These are the things I meant to tell you. These are not the things I told you or the things I thought to tell you. These are the things I never thought to tell you but always meant to say. This is what I wrote on so many postcards I threw away.
In a dark room there is always a door. There is not always a window, but you can count on there being a door. Even if you forget how you ended up here, you know your act of coming here most likely involved a door.
There is a piercing noise coming from someplace outside of me. It is a syncopated beeping noise I remember slowly the deeper it resonates. I remember that it is coming from the other side of the wall and that my room shares a wall with my mother’s room. I remember that the sound is her alarm clock going off because it is time for her to get up and that this time is quarter to six. I remember that I still have another two hours before I need to get up myself. There is a book I often think of as I roll away from the wall and place my pillow over my ears. It’s a book Elizabeth gave me. Something she read long ago when she had time to read books, she said. Something she said she still didn’t completely understand. Something I definitely don’t understand, though for what it was worth I told her that it seemed to speak of death. I remember she nodded vacantly when I told her this but didn’t say anything back to me, though her glance seemed to suggest she agreed.
Across the room from the door there is a window I see dawn push the darkness through. Slowly a silhouette resumes its features beyond the glass. The shapeless buildings of the town where I live grow clearer. In the distance the mountains rise out away from the horizon. I lay still and watch the grayness carve a humble portrait of disgruntled sky. I don’t care how it happens, but I appreciate the fact that it is happening. I lay in my bed and contemplate the uncertain attachment I feel towards all of this. My little town. The sounds of the people moving beneath my window on the street. The grayness that makes the Pennsylvanian sky so easy to blame for everything. I contemplate this uncertainty because it seems that there is more to it than finding comfort in not being alone. Even though I don’t understand these things I contemplate, I continue to contemplate these things because I am determined not to be the reason why these days the only way I ever feel is alone.
First there is darkness. Then there is morning. The road is dark and my car is dark. I never turn on the radio until I see the sun. My coffee is dark because it needs to be dark. Because the road is dangerous I need to be awake. Because on the road there are a multitude of possibilities that will kill you. Because being here my dreams are dead. Each morning I find myself here the first thought I have is that I should forget about my dreams because then maybe I wouldn’t realize that on this road they are dead.
Elizabeth recited a quote from the book before she gave it to me. She wrote it on a napkin at the bar. Her eyes sunk into something, maybe sadness, as she scribbled it down. ‘In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep you are not. And when you are filled with sleep you never were. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I am or if I am not.’ It’s by Faulkner, she said, though I didn’t really care who it was by. I tried my best to understand what it meant but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to offend her by saying that I didn’t understand, saying that when I went to sleep I just slept and when I awoke I took up wherever I left off the day before. I didn’t want to say that I didn’t understand all that I am and I am not stuff, that more or less I’m an it is what it is kind of guy. I didn’t want her to think I wasn’t trying to understand because I didn’t want her to stop telling me about things I didn’t understand so I wrote down the lyrics to my favorite song on a napkin and gave it to her. ‘I’ve got some chords they fit just right I wrote some words don’t tell me they’re trite cause I was up all night just trying to get them down and you can say I’m crazy but you can’t tell me that I’m wrong cause I’m betting it all on this song all on a song.’ I tried to tell her that it was by FOD and called ‘Commercial Success,’ that this was the best I could do to help her understand me, but she wasn’t listening. She looked away from me into the mirror behind the bar and her expression didn’t say anything back to me. She ran her fingers through my hair and then rubbed the small of my back. So often when I can’t get to sleep I think of the feeling of her fingers in my hair and that memory puts me to sleep. The memory of the book makes me think of her hands but that doesn’t put me to sleep. To get back to sleep I need to think of the feeling of her hands.
I don’t know why I feel connected to these things so I try to understand the way I am living. But the way you are living never strikes you as interesting enough to understand when you are living it because when you are living it you never think it is going to end. Because there is no end in sight, there is no reason for serious reflection, no reason for you to try to understand the links between the scenes because the fact that it is happening is more real than anything you can remember. It is only much after the fact that things begin to resonate, much after the fact when things physically stop happening when mentally things start to happen, when the connections between the places you have been begin to take root and the concern shifts from where you are to where you have been. Only when there is distance of some sort do you begin to assess how you have gone about spending your time and wonder if your conclusions mean anything. This is where the story begins, never before, but always much after the facts have occurred, once you have lived your life and your life belongs no longer to the present, but to some distant past that hardly seems real any longer because it means less than the place where you find yourself. It is only when things mean less than they formerly have that you can understand them and use this understanding to construct an honest story. This is what I aim to do now, now that I am dead.
These are not the things you want to hear. These are the things I want you to hear, the things I need you to hear if there is ever to be an end to this.
I don’t want to be here. I never want to be here. I am only here now because I have to be here. Because I have no other choice but to be here. I am only here now in this car racing away from everything I claim to love because it has become economically necessary for me to make a productive use of my time. I need something to show for myself, something to share with those who depend on me, all these people I love, all these people I claim to love. That’s why I’m here now and why my decision to be here is an easy one to accept. This is why it is easy for me wake up and walk away from my family and get in my car and drive 100 miles to meet with men who I have no interest in meeting with. This is why it is easy for me to go wherever my boss tells me to go even though I don’t wish to do any of these things. If it were up to me I’d spend my days home with my family. Because I would like to give myself an adequate amount of time to think about why it is that all the things I say I love are things I no longer understand. I would like to have the time to figure out what it is I’m fighting for and maybe find a new way to fight for these things. But this thought of what I love, the people who love me, the people who depend on me, all those I claim to love makes it easy to dismiss these questions and do whatever I have to do to raise the capital necessitated by our relationship of love. Today I don’t feel well, but I have come here anyway because I always come here regardless of how I feel. Today I have come here because somewhere inside of me I still believe that it is worth fighting for the things you love, even if you feel these things are things you may only claim to love.
There is a café I sit in with B and spend the early hours of my Saturdays I meant to tell you about. There are always people sitting at the tables around us in mismatched clothes whispering. There is always something by Pink Floyd blaring on the stereo that makes conversation easy because the perfection of David Gilmore’s solos is something I can rely on, something that makes B’s smirk bearable and makes it easier for me not to speak of the newspaper office where I spend the duration of my week. There is a war raging on inside of me. There is a war going on that I am growing increasingly concerned with. It’s not clear to me which side is winning anymore because I’m not sure which side I want to win. I’m not sure I give a damn anymore about which side wins. I only tell this to B because E isn’t around. Right away B’s advice strikes me as thoughtless but I listen to it anyway because I don’t have anyone else to listen to. B asks me why I’m asking his opinion on the matter and not writing about it. B tells me that my war (a perfect instance of internal conflict is how he phrases it) is the perfect thing to write about because there is always a lot you can do with internal conflict. E would have just told me to pick a side and do whatever I had to do to win. I tell B that I don’t want to write about it because I don’t know how to begin. You writers are all the same, he says. I only let him get away with saying this because he used to be a writer. B used to be a culture critic but his inability to find success as a critic drove him to become a nihilist and his nihilism drove him recently to enter law school. Either write or don’t write, he says. Quitting writing was the best thing that ever happened to me. I know, I say. You’ve told me that before. Did I tell you about the little slut I nailed last week in DC? he says. No, I say. Right before I finished I pulled out and ripped off the condom. I told her I wanted to cum in her mouth. Rather nice of her to oblige don’t you think? I tell him that I guessed it was nice of her. Then I took her into the shower for round two. When I was ready I pushed her down to her knees and told her to open up. Her cheeks got nice and rosy. I might stop down there to see her over Christmas, maybe make her wear a Santa hat while she sucks me off. But I don’t know. I’d like to go to Vermont, do some skiing. You got anything going on for Christmas? Just going home to see my folks, I say. If you could only realize how hard you try to make yourself miserable, he says, but I don’t answer him. I pick up a section of his paper and start reading. He does the same. At least an hour passes this way. Neither of us says a word.
I hope for the right words to come to me but when I think of my story it is difficult for me to say anything other than that it is painfully typical. It is difficult for me to begin telling it because I hardly think I have an interesting story to tell unless it is interesting that the first adjective I have used to describe my story is painful, which implies that I am in or have been in possession of a sort of pain that is worth speaking of, which implies that this sense of pain isn’t one that has already been exhaustively depicted, that the degree to which my story is typical is in an illuminatingly painful way. Perhaps I just need to flatly describe the day I died and try my best to avoid all these circular thoughts. Perhaps it would be best to start with my name, to just say that it is Elizabeth, and the first thing I remember that morning is Tommy gazing into me through the mirror. Understand that he didn’t look directly at me. Otherwise he would have known I was awake. It was still dark outside, maybe an hour before dawn. He stopped before the mirror to fix his tie. A half hour earlier I heard his alarm go off and watched him walk into the bathroom. I should have been trying to go back to sleep but I couldn’t help but watch. I saw him stare diagonally into the lower corner of the mirror at my reflection in bed. After a few seconds I rolled over because I wanted this moment to end and then it ended. Then the sound of his shoes scraping against the planks of the floor, then the sound of the door opening, and then the sound of it closing. That was the final sound.
These days she only calls me early in the morning. She calls me before I know what is happening. It’s like a dream but it isn’t a dream. When the phone rings I resist it for a moment because I’ve always had a thing about being woken up by the phone, but I know it can’t be anyone else and then I remember I like talking to her so I answer it. It is a welcomed intrusion at first but then I sit up and look at the clock. I’ve never brought it up with her, but I know she times out everything. She must. Almost exactly an hour before I have to be at work. About a half hour before I typically get up. ‘Hurry up. Use the shower at my place. I want to see you so hurry up.’ I hang up the phone and get dressed. Then I drive over there. When she calls me early in the morning I find my keys and do whatever she tells me to do because after I talk to her, after I hear her voice, it becomes easy to follow her instructions and do what she tells me to do. Her voice is too tempting for me to do otherwise. I trick myself into believing that going over there, that seeing her before my day begins had been my intention all along and that there’s nothing wrong with this. After all, what could possibly be wrong with doing what you had originally set out to do?
I lay in bed and looked at the phone. I looked at the phone and lay in bed. I heard Lucy’s alarm go off down the hall and wished I was Lucy. I wished some stupid acid trip hadn’t made me name her Lucy. Out the window the clouds became violent with the colors of the sun. I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t watched the sun rise each morning. I wondered how long it had been but only thought about this for a moment because I knew that it had been longer than I could remember, longer than I can phrase in a way to imply the impetus behind an interesting story. So then I stopped thinking and got out of bed and took a shower. I dressed and made Lucy breakfast. She spoke fast and incoherently, something about social studies. I found myself looking forward to the days when she would be 15 and we’d finally have something to talk about. I sent her to school and after she was gone I crossed off the date on the calendar and found it funny that I had become the sort of person who crosses off the date on the calendar.
I continue to drive away from myself, here on this road far away now from all the things I claim to love. I continue to drink coffee and drive and listen to the radio now that my car in filled with light and the warmth of the morning sun. I keep driving because I have no other choice but to keep driving. But then something sinks inside me. At first I disregard it. But then it comes back. My stomach rises. My heart begins to palpitate and it seems a fever is coming on. I turn off the heat, but even still I can’t stop sweating. Beads of perspiration run off my forehead into my eyes and my stomach sinks into something nauseous. I don’t know what is happening so I decide to take a moment to try to figure out what is happening. I turn off the highway and pull into a truck stop and empty out everything inside of me behind a dumpster in the parking lot before going in. Inside I sit at the counter and order water and some toast to settle my stomach but the greasy smell of the trucker food makes me feel worse. I pretend to look over my papers so the people inside the restaurant won’t think I’m in trouble, but their stares are everywhere and unavoidable and I realize that my act is useless here because these people already know my story. I realize that these people have seen men like me stuck on this road before so I stop caring about caring about them and think of only the ones I love, the ones who love me, the ones I claim to love. The thought occurs to me that I need to pull myself together and do whatever it is that I need to do and get back in my car and continue down that road. Because if I don’t continue down that road the ones I love will die and if the ones I love die I will die because then I won’t have anyone to claim to love. But then my stomach rises up again. At first I’m able to suppress it but then it comes back stronger. I stand up and walk away from the counter but when I stand my vision fades to black. My head pounds. I make my way to the restroom and empty out more of me into a toilet stall. After I finish my head fells okay when I stick it under the faucet in the sink, but when I get back to my car it starts pounding again. I want to ignore this pounding and get back on the road. I want to do this because this is what I have set out to do because this is what my love requires me to do. But the pounding doesn’t go away. It gets worse. It pounds so hard I feel tears welling behind my eyes. I feel sick again so I get out of the car and let myself be sick. Then I call the office. I apologize to my boss. I hang up the phone and drive away. I turn on the radio to give me something else to think about but can’t help but thinking that there I am driving away, that I have a job that means so much to me that I feel bad about needing to drive away.
Woke up cotton-mouthed but not hung over and felt pretty good before I rolled over and realized I was lying next to K. The memories rushed back to me forcefully all at once and my mood sank into self-disgust. I got out of bed and saw that I was naked. I found condom wrappers in the wastebasket just I imagined they would be. Then I walked into the bathroom and tried to think of what to say but before I could think of anything the phone rang. I guess you could say I caught a break. It was B. He wanted to see if I wanted to grab coffee. We agreed to meet in a half hour. The rest of it shouldn’t have been so easy but it always is. Even walked her to the subway and bit her lip as we kissed before I turned away.
My choice to pick up the phone is my choice to throw everything away. It is a choice to challenge the place where I find myself, the only way I can think of to convince myself that it means nothing, that this place means nothing. Because it means nothing to me, it is still within my power to walk away. Calling him is how I walk away. I call him and he doesn’t answer so I keep calling him until he does and I tell him to come over and then I hang up and wait. I don’t straighten up or put on makeup. Maybe I clean up some of Lucy’s things, though I doubt Billy cares if the house is messy. Sometimes in the summer I go outside and smoke a cigarette but in November it’s too cold to go out for a smoke. The second time he came over he brought me flowers. I told him if he ever brought me flowers again it was over.
Just tell me you came in her mouth, B says when I join him at the café. I tell him I doubt it. What do you mean you doubt it? he says. I tell him I don’t remember what we did. Well you might as well say no, he says. Trust me. It’s not the sort of thing you easily forget. To change the subject I ask B how things are going with him, which always works because this is what B enjoys talking about most. Like most people B loves to speak of the things that prove he is succeeding in life. I’ve heard his stories many times since I met him, but even still I can’t say I know him well. What I know of B is exactly what he wants me to know of him. First there were the tales of his critic days and then his nihilist days when he’d criticize me for reading the paper. Now there are his tales of law school. These days B speaks with his hands and is excited about everything. He tells me about some OpEd he read in the Times, a law article he was working on concerning intellectual property rights, the girl he slept with the previous night, the conversation he had with some hot shot lawyer at the Oyster Bar and his dream to become a diplomat one day. His excitement makes me believe that this cycle of change has been good for him, not because he is better or worse off than where he started, but because change proves he has evolved and evolution proves that he is alive, that he is leading an active life. Seeing him like this makes me wonder what he thinks of me. It makes me wonder if it occurs to him that over the two years we’ve known each other I have been saying the same things, if to him this means I haven’t evolved. I wonder if people who have evolved need people who haven’t evolved because as in so many things in life a certain amount of balance is often required. But I don’t think about this any further after I finish my coffee and walk away. I think about how I am sick of people who don’t know a thing about my life asking me if I came in a girl’s mouth and I think about how much I miss E, even though I know I shouldn’t miss him. The only thing I know for certain is that I’m done with B. I want to be done with thinking about evolution too, but I don’t know how to stop. I don’t know how to stop talking to myself or why talking to myself always makes things seem worse when the idea is that talking things out will facilitate understanding and should potentially make things better.
The farther I drive the easier driving gets. The idea of going home grows easier for me to accept. It grows easier for me to find the positive things in a disgraceful situation, to think of how it will be nice to spend a quiet day at home being looked after by my wife. I begin to think that it will be pleasant to spend a day away from the world and the man the world has forced me to become and concern myself only with what I understand to be love surrounded by those I claim to love. I think about how love is the worst thing that ever happens to a man because it is the best thing. But it is the worst thing, because it is an awful thing for a man to have to admit that he has found what he thinks will become his all time best. Even if this thing is truly what he does best, because admitting you have stumbled across what it is you do best forces you to find the courage to dismiss all the millions of other things you have ever contemplated and concentrate only on what it is you do best. Lesser men dismiss love by saying it is a confusing thing but I don’t buy that. I say love is hell. Everybody goes through hell. If you want to get to heaven you got to go to hell.
Even still I don’t know how to begin or if anyone ever begins anything. I don’t know if the act of beginning is something that anyone can ever claim to do, if saying now I will begin or the time has come for me to begin is anything other than a way to retrospectively paraphrase time. The idea behind a claim to a beginning will always be a false one because claiming that you knew where you stood in the beginning means that you are speaking from the view point of gained experience that is only possible to grasp at the end of things. So maybe the only way to actually begin is to speak of the end. This is all I have to offer, what I so eagerly wish to explain to you. All I have are endings, facts and recollections that mean little now that they have passed. My ending is the only way I can think of to offer a way into the mess that has become all of this. Cursory statements such as with E gone there is no reason for me to continue living the way I have been living. Without E there is less motivation to engage myself with the outside world. There is less motivation to do cocaine. Without E there is more reason for me to need a name.
Everything changes when Elizabeth opens the door. Everything changes when I see her. Before in my truck, on my way over there, I always have doubts. On my way over there the thought occurs to me that maybe what I am doing is wrong. But once I see her I forget this thought. Once I see her I get caught up with seeing her and don’t think about anything else but her, about being with her. Seeing her makes my head feel light; the weight of my body is no longer heavy. I take her into my arms and inhale her scent and hold it deep within my lungs. I feel her fingers in my calloused hands. Then she closes the door and I follow her upstairs to the bedroom and then she closes that door.
Meet the man alone tonight and thought of E. I thought of all the clever things E used to say to the man that I didn’t have to say. I was alone at a bar when I called him. I think it was about 11. He called me an hour later. I walked a block away from the bar and got into his car. Then I bought the stuff and he dropped me off a block away. I went back to the bar and did most of it. I thought of E while I was doing it but it wasn’t the same because E wasn’t there. I felt guilty that I was out and not home writing. At the end of the night I heard myself saying never again, saying I was finished with drugs that this was the last time, a thing I’ve told myself so many times before but without E there is less reason to contradict myself. There is less of a reason to go back to where I don’t want to be. It got late so I gave the last bag to some girl in line for the bathroom behind me and then I walked away.
They tell me there was a truck pulled up out front that I probably didn’t notice. They tell me that certain ideas entered my head once I saw the truck but I don’t remember any ideas entering my head. I barely remember pulling up. My headache was pounding too hard for me to remember much. It was pounding too much for me to think of anything other than lying down and maybe taking a cold shower. All I remember is the pounding. I remember being glad to get off the road and feeling so lousy. I hoped that I hadn’t caused any accidents; it was that bad. Then I opened the door and walked inside and then I walked upstairs to the bedroom and then I opened the bedroom door.
There is loaded pistol sitting in the drawer you told me to tell them about. There is nothing else in the drawer. No answers, only bullets. Stories aren’t about happy endings, you said. They’re about evoking tragedy, about tricking the reader into feeling happy about tragedy. The idea is as long as that ain’t me. I get that. I get the conundrum of self-examination that can only come through false self-reassurance – the what if that could be me argument. But isn’t the question really more about wasting time? Consider that everything here I have written for you. The question then becomes in writing for you have I wasted my time and consequently your time because in a sense you asked me to waste it because you asked me to write about what happens when people I don’t know a thing about all open the same door.
There was a scuffle. I think I remember a scuffle. I remember it killing me. A shouting match and then a punch to the face. All I had on was my underwear. I didn’t know Tommy kept a gun in his drawer. I didn’t know that for who knows how many years I had been sleeping in the same room as a gun.
On my way home some guy, I’ll call him G, comes up to me. He’s wearing a fedora and mentions some young guys he saw on CSPAN I remind him of. I tell him I don’t give a damn about who I remind him of. Then he puts his hand on my shoulder so I shrug it off and tell him to fuck himself. He laughs and steps back. As I walk away he calls out after me. The light is energy and energy is the light, he says. It took me forty years to figure that out. Don’t make the same mistake. I don’t know what he means by this, but I think he’s wrong. I don’t know why I think this. I just wish people would stop telling me things. I wish people would stop telling me the way I’ve been living is wrong. I wish people would stop telling me things that make me want to walk away.
He punched me harder than I thought was possible to punch a man. He punched me so hard my heart fell out, so hard the pain I felt made me feel embarrassed. That’s the only way to describe it. Embarrassment. I guess I should have known what was coming, what to expect from all of this and her, but even still none of what I knew I should have anticipated kept me from feeling like a jerk. I love both of you, she said. I think I heard her say she loved both of us the same but that didn’t make me feel any better or less embarrassed. It made me feel worse and maybe ashamed. Hearing her say that only made me feel like a fool and fight that bastard harder though I knew that there was no legitimate reason to be fighting him. Both of us knew this. His expression was a mirror of my own. I knew that when it was over the reason behind all of our fighting wouldn’t mean a thing because as soon as the fight started I knew that life as I knew it was over.
In the distance a shot rang out. Only then did I realize I was shooting the gun, that I was shooting them and everything. I blew apart the mirror and then I shot myself. I needed for everything around me to stop so I shot it. Because I was sick of talking and didn’t know how else to make it stop. Because I didn’t know how else to say I love you. Understand that I only say this because I love you. Because I don’t know how to talk about love. I only know about talking about saying it. In a dark room there is always a door. There may not be a window but you can typically count on there being a door. You can count on the fact that your act of coming here most likely involved a door, that regardless if you acknowledge that this is a way into all of this or a way out, there remains the option of the door. There remains the option of whatever you consider to be the door.
New Years Eve. E shows up unexpectedly. I have plans but cancel them. We drive to some girl’s place he knows, somewhere far out in Brooklyn. Once we’re inside he pulls out his bag and dices it out.
I waited a moment before I put the gun in my mouth. I didn’t cry. I just waited. I didn’t think about how my world had come to this. I only wondered why I wasn’t crying – why after all that had happened nothing had caused me to cry. I thought that maybe that was the lesson to be learned from all of this. I thought about what it means to come to a point in life where you realize that there is nothing around you that makes you cry – not that there is nothing worth crying about (there are always too many things) – but just that you are no longer capable of the actual act of crying and that in the face of death such inabilities mean nothing.
We pass the stuff back and forth and have our fun. First we speak of old times and then E asks me what I’ve been doing since he left. Are you still writing, he asks, so I tell that I am. Then he asks me what I am writing about. I’m writing a story about trying to write a melodrama but being unable to do so, I say. That sounds deep, he says. Does it? I say. Here, he says, have another line. You could definitely use one. Then I take the line and ask him what he’s been up to since he left, but he doesn’t go into things. He lights a cigarette and looks away from me back towards his girl across the room.
Even though I want to care, I don’t really want to care. Even though I know that I should care, I find it difficult to care. I find it a challenge to care about bullets and all this death.
After awhile I realize I am alone again. I may have dozed off. Maybe I just stopped paying attention to what was going on around me. Somewhere down the hallway I hear E and his girl. Through the window I see that it is already starting to get light outside. I stand up and walk out the door and let it slam behind me because I want it to.
There doesn’t have to be blood on the walls for things to come to this. That was the last thought that entered my mind before I pulled the trigger. It was the best and most hopeful though that I have ever entertained, one I knew additional thoughts could never live up to.
Outside the sky is gray and full of clouds. The air is cold, but feels moist. It is raining slightly. No one is around but me. The streets of Brooklyn have never seemed so silent. I pick up my pace and it feels good to breathe deep. It feels good to be awake and out so early. For the first time in awhile it feels good to be alone.
I pulled the trigger because I didn’t want to have to deal with feeling inadequate. I pulled the trigger because I found it impossible to believe that everything could be fine again. I found it impossible to keep believing in the lies I tried to tell myself. Because when you have a gun in your hand it is impossible for you to know how things will turn out for sure.
Then all around me the morning explodes into sounds. All the incarnations of love I’m not experiencing. My former tranquillity is lost but I don’t miss it. I can’t find it in myself to go back underground so instead I opt to walk home. The tangled streets lead me to the East River, which glistens under the morning grayness. The surface becomes a confusion of spheres with every drop of rain.
This is what I need both of you to hear if there is to be an end to this. I need you to hear this because for me this is the end. You will both go on existing but my existence is over. I don’t care which one of you wins. I’m sick of picking sides because there’s no point in picking sides. Shooting is more responsible. There’s no point in shooting anyone but myself.
I watch the reverberations in the water form bubbles that rise towards me. Bubble after bubble floating aimlessly in a world it cares little for. Just trying to find its own way home away from the world. Insulated by its own indifference. I identify with the bubbles because there are many factors we have in common. I become one with the bubbles and imagine floating away with them into the sky. Then I forget which way is up or down and that’s the end of this.
I shoot myself because both of you have been here forever but I haven’t been here forever. Some days I trick myself into believing we are the same, but today I know we are not the same.
I float away in solidarity with the bubbles content to be indifferent, my eyes barely open now, just feeling my way through the streets without actually feeling them. Without actually seeing them. Everything I hoped to find here, everything I hoped to see first becomes liquid and then fades to black. Because there are never any answers, only bullets. I let the bubbles become my bullet.
