And then it was gone. Just like that, without a pause, intuition aside. Pretenses erased, memories nothing more than blips and bloops, like my pores drained out the entirety of my brain into little packaged nanoboxes, shipped first class to some delirious mistress in need for a bit of sanity. Poor whore, she's just getting nothing more than damaged goods.
As I was losing my mind today, I sat and tried not to blink. Once the initial uncomfortable ticks leave, it's not so bad. It's just like taking a deep breath while the nurse punctures your vein, a vague prick in your temple, a simple pierce of the egg whites of your eye whites. The US of America experienced a heat wave today, I was no exception. The interior of my father's 2003 Honda Accord Special Edition (he adds this comment about his beloved auto with the flavor of a man who knows his bargaining presence) is as dark as a damper panther black. Like my old ebony lab, its skin shone with a brightness you could breathe; you knew its tremendous visceral swelter by just a seconds glance. What a beast it was a inside.
But I couldn't help myself. The ignition was never in question: off went its post into a broken limp. As did my posture. I was your everyday zombie, frozen in a stupor without shame, without wit, without anything but a mutated crave to satiate every orifice on your face. Except my stupor left me without a victim. To say I was my own victim sounds cant and softens me to less than some fucking loser. But what else could you--would you--say. I can't answer that.
It felt like warm, chewed vomit in my mouth, but the scream was more real in an artificial sense. It burned my esophagus and completely drenched my abdomen, chewing away layer after layer of self-confidence and mental toughness. I was a child stuck in a mutant child's body. My hair was in bunches and my mouth was left ajar. This I know, my reflection frozen directly in front of my gaping face on the pull down mirror, accessorized with this blank panther Special Edition. I wanted to be in a movie, not in it's entirety, but in that one sliced scene of film where neither the character, his or her origin, or what they stood for didn't matter one bit. All that the scene is meant for is to catch the audience's attention in its detail and location and textures of illumination. I wanted to scream so loud that everything around me would explode, where the leather would rip and the glass would be pulverized into marble and sand. Where my heat boxed car would break into a thousand piece puzzle, shattering itself into its original boxed, conformed yet haphazard form. It could be so beautiful or tremendously dumb and aggravating. Because it would make no sense whether or not I had an original reason, but I can't think of that now, so how could I have justified it then?
It was that sense of nothing that made me scared the most. That nothing meant anything at all. And that everything, anything was nothing in itself. It wasn't worth it, it didn't mean what it was meant to be anyways. I looked at all that was around me in my frozen, heated, boxed stupor. Especially at the font, there was font everywhere you looked. On the sticker for the car's next inspection. The countless number of buttons to mash and press and light up and turn off and scream at and forget about. It was on the mirrors, on license plates, on stop signs, on construction warnings, on teeshirts, on coffee mugs, on the ground, on the best things you could ever take for granted. And I wanted it all to be gone, erased, invisible, absent. But I couldn't do it; I've never felt so useless in my life.
And then like that I was hot, sweating, scared shitless. I ran out of my car, into the heat, into that mess of fucked up font and heat and stupor and cheesy teeshirts and mindless work and mindless life. Nothing made sense, but I knew I had to pretend it did. For survival, for sanity. And I slowed down to a jog, then a pace, then a walk. I wanted to erase my brain. And I wanted to scream. But I didn't want anyone to think I was crazy. So I kept walking until the air conditioning hit me and I stopped to say hello to the security guard.
