them too. Whatever versions of them you choose. Many are called, few are chosen.
Everything I know and love will be lost in the Holocene. I am flying above the clouds. I have taken three tablets sublingually. I worry about absorption of medicine as I wonder about turbulence and wind flex as I inspect the wings of the aircraft. I have spent months watching videos that terrify me to conquer my fear of heights. Nothing has worked. Who would have realized thinking about explosions in the sky would not calm my fears of being thirty thousand feet in the air? When did everyone figure out what I am just realizing now? How did no one realize sooner?
I am listening to Russian hardbass watching teenagers have their legs blown off by drones half way across the world. It is a dystopian nightmare and my humanity is long gone. Young boys staring into the sky afraid of God. My eyes have gone blind staring into the sun.
The current political landscape has been designed to alienate men from one another. The school of resentment came true. I am ready to dig up the bones of Harold Bloom to pen my greatest work. I am walking through the streets of downtown Seattle. Strangers in the fetal position on the sidewalk with needles sticking in their arms. I walk past them. I wonder what is wrong with myself, too.
Blood splatters in droplets slowly then all at once as I try to get up from laying on my bathroom floor. The clock on my stove blinks five after five. The light peering through my blinds suggests it is earlier than that. I regret the white carpet in my bathroom. I black out every day. I am doing just fine. I have been given the rope I so desperately wanted. My talents have been greatly exaggerated but any admittance of these things would be suicide. I cannot push the boulder to the top of the hill let alone for all of eternity. Let me impress you with words no one cares about. This deconstruction of self should be entertaining in the very least. The air is clean again and I cannot keep my nose clean.
Death of the self. Death of the ego. Death of the soul. There is a darkness stemming from a place of
great discomfort and grief that I dare never explore you. I do not want to look into places that are meant
to be ignored. I see faces in the night. Shadows on the walls moving and swaying. They torment me in ways
that are blinding and indignant. I cannot express to myself let alone you. I call in sick to work. I am
going to be fired. I dropped out of school again because they are breaking the law. I am on the hook for
thousands of dollars. You should remove those from the top of your resume. You don’t want to start out a
story with a failure. Thirty-one years old and retarded in life and personal goals. A real impressive set of
skills I have amassed in these past years. I am arguing with doctors who cannot write prescriptions. What do
you call a doctor that got a “D” in medical school? Why is everyone offended by words and not language?
Doctor.
I was going to be something, once. I had all of the hit songs. Now I struggle to hear what people are saying when they are standing in front of me. Further embarrassment. It is hard falling out of shape when you hold yourself to a specific standard. I will not falter. People joke about being perfectionists but it has ruined my life. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. I am unworthy of love, I am unworthy of grace. I am swaying beneath streetlights trying to light a cigarette. My very existence appears to be an affront to God. Do you hear how self important I think I am? There is no reversing that. I tried for so long to be outside of the box that I do not even understand it enough anymore to try to fit in. Nobody listens. Does any of this even matter? None of this exists in the abyss of space. These thoughts will never escape the machine. It is not wrought onto paper. Screaming into the abyss; I never even happened at all.
If I print these stories and hide them in library books I will have achieved my goals. Why was I born into a
time with so many constrictive systems? Technology was supposed to improve our lives but all we have are
cellphones to look at while we evacuate our bowels. Were magazines really so bad? Everything at my finger
tips and I am unable to do anything with it. A flaw of character. Staring into the sun has been replaced
with staring into the consequential abyss of nothing at all. Telephone tablet computer screens. My entire
life I was raised to believe structure and order had been present but everything is an illusion. People
cannot afford food while I drive by miles of farmland. What is happening?
If you are not rich enough to be considered eccentric when you are autistic, people will automatically
consider you to be mentally ill.
Everything is starting to add up over here and I never said any thing at all. ◆