Chapter 10b
Sunday, May 11, 2008
I am falling apart and there is nothing to be done about it. I sit, day after day, sit and wait and watch as the world crumbles around me. At the horizon I can see the edges of the earth start to bend. I am lost. There is so much now that I am consumed.
They try to tell me, "Neutiquam erro," they tell me over and over, time and again, they beat the words into my skull like pounding meat with a giant tenderizer. They will not let me escape but I still do not believe them. They tell me many things.
I am hurried and frantic with my thoughts. If I am not they will be snatched away. The dragon will consume them and me with them. There are so many things we wonder about. Things I remember that I know are not true. Women I have slept with who don't exist. Money I have paid for things I've never owned. I remember what I've done while I've been asleep.
I have grown accustomed to the smell. The filth surrounds me but we have reached a mutual agreement. The filth will not dictate my life so long as I do not attempt the same on it. The terms sounded beneficial to both parties and were accepted without hesitation.
This is getting too hard. It's too hard to keep what I need and go on. Blah, blah, blah, they always say, blah, blah, blah.
I tried to kill myself today. It was half-hearted and quick and pointless. I can't even keep my mind clear long enough to end things. When I managed to snag the thought, the one random thought I caught from the flurry of them twisting around me like I was stuck in a vortex full of floating cash as if on a game show, that was it. I took that thought and ran with it for as long as I could before security would have a chance to stop me. I bent down, picked up the brick, then clobbered myself in the head with it.
It hurt. I lost vision for what seemed like hours, my ears rang, I bled, but at no point did I die. I tried to, even as I sat hunched over a growing puddle of my own blood. I think there may be some kind of dent in my skull now but it still rages with pain when I try to touch it so I haven't been able to see for sure.
I don't know why I did it. I wasn't really trying to accomplish anything. Do I want to die? Sure, but no more than the next guy. Was I trying to kill myself? Absolutely. And why? Not because my life was unbearable (although it sometimes is), or because I can't take it anymore (I can, I am nothing without pain), but because that was the thought I happened to catch and that is how I made us of it. It's pitiful, really.
This says to me that the end is finally almost here. I've waited breathlessly for so long. I am ready and happy and accepting. Maybe a single brick won't kill me but I still haven't forgotten. My time to perform has finally come. I know that I am within a few weeks or months or years, maybe a decade or two, from drying. With an average life expectancy lying in the seventies, I'm ecstatic to have been given the idea that I will die sooner.
And where did that idea come from? I can't say. I don't want to but I don't have the answers anyway. I want to say but I can't because I don't know. All I do know is that I can feel the strings tighten and pulling everything together so that all the loose ends can be tied up at one. What I believe that means to me is the blissful silence of death and I away expectantly.