627. Endogenous Etiology: 5

Transcript from sometime in the future. Location unknown. Names redacted.

Q.

A. There is a stress in the act, the needle before injection, finger on the trigger, that moment before the moment, that irresistible instant, your moth into the flame moment. I know no other way to explain it. The desire for destruction becomes sexual. Consummation no longer a choice. You become actor, not director, not writer. And though you know you should not, you know you can't not. You dive with smile into the empty pool, your brain and teeth shattered to join the shards of your psyche. Now is that fucking seductive or what?

Q.

A. Don't ask questions you can't understand.

Q.

A. Forget it. (pause) Just don't do it again. (pause) Ever.

Q.

A. I'm paying you to listen, not talk. You're on my time. My dime. I don't need your words. Got too many of my own. (laughs) That's funny (face straight).

Q.

A. Good. I like a good understanding. Like butter melting on my toast.

Q.

A. The pull is biological, like the flower to the sun. The process is not of thought. And you realize that what you are is more than thought (there is a stare and a pause here); assuming, of course, you ever thought you were just thought in the first place. Anyway, you feel occupied. That something is living inside of you. Something dark. Something that no thinking can find. You know it from the shadows, never directly. A tail chased but never caught. Round and round you go. The pain is such that you believe only greater pain, more pain can extinguish the pain at hand. So you replace one pain with another and then another, the chase, seeking relief, or so your mind tells you, but, bullshite aside, the pain is an end in itself. You feed it, willingly. As I said, seductive is the power. Electrifying at times.

Q.

A. I don't know. I suppose it is like ghost hunting. Your pain is the cry. The cry into the darkness. Not a plead for help--don't ever believe that nonsense. The cry is for truth. The truth of pain. Understand?

Q.

A. Think of it this way. I seek, what you might call the other side of the coin, not for coin's sake. You see? No? Damn. You see, He never answers. The great Silence, he is. But something, call it the pain, demands I double check. And since My Father is absent, silence, I seek the Great Antipode.

Q.

A. This is not rocket science. If I find one, I can posit the other. That's one theory.

Q.

A. Shame.

Q.

A. To shame The Father. So I destroy, create chaos, take the Image and prostitute it, no, desecrate it, into the nether, into that silent darkness, the cry, the challenge, the in-your-face fuck you.

Q.

A (roiling laughter) Are you serious?

Q.

A. No.

Q.

A. So yes, like the tail, we are back to the beginning. In pain is life. No life, no pain. So, perhaps, this is my way of living, of knowing I am alive, of feeling the most intense life I know. An end in itself, or so it seems.

Q.

A. You are asking the wrong question.

Q.

A. Why the fuck I still come here.

__________

Q.

A. Death is not the problem. Have you not heard anything I've said? It's not death. It's life. Not the life you think you know, not the life we talk about with wife, kids, home and all the rest, I'm talking about life with a capital L. I'm talking about the life that animates your heart, digests your food, shuttles off your waste. Do you hear me? That life. That life that chooses when you stay and when you go. That life that operates on its own time; has its own agenda.

Q.

A. Okay, let me paint the picture. You live your entire life, saintly, let's say. You live long, one partner, many children, blessings beyond measure. Then let's say one day, you have a little health issue. You can't talk, you can't walk and it is not certain you can even see. You live in a bed. Someone else wipes your butt, sees every private detail of your old, tired, sagging sack of a body, prodding and poking you at will, touching and seeing whatever, whenever they want. You shit yourself. You piss yourself. You eat the mush they deem to feed you, day after day after day. You are a prisoner in your own body; your dirty, smelly bed your cell, your closest family, the guards. You are subjected to mindless TV. And baby talk. You receive no stimulation. You can't read. No one reads to you. You haven't seen the news in more than a year. The touch of a book is alien. The taste of solid food a distance memory. Music is not played. Life. Right. Life wants to live. This is your precious life. Imagine no conversation. No one talks to you because you can't talk back. So you have no conversation. No intellectual exchange. None. You are not in a coma. But you are paralyzed and you can see, somewhat, but no one bothers to check your vision or put on your glasses. In fact, truth be known, no one expects you to live much longer and you are not seen as a person, but rather a necessary, obligatory burden. You lose your humanity, but, and keep this in mind, you are no less alive. Right? Life. But here is the thing, that conceptual universe we create, now, in this instance, reveals the very separation of little life and big Life. In this universe, who you are is who you were--people look away, afraid of losing the memory they have in exchange of the life now before them. A memory. A living memory, not a living person, a living mem-o-ry. No new memories to be made. Think about that for a second--alive without the ability to be anything other than a memory to others. You are just a heart beating, a stomach digesting, an anus that occasionally can still close after it opens. And unlike a coma, you can see and hear it all. Now you tell me death is the problem.

Q.

A. Yes, I'm aware of the dissonance.

A Reading of EE:5

590. Endogenous Etiology: 4

Transcript from sometime in the future. Location unknown. Names redacted.

Q.

A. The grayness comes without rhyme or reason and it comes, if we personify, as visitors of all sorts, shapes, sizes. Like the knock at the door, it comes of its own accord, a time of its choosing. And, for the record, weather has nothing to do with it.

Q.

A. What I mean is, the grayness is seldom the same. The feel, the texture if you will, changes and I cannot say that this grayness is like that grayness, that today resembles yesterday.

Q.

A. Today? Today is an odd grayness, a flavor I've not sampled before. The sky is blue, the weather near perfect, the house quiet and my emotions calm like the surface of a lake at dawn. Yet, there is always a yet, the sun rises quietly. The quiet is the first sign that all is not as it should be. I feel apart. The dawn, the awakening of the day is experienced as something separate. I don't feel a part of it. The feeling is somewhat like, how do I say it, like when you leave a thing, a job, a relationship, and the thing you are leaving is still in view, still warm, yet, you are no longer troubled with the issues attached to that job or that relationship. The troubles are still there, nothing is better, you can still see them, but you are no longer involved, the troubles are no longer yours. That is how it feels, as if one is in limbo, between this and that, an odd nether-land.

Q.

A. These are the days that scare me the most. The absence of emotion. You see, anger, as much as we diss it, is like a guard rail. It keeps us from going over the edge, for anger wants to express, to act, to be. So anger, in a strange way, keeps us in the game. I may do bad things when angry, but the ultimate is out of bounds. So you see, when I'm angry, I'm protected. But when anger is absent, and the grayness rolls in, then the game is very different, as different as swimming in a lake and swimming in a river flowing before a waterfall.

Q.

A. Anger is like the fist holding the rope tight. With apathy, you just let go, and the letting go is without care, without an opinion one way or the other. In short, you just don't care anymore. Imagine it this way. Let's say you no longer became hungry and let's also say you could not taste anymore either. Would you eat?

Q.

A. Well, that would be logical and if logic had any part in what I was describing, would I be here?

Q. 

A. Voices sound like so much noise. I hear them, other people. I know they are talking, sometimes to me although it seems more like at me. I know the words but when I try to put them all together the only thought that comes to mind is, what the frail are they saying and why do they need me to say it because it certainly seems as if they are going to say what they are going to say with or without me.

Q.

A. (raucous laughter) You're shiotting me, right? 

Q.

A. Look, I don't even know what that would feel like anymore. And memories of what it once felt like fade by the day. And then I ask myself, am I even capable of doing what I accuse other people of not doing. Do I remember myself?

Q.

A. I don't know. But I like the metaphor. I do feel like I'm floating away, into the sky and all I know is getting more and more distant. So, I suppose, in answer to your question, I feel no connection, to anyone. Nothing. No thing. Just a drifting away and the sense of distance, of fading away, doesn't need physical distance. The distance is something other. But I think explaining it as a lack of connection is apt. Not connected. Not fitting. A plug without a socket. 

Q.

A. Not always. There are moments, which I think only stand to illustrate the greater picture. If life were a highway, well, then, the station I'm listening to is mostly static with the occasion clear signal and I keep turning the knob, trying to get a clear, consistent signal, but I can't. I rock the knob back and forth, to and fro, minute adjustments and, for a second I have a signal and then, just as quickly, its gone and the static, like a steady shower, washes over me. Now imagine that its not just a ball game you can't tune in, but life, relationships. So your life, all its relationships, are just noise, static, an endless gray.

Q.

A. You reach a point where you are just tired. Morning, noon or night, doesn't matter. The tiredness is not of body and not really of mind. When you are being beat, physically beaten, you go through stages, fear, terror, pain and all the rest but then you get to a point where to pain slips away and the blows appear to slow down and you feel like a pillow, absorbing blows, cushioned by a body you no longer recognize as yourself and you realize they can't reach what they want to reach and it is at this moment you either stay or go.

570. Endogenous Etiology: 3

Transcript from the sometime in the future. Location unknown. Names redacted.

Q.

A. What if you were evil, pure evil, but all your life, you thought you were the good guy?

Q.

A. Seriously, think about that for a second. How many bad guys think they are bad guys? So they live their lives thinking they are good. Right?

Q. 

A. My point is this. I woke up one morning and I realized . . .

Q.

A. I had no idea who I was. That everything I thought to be true about myself was not true. Now I know this sounds trite and the words are. Write them down. Say them. Try to do it with a straight face. You can't. Now, live them. Wake up in that realization where you are not saying the words but the words are saying you. They don't express some intellectual idea, some contrivance of an overactive imagination; they express you, your state.

Q.

A. Well, then you gotta ask yourself, if you have totally frailed your own idea of yourself, have you totally frailed your view of everything else too. I mean, what can you believe anymore? But I want to go back to what I said earlier. What if everything you did caused pain and you thought just the opposite? Try and imagine that.

Q.

A. Frail. If it were easy, would I be here? Okay, let me put it this way. You've picked flowers, right? Put them in a vase, maybe given them as a gift. Made the home nice and all the rest. Okay, now imagine you've been picking flowers for years, making everyone happy, the world beautiful and so forth. You with me? Good. Now imagine, one day, when you are picking those flowers you hear a scream and you realize, after looking for that scream, it is the flower in your hand and the dirt on the root starts to run, red, blood red and the screams get louder and louder and you see what you've never seen before, that all your life, when you thought you were doing good, you were actually leaving a trail of murder.

Q.

A. So you look at the world and the world is empty. The world is nothing. Nothing. 

Q.

A. Nothing as in an empty vessel. Everything you see is empty. Everyone you meet, empty. And then it dawns on you. You are the water. You pour yourself into the world, into the empty vessel. You with me? So nothing is as it seems.

Q.

A. Okay, now imagine these two thoughts hit you at the same time like a one-two punch. You are evil and everything you see is nothing but you, your projection and so you see evil in everything, everywhere.

Q.

A. Now, you try and live like this. 

Q. 

A. Hard to say. There is an anger inside, I don't even know when it began and I certainly didn't recognize it initially. Odd aberrations, situation specific I remember thinking, not some alien entity growing inside of me, feeding off my own thoughts, extending its tentacles with every episode, each outburst harder and harder to rationalize or justify and I began to understand how normal looking people, like neighbors you see every day, could, seemingly out of the blue, do some of the most heinous things. I could picture them in court, long after the temporary insanity, knowing that in this moment, as normal as they looked again, that alien root structure was there, as clear as the veins on their hands, waiting, silently. 

Q.

A. Imagine standing outside on a beautiful day. Inside, your head, your chest, a storm is raging, raging with a ferocity that takes every ounce of your energy to keep from tearing you apart, apart from the inside out. So you just stand there, looking into the clear blue sky, feeling the perfect breeze, listening to the most gorgeous songbird, the air fragrant the ways bees know the world and yet, inside, you feel shattered, pieces, one by one, falling away, until there is nothing left but an odd hollowness, a sense that if you looked into a mirror, there would be nothing there or at least nothing you could recognize as you. And all you want to do is curse the hand that put you, whatever you is, in motion, whatever sick magical force took nothing and made something, something they labeled with your name and then kicked you out into the void, cold, alone, naked into the thorns. 

Q.

A. You feel invisible, not as in no one can see you but rather as in no one will look at you, no one will acknowledge you. You speak, but no one turns their head, stops what they are doing. There is a sense of utter repudiation of your existence as if you could be voted out of significance, of meaning, of value and the implicit suggestion is, you are nothing.

Q.

A. It's only harsh to those who have not walked in my shoes. There is a reason soldiers do not talk to non-soldiers about the things they have seen, have experienced. The experience of war, of most things, creates a unique language, a language of sights and sounds and smells and tastes but also a unique language of mood, emotion, anger, fear, contempt, horror and I could go on and on but the language is known not by words. You see, words only point and when one with the experience is talking to one without, then it quickly becomes known one is pointing at ghosts, pointing at nothing for the words mean nothing. Do you understand? The words don't mean nothing. The words are code. The words point. And if you don't have the code, if you don't have the language embedded in your own experiences, well,  . . .

Q.

A. Let's say you are your experiences. Forget that. Let's say you love music. You play, you listen, it gives depth and joy to your life. Let's say nothing else makes you as happy. Now, let's say you wake up one day and no one you know wants to talk about music, won't let you talk about it either. Nor will they let you play it. They hold music in utter contempt and I mean stark raving utter frailing contempt, the kind of contempt so contemptible it cannot even be spoken of, acknowledged. No discussion. None. Imagine that world. Go ahead. Take some time. Try and imagine living in that world.

Q.

A. Got it? Okay, now, let's say you wake up one day, and you sneak off to enjoy music, someplace alone, which is the only way you can get your fix and you need your fix like a plant needs sun. And what you hear, the music, is insipid, but more than insipid, more like rancid. As if every tone was slightly adjusted to a cacophony of disharmony. Imagine the shock of seeing a song, hearing a song, knowing that it was being played correctly, knowing how it was suppose to sound and yet, somehow, your ear, your brain could no longer process it but instead, distorted it, bastardized it. I would say it is the same as watching a parent suffer Alzheimer's. The body is there, but the mind is gone. And you realize that what you have lost cannot be found for it is right before your eyes, empty as a shell. 

Q.

A. So what do you do? You say farewell and good night. Farewell. Good night.

Q.

A. Lighten up. I would never telegraph such a thing. But then again, the question is this. What is me and what is this thing inside of me, which at the moment I am crudely describing as anger, a label, just for the record, is a placeholder for something beyond my comprehension to understand its nature and depth. All I know is that I don't know, I don't know what is in the shadows, I just know something is there and that it is not a good thing. 

Q.

A. Here is what I do know. There is me and there is this 'anger' inside of me and the two feel as separate as the flower and the bee. That is a poor analogy, for the bee can just fly away. I have nowhere to run from this thing inside of me nor, it seems, can I get my hands around it, shape it, control it, manage it or know when and where it moves. Still, I sense it grows, like weeds, finding nourishment within me in places I know not. Think about that. Something inside of you, taking root, growing, consuming you, feeding off of you and you don't even know how; you don't know upon what it feeds, you are not privy to this information. You see, you know it only from the shadows and all you really know is two things. It is there. It is growing. And, I suppose, you could say, day by day, as it grows, it is becoming more you than you. The bee is becoming the flower and the flower feels helpless to stop it, rooted as it is, petals open to the wind, exposed and, pardon my language, raped at will, its pollen taken, time and time again. See, I can't explain it. My analogies and metaphors are confusing, which is only a reflection of my internal confusion about what is happening. All I can say is this. I feel consumed. I feel taken over. I feel as if something else is driving me and I have been thrown in the backseat and I'm watching this entity drive, recklessly and I know where it is headed, to the cliff and as in a dream, even though I know this, I am helpless to stop it; I feel as if I am being forced to watch my own destruction, my own murder. Yet, if you were to ask me by who's hand, I would be at a loss to say.

Q.

A. I wake up with circles under my eyes. Some would say bags. And I'm not the only one who has noticed. In those first moments I feel as two. There is me, the old me, the me that I think I am. And then, and I want you to listen very closely to this, and then there is this other thing and it is waking too and I feel its strength, as if, in the night, it has grown and I feel it stirring, flexing itself and in that moment--is fear. I fear losing myself and the image occurs in my mind's eye of me seeing myself, as if there are two of me. No words are exchanged. Just hands outstretched, one reaching out to the other and the look. The look haunts me. I see the look of a child, confused, lost, reaching out and I can't grab the hand. So that is the image. Two arms reaching, as one might imagine someone thrown overboard in a storm reaching for the hand from the deck and both parties know that all is lost but in that moment, the moment of realization, the moment before all that is lost is completely lost, the moment of no return but prior to grief, that moment, where time stands in a circle giving pause, hands behind back, respectful, for a moment. That is how I wake. And the circles under my eyes, day by day, grow. I'm witnessing my own destruction, days like pages, and day by day, I get closer to the end. I'm on, in, the last chapter, the book is almost . . . 

Q.

A. Actions occur that I cannot control. Struggle. Between the two selves, who I was and who I am becoming. My old self wants a mercy killing or, at the very least, solitary confinement, to limit the damage to others. The other self, the self that is growing, feeds off the pain, sardonic to the end. And this is my life, a civil war, and as a soldier, I sleep not, eat what I can, but I look like shiott, feel like shiott, and, as that soldier, know no one who shares my language, who can understand, who I can talk to. So I talk to you. And I watch your face. Your frailing professional face. And I know. I know as I talk. You have no frailing idea what I'm talking about. And in that space is a loneliness, an isolation that is cold and silent. A place where my other self sits upon a rock and smiles, waiting for me to return. 

525. Endogenous Etiology: 2

Transcript from sometime in the future. Location unknown. Names redacted. (document 2)



Q.

A. I couldn't tell you when it started, no more than a man who slept late could tell you when the sun rose.

Q.

A. Look. I fucking told you I don't know. Ask me another stupid question and the session is over.

Q.

A. Don't apologize. Don't ever fucking apologize to me. Means nothing.

Q.

A. By the pauses. I would say memory, but that is long gone, like the flavor from a biscuit left in the sun. Insipid. Is that the word? Fucking insipid. My memories.

Q.

A. The juxtaposition of those two words. About how my fucking has been. Ever have an orgasm without having an orgasm? Didn't think so.

Q.

A. I don't laugh much anymore. Indulge me. Screw it. What did you ask?

Q.

A. Right. You know not by the thing itself because the thing itself consumes you, becomes you and you can no longer distinguish between it and you. So, you don't know. People look at you funny. They know. But you don't. That is, until you have slippage. You don't know what slippage is do you? Well, slippage is a flash, about that quick. A flash of light. And in that light, just in a millisecond, you know. You know that what is, is not as it should be. And you slip back into the humid dark. A darkness unlike anything out there because the darkness is within. There is nothing out there as dark.

Q.

A. It comes and it goes of its own accord. I've met no enemy I fear more. I never know if the day will bring light or dark and even within the day, like passing clouds, the moods change, sometimes on a dime. How. Why. I've no fucking clue. I do know, there was a time it was not this way. There was a time when the light was all there was. There was a time when I could do no wrong. Now, those times are like another life. I don't even recognize who that person was.

Q.

A. The shift, either way, happens in an instant. I can't predict it. I can't anticipate it. I can't control it. And those around me, they don't understand. To them, I'm an asshole. And, I suppose, looking from the outside in, I am. I treat them like shit. I know it. I know it when it is happening. I see it unfolding. And I am powerless to do anything about it. Except . . .

Q.

A. Leave. The only power I have is awareness. I haven't lost my awareness yet. I know when the moods shift. I know when I'm out of control. I know when I'm going to shit on anyone and everything in my path. I can't change the behavior so I have two options. Either they leave or I leave. Because if we stay in contact, bad things happen.

Q.

A. I feel like you are not listening. I can't fucking control it. I can't not be what consumes me in that moment. I can see it. I can know it. But I can't be otherwise. Imagine it this way. When you are drunk, you know you are drunk. You have that awareness. Now, that awareness does not make you less drunk nor does it give you better judgment. So you don't drive. So see. You isolate your ability to do harm. That is your option. Same here. When the mood changes, it is like in one moment you are sober and in the next you are drunk. And that quickly, you act like the drunk. Now imagine what those around you think? You see, there is no bottle in your hand. You are not at the bar. They see none of the outward signs. Just bam. One moment you are yourself. The next, you are an asshole. A danger to yourself. A danger to everyone around you. And no one understands. So you live with your sickness alone. Unlike a fever or a cold or the flu, you get no sympathy. Instead, you get scorn. And hatred. And you watch your friends, one by one, go away. They stop calling. The visits become less and less frequent. You understand. They don't.

494. Endogenous Etiology: 1

Transcript from sometime in the future. Location unknown. Names redacted.

Q.

A. High gamma. Overexposed. Blown out highlights. Blacks blacker than black and dream-like fuzzy.

Q.

A. Like cobwebs in my esophagus. Treble hooks below my eyes pulling the skin with lead weights. Cheekbones feel porcelain brittle, not living, ossified within my decaying flesh. Air heavy. Like water. My lungs work as bilge pumps. On a sinking vessel. Laboring to pull air in, mechanically working to expel.

Q.

A. Sharp. Exaggerated. Everything over the top. No middle ground. Nothing subtle. Aroma hurts. Cuts. Stabs. Bites. Claws. Gnaws. Eats. Sucks. Teasing nauseousness. Invading. Attacking. Omnipresent. Nothing smells as it once did.

Q.

A. Whatever is not in focus is grey, but moving as if the grey knows, as if the grey is whispering and pointing. Talking. Gossiping. Assuming. Looking from corners. From eyes shaded.

Q.

A. Shrill. Irritating. High-pitched. Relentless. Consuming. Everywhere. My own voice labored. Tinny. Like I'm talking underwater. No one can hear me. Talking louder doesn't work. Has no effect. People talk over me. Around me. All sounds are sharp. But voices. Voices are muted.

Q.

A. Hyper-sensitive. Beyond drugs. I am no longer able to become intoxicated--no matter how much I drink.

Q.

A. Nothing satisfies. Not in the bite. Not in the meal. I eat more than I used to. The strange thing is, I look forward to eating. The memory of what it was like to eat is still there and I approach each meal as if this time things will be different. Be as they were.

Q.

A. Never.

Q.

A. I know at the first bite. So I eat more. I couldn't tell you what propels me. The experience is almost out of body. I watch myself eat.

Q.

A. I’ve lost all peripheral vision. I see, sometimes vaguely, only what is in front of me. Sometimes I see nothing at all.

Q.

A. Yes.

Q.

A. I thought it would. It didn’t. If anything, it only made things worse.

Q.

A. Constricted. Especially my heart. I don’t think it is functioning correctly. I feel a gurgling in my chest. Something I’d never felt before. I’m cold too. Seems I can never get warm. I take a lot of baths--hot. It helps. For awhile. I used to light candles but I can no longer stand the fragrance. So, I bought scent-free candles and I found the light bothered my eyes, so I closed my eyes and I swear, the sound, the sound of the flame, irritated the heck out of me. I bathe without light now. (pause) I want to come back to sound. Everything I said before--not always so.

Q.


A. Sometimes sound passes through me. Like I was a ghost. Like I can’t hear it. Don’t hear it. And words are just sounds. I hear them them without listening. And others know I’m not listening. Yet, and this is the strange thing, when they confront me on not listening, I can repeat in detail everything they just said. You should see the look of disgust on their faces. But they were right. I wasn’t listening.

Q.

A. Little things. Details. Like zooming into a fractal. Getting deeper and deeper and seeing the same patterns. Little things seem like everything. Big things like nothing.

Q.

Death.

Q.

A. I have this overwhelming desire to cut my grass with a pair of scissors. A few blades at a time. Taking pains to get it right--height, level, etc. And watering my lawn--not with a hose or a sprinkler, both of which I have, but with a bucket. A small bucket. Red. I fill it up inside the house, bypassing the outside facet and going up the stairs, in the house and filling up my small red bucket in the kitchen sink. Just watching the water flow. Careful not to over fill it. That is very important. I could tell you the grass knows the care I take, but that would be silly.

Q.

A. I pick my spots. I know how to pretend, to act normal. Or so I believe. Its exhausting. Maintaining that belief. Heck, just acting normal, and I never know if I’m doing it right, because, fuck me, if I knew, I wouldn’t have to act. Right?

Q.

A. A good set of hair. You know. Young hair. Thick. Rich. Luxurious. The color of rosewood. Deep. Soft. Textured. I miss that. You know what I like the most? Where it bends. The hair. And the light catches that bend. That bar of light on the height of the curve. I could stare at that bar of light all day. That and the fine texture of clean straight hair, the slight variation of hue and saturation and value. Try and paint that hair, try and get the HSV right and you’ll appreciate what I’m talking about. Most people look at me like I’m crazy when I describe hair like that. And you know what else. Reminds me a little of grass. Fine blades of grass. Some days I just lie in the yard and run my fingers through the grass. Soft. Alive. Delicate. Defenseless.

Q.

A. They don’t come around much anymore. And when they do, I can’t recall they have much to say. Of course, they seem equally disinterested in what I want to talk about.

Q.

A. Details. The world in a grain of sand. As they say. Like . . . Never mind.

Q.

A. A glass of wine.

Q.

A. There was a time a glass of wine was not just a glass of wine. And you know the fuck what? There is nothing more lonely than knowing a glass of wine is not just a glass of wine and nobody else knows what the fuck you are talking about and there is no way to explain it to them. But you know what? I don’t have that problem no more. Jack.

Q.

A. (eyes water. tear runs down cheek)

Q.

A. No, what do you want to know?

Q.

A. Haven’t talked to her in awhile. Last I heard she was doing well.

Q.

A. Hard to say.

Q.

A. Thanks.

Q.

--Break--

Q.

A. I put headphones on and look at myself in the mirror. I look more handsome with headphones on.

Q.

A. After reading. I mean, I can no longer read without my headphones on. Music playing. It has to be headphones. I can’t read if the music is playing without headphones. But I can’t read without headphones playing music. And that is when it occurs to me.

Q.

A. To go to the mirror and look at myself. Sometimes with the music still playing. But mostly with the music off. Seems sacrilegious to look at oneself with headphones on and music playing. Like adding something profane to the reverent. If you are looking in the right way. Don’t you think? I mean, to look upon oneself is to look at the great unknown. You might as well walk outside and stare up into the dark soul of the sky. The two are ‘bout the fucking same. Right. And it is what it is. Music just adds something extra, like a small child taking a crayon and adding some birds to a masterpiece of art.

Q.

A. No. Never.

Q.

A. Maybe.

Q.

A. Let me touch your hair.

Q.

A. Well, there you go.

Q.

A. Yeah. The reading. Opens my soul. I don’t like what I see. Music creates a barrier. Between me and the darkness. A wall. Protection. Gives me a coat against the cold infinite bottomless pit of nothingness. That pit, in my mind, has eyes. They don’t blink and sometimes I swear there are more than just two. Music distracts me. Or maybe, it is a tether. A lifeline to the world I know when the world I don’t know threatens to consume me. So I hold on.

Q.

A. It's not that I want to read. It's just that I can’t not read. Each book is like a person. And each one is in my life for a purpose. Hell, I’m that one that brought them into my house. They didn’t just show up. I am cause. I am effect. And they sit on my selves just waiting for me to pick them up. Patient little bastards. I’ve got more than I can attend to properly. And yet, get this. I keep adding to the flock. I’m sure the bastards hate me. Would explain why they torture me so. Nice theory. Complete shite. But it sounds nice.

Q.

A. Don’t matter. Don’t you see that. It’s not the book. It’s not the message. It is the act. Reading is not reading. You know, it really pisses me off when you smile like that.

Q.

A. Accepted.

Q.

A. I once had a baby chick. You know, the one you take home from school when they teach you about babies and do the incubation thing. Every kid gets a chick after they hatch. Well, I don’t remember this story myself, but the story goes the chick, the one I took home, was doing what little chicks do when taken away. Chirping. Endlessly. And the story goes, I silenced that chick. With my own hands. Now, like I said, I have no memory of this event. Only the retelling of it. But the adults in my life at the time, keepers of the tale, say it is true. But you know what bothers me to this day?

Q.

A. No.

Q.

A. The way they told it. Like it was funny. Like it was their story. Like I didn’t matter. Like that chick didn’t matter. And they seemed to enjoy telling it. Mostly, it seemed, only when I was there to hear it.

Q.

A. Yes. That’s when I knew. And you know what else. I think they knew too. And I think they thought they could laugh it away. Kill it in the telling over and over again. Then again, I imagine a lot of shite. Who the frack knows what they were thinking.

Q.

A. Nope. What it did was lead me to hate them. To hate the pleasure they took at my expense.

Q.

A. Weakness. Or stupidity. Or both. You know what I wonder? Why. Why I did it. What impulse at that innocent age had taken root and I wonder if they knew, knew the root within me, the one they had witnessed, the one they laughed about and recounted endless times--to the same circle of family I give you. It was not like there was a new audience. They all knew the story. Yet, still, within them, a need. To tell it again. With me present. I see the laughter to this day. And I see little difference between that laughter and a knife twisted in my chest. And I wonder, how much fear they had. Knowing this was one root they could not pull. Did not know how to yank. Think about that.

--Break--

Q.

A. Fear. It dominates everything I do. I live in the spaces between it, where it allows me to venture. I live in those well-worn ruts, trotting routine into the soil of my prison yard. And I feel shame. Not what you think. Not shameful for the fear. I see the fear as something not of me so I have no shame for it. No. Shame for not trying to escape. Shame for not having the courage to end it all. I could do it. No. That’s not right. I can’t do it. So I cower. I live in the shadow of fear. And I cloak myself in the shame of knowing I have not the courage to end it. End it all.

--Break--

Q.

A. I feel like something inside of me is falling. Just falling. I feel it. Not just a thought, but a physical sensation. I feel it mostly in my chest as if my heart was lead, not flesh. The image of water flowing over a cliff is what I see. I don’t see the bottom. I don’t see the top. I just see the infinite flowing, the infinite falling. Falling without beginning and without end. Without start or stop. (pause) I see it in hair too. Not curly hair. Hair that flows. A graceful, tragic, curve. Like your hair. (smiles)

--Break--

Q.

A. Handwriting becomes tedious. Every letter, of every word, is an effort. Just forming each letter becomes almost impossible. So my writing can’t be read by anyone else. Actually, within a few days, I can hardly read what I’ve written either. And I know, I tried, with tremendous effort, to write legibly. My own hand mocks me. It doesn’t shake, like an old person. My hand is steady. It just refuses to allow me to write clearly. I can’t explain it. So I don’t write so much anymore.

Q.

A. When connected. Like climbing a mountain and we feel the belay--above and below--and we know connection, togetherness, in life, in the support of life. And no one on a mountain, belayed, is laughing at the one above or below. People look at me today and they don’t belay. They choose not to connect. They walk on past. I see it. I feel it. And I withdraw. Further. Like a shadow. Growing with the falling sun. Waiting to be consumed in the encroaching, inevitable darkness of night. Think about that. Think of yourself as a shadow. And night is coming. How would you feel? Think about it. Think about what that shadow is thinking. How do you stop the coming of night?

Q.

A. I sit and watch the seconds tick by. I see my life, alone on that mountain, dripping away, each second a drop of blood from a vein that won’t coagulate. Sometimes those drops are not blood, but poison, like chemo, dripping into my veins and I can’t stop the poison and it drips, into me. Nobody comes to stop it.

Q.

A. Right. Yes. I’ll schedule it.