Eight
Broken. It’s that feelin’ of wellin’ up like so many irritants inside are tryin’ to rip your mouth open and scream the apocalypse. What would they scream? Hatred, death, somebody help me, a hug? Somethin’. It’s a convolution of shit that’s mostly incomprehensible and it’s easier to just sleep it off than to actually sittaown and deal with it.
I didn’t even know the dude. Really. Sure he hung out at my place, but he mostly said a lot of stupid shit for attention and all we ever did was make fun of him. He was too gooda soul to do anything but shrug it off in real life, though. Only ever saw him snap once at someone and it was rightfully so. Hard to be backwards in a backwards community, that was always a point of respect. But who am I to patronize ‘im? I didn’t even know him. Still affects me.
Somma us like to pretend we’re invincible. It’s really only ever to a point. I can watch ‘em die off in the distance all day long, but as soon as it comes within grasp, there’s a certain pressure attached to it. Can’t shrug it, can’t just say “fuck it, didn’t know him”. ‘Cause the truth is that we did know each other- hell he was aware of one of the biggest plights of my life, more so than any friend I’ve made in the last three years ever will be. But I still didn’t know him.
Existence gettin’ stamped out is no big deal in itself. Your neurons stop shootin’, the brain quits sending signals to the body, physical functions cease, you grow cold, you bloat, you decay. There is nothin’ fantastical about this. It’s the stamping out, that’s the real thing. An active memory turning into a stale re-run. That’s what gets me every time.
I still dream in Troy. It’s the most wonderful thing. It was such a vibrant, familiar part of formative life that there really is no going stale. All this death, it’s somethin’ similiar. These existences that crossed into mine- however briefly in some cases- were tied to my view of reality, and a bit of the world that was otherwise going to continue on for a long while is crumbled up, and tossed out.
This reality of mine, of yours, it’s all there is. And it exists only as long as those who partake in it stand within it as well. But one by one, it will disintegrate out of memory. And after this place is over-run by the next one, nobody will recollect it.
It’s really a bizarre concept to blame these consequences, this welling of emotion, on somebody I didn’t really “know”, but whom I knew. And it prolly wasn’t even proper to do so today. Somethin’ of a lie really.
‘Cause today was a mishmash of wrongs, not just the one. You get to a certain point- all these things you don’t wanna be doing, but that you feel you “have to” do for people you tell yourself you care about but really, you don’t. Obscure childlike crushes and high school-ish jealously? A class whose politics and idiocy has shockingly spilled over and encompassed your every free moment and you don’t even LIKE the point of it? It’s like being forced to paint a really shitty picture with half a brush.
I realized today that there’s was no why for all of this. The “how”- the too distraught with life to even speak to an old-friend I never see in person these days, the mental collapse shortly thereafter, being within five seconds of grabbing my shit and leaving town, the wasting of two hours on a beautiful afternoon doing shit for a doomed project and another four in some half-cognitive sleep-like state trying to forget the whole affair- is just foolish. I find myself in the “golden age” of my life, doing this. This.
Broken. That’s what it came down to. It wasn’t workin’, so I stopped the bleeding. Maybe there’s consequences for all this, academic/social ones for this micro-reality I call school. But maintaining sanity and peace-of-mind is larger than that, and sacrificing either for anything so unsubstantial is an utter waste of life.
Eight. Eight bits of my reality severed and tossed out with uniform speed. That’s the thing with all this death… Makes you wanna live. Sounds a little cliche, sure- but when I look ’round and see these walls, these politics, these uncaring minds…
I can’t help but wonder what I could find elsewhere.