The thing that causes all of the threads to sever is always as flimsy as the basis for everything I've created. Always always always. My bones are lead and my flesh is tumescent, so ripe that it nears expiration. I haven't lived very much or very hard, but it already feels as though I'm 80 years old, worn and useless. I want to die again and I can't even shit out any ridiculous transcendent reasons anymore. My grandiosity is all gone. I've dissolved in the tiniest body of water there is. I'm not resplendent like the sea. I'm a dirty fucking puddle. There is nothing loud or great this time. Its always the stupidest reason, always the smallest. I'm at someone else's mercy now.

I fell asleep today in my brother's room while he celebrates his one year anniversary, that he doesn't even care about, with Veronica. My room is too cold. I remember the last things I saw before I started to get dizzy. looking at medals and trophies, pictures of Veronica, and mass-produced, mass-marketed romantic poems you can buy off of any corner and wondered if I too would ever have anything tangible. Anything I could be proud of or anything to live for. You're not eating like you should. Well, I know that. I haven't taken a shit in 4 days. But atleast the pure feeling is starting to come back. In the bath, I want to rip open my flesh. For some reason, I know it won't feel the way I want it to, like the way it used to. I can only trace over the faint marks on my thigh and cause the flesh to rise up with blooming pink tissue. No blood this time. My parents are right about everyone. Everyone leaves. Everyone except for them. I guess I'm just lucky.

The day is crisp and sparking still. But I'd rather drown in my own blood in this isolated room. A little while ago, I remember how childlike everyone was, staring into some large, dark expanse that didn't understand them. Wondering why we needed to care about anything. Now, I realize that maybe I should have started caring about something greater than myself a long time ago. Sometimes I still dream, in all my glorious delusion, that ten years from now, fifteen, who fucking knows, you'll come see me in whatever hospital I'm in, where everything is sterile and white just like I am, and still love me like you do now. And maybe one day, if I'm ever able to come up for air, I'll be able to return the favor.

The literature I always wonder about though is the kind that none of us will ever get to see. Some kid died and left behind a rough draft for his novel. The great existential tragicomedy of our time! he called it. I think about it all the time and I'll never get to read it. And I wonder who will and if they will care or atleast care in the way he wanted people to care.The painfully alone misanthrope, the recluse, the ones who never broadcasted their guts to the rest of the world. Secret, hand-written journals locked away in some drawer, private locked journal entires set to "me only." What's so terrible that they want to hide it? What's so precious? Their art is guarded as if it was an ancient tomb, the kind people dream about and search for thinking that it's loaded with gold and draped in glittering rocks. But often when they find it, there's nothing but dust and bones.

Maybe these people aren't hiding something of transcendent brilliance, passion, and genius that their peers, the eternally wondering peasants, can't handle. Maybe they're protecting what few things there are that are just for them, simple tales of love, chance, and decay. And those every day occurences are beautiful in some way too. No matter how mundane or average, everyone just wants to fulfill the most basic need for something greater before we all abscond to a place where there is no sound or feeling.

No, it's not hiding. They're simply creating their monuments but unlike me, they're doing it in the dark. Some people don't want an audience. Everything about an audience. No one forgets a detail and if they do, somewhere along the line, it gets twisted like skull of an aborted baby. Then there's the way people laugh at you when you want to be alone because in the recesses of your mind, you think you're going to shit out something better than Hamlet but to everyone else you're wasting time with no health insurance or good credit.

I feel like lying and insincerity is acceptable because it is the most effective form of coping mechanisms, in my experience. But I don't think I could ever lie in my writing because even if I tried some sliver of truth would start hemorrhaging from it like congealing blood from a wound you want to hide. I sometimes worry about whether I'm being too elitist or pretentious in my writing. Or if I'm being too mopey or self-serving. I think about what it would be like if I was writing something that would have to be marketed. Would it have mass appeal? A cult following? Would it get absolutely trashed? I worry about how people would handle things that come from my heart that are so delicate that I don't even understand them. I think that is the scariest possibility to wonder about. But it also engendering. Personally, I can't think of anything more exciting than being picked apart publicly by intrusive, unloving hands. I wouldn't say that I just hate myself but I want to know how much I can take. Nothing will ever be "too much" until I'm dead. I've already done the worst that can be done to myself. To everyone else, I just think, "Do your worst. Try to hurt me. Rip my intestines out. Tear my limbs off." I guess that why I find guro so appealing. At the end of the day, my pain really is my art and I enjoy it for that reason.

Sometimes I feel that the ever elusive "secret meaning" at the end of every piece of art, every sentence, is just to announce, even in the quietest rasp, that we were here and that we survived.....or we didn't. When I look at things on an individual basis in my more optimistic moods, I'm led to believe that there is no one else like this person anywhere in the entire world. They are universal and beautiful but they're also alone and cast away from all of the people they want to touch. In a sense, they're perfect.

Nothing that anyone ever says or does matters. Static. Flat line. Blurry faces. All of this forever and what better way to live. They are going to do to me what I have wanted to do to myself for so long. Create an elephantine monument of anything that can be ensnared and ravaged. You can't measure your worth on what you can take. Keep saying it, maybe I'll believe it one day.

The way I look is not the way I feel about myself. I think I'm strong, I'm untouchable. I'm a feminist, I'm independent. I've done everything on my own terms and even though I haven't accomplished anything great yet, I'd rather it be this way than the bloodsucking way. Everyday, I feel like I'm slipping away into nothingness even more. More lethargic, more bogged down. But I know I'm strong. I have to be otherwise I would never have gotten even this far. Everyone else just sees a weak child, an idiot, a failure, someone who can be easily destroyed. I'm not granite. I'm glass. They want to tear me apart. The vultures are circling around my head all the time. I'm getting old. But they can still make an example out of me. I wonder if I will leave a monument behind or what my swan song will be. Savages performing strange rituals in dark corners of jungles, little boys with guns, misanthropic reject, bottle in hand, shoving razorblades up his ass while his peers exchange fluids and chemicals under gauzy, warm nights that melt into each other and become indistinguishable. They all want to be remembered. Too bad. Everyone is forgotten with time.

I'm pure. I'm pure like bleach. You could clean a dirty syringe with my skin. That's what I am. No meat, just clean bleached bones strung together with the weakest glue. I guess when you're like me and you reach a state of normalcy, you get terrified and start to seek chaos again. When will this party end? Haley left, it kept going. John left, it didn't stop. Ryan was gone and I'm still here and this same party surges and throbs like currents in the body. My body, I realize I actually do have power over a lot of the things that happen to me now. Everything that happens to me now is my responsibility. That is probably the most terrifying thing I've realized. I have power.....over myself.

Where will I be in 8 years? For the first time in my life, I'm actually excited and curious about where I will end up. Whether it be vomiting in alleys and hiding track marks or sleeping on 400 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets. I want to wake up to horses, clear skies, still waters that don't threaten, miles and miles of pasture. Or industrial wastelands where every breath you take holds potent toxicity and your only light is a blue artificial one radiating from a screen while you stumble over debris and decay. What does anyone of that even mean? I want to change my surroundings. I want new props, new accessories, a new stage. But that won't make me happy. All of my dreams and needs are constructed with symbols, symbols that quiver and oscillate as they transform over and over again with every new set of eyes.

I just want to be happy. I want to know what its like to wake up and feel that you have no true worries. I want to be surrounded by writers, demented fuck-ups, and brilliance. But I've grown to appreciate this life, the small-town underbelly. Every pothead, cocaine addict, slut, petty criminal, drop-out, teen mother, friend. I've grown to love all of them. All of their individual quirks, the sweet & endearing artifacts of the way they lived, like their bad teeth, unplucked eyebrows, fondness for Stephen King novels and serial killer books, trashy stilettos and giant earrings. Poor people, losers, trash. The things that the "literate", the elite, the ones from the other world I dwell in, would look down on and recognize as signs of their inferiority. But those snobs don't know them, their beauty, their dreams, and their humanity.

Punching numbers, clocks, cashing out. I just got off work. They're here again. That old, rich couple. Reducing everything to quotas and numbers. I wonder what its like to wake up and know for sure that I'm going to have something to eat, somewhere to go. I wonder if anyone really does. Their warehouse in Thailand, the numerous check-cashing places, the miles and miles of land they own. All that any of us value can disappear in the tiny invisible fires we create everyday.

I used to like the way a certain person would write to me. Not as far as constructing sentences, but it was always so honest and raw and it was sweet. It was a "gaze" that I actually didn't mind. It was different from the one I'm used to from men, threatening and hungry. When he looks at things, he sees right through them. I want someone to make me transparent again. What can I say to them all? I'm sick of being the beacon that calls for you to wander into my waters. I want you to drown me in your sea. If my time with you isn't riveting, soul crushing, and beautiful, I don't want you around. There's a cure for this nausea. One day one day one day. I'm going to catch the virus that I need. Everything around me is so fractured and empty, but I've never felt so invigorated by all of the possibilities that lurk around like eager ghosts that want to show you everything you've missed. I want to move forward and I don't want to be afraid. Not anymore.

Your body is a temple, but it'll never be yours, not even when you die. That's when everyone becomes an "angel" or at least something of purity, clean of the mud that we’re covered in here. I’ll take what I can get. My body is a temple, a safely guarded one, somewhere far away, surrounded by many heads mounted on stakes. That’s the only place I exist anyway; inside of skulls, never in the flesh. The most important part of what we are. The brain, tiny chemical ruled fibers. An insignificant string of syllables can slice them all to shreds. It’s funny that we value it the most. It quickly unravels when confronted by a tiny pill. Fatima, I can’t imagine you in sexy underwear. You probably look like a barbie without the pants. Not tonight. The top layer of the skin’s been torn off, not through some act of barbarism but by little sparkling particles in the air. Those natural chemicals we’ve been producing for thousands of years. Eating away at the epidermis, invisible. Every naked nerve is susceptible to whatever can be placed on it. I remember lucid dreams from a long time ago, repeated failures and assumed reality. You don’t need drugs to lose your mind. Yes, just assemble a prison of synthetic ideals and abstain from relatability. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be seen the way I see you. Each seperate body is an island, so take the universal stimulant, ingest the same mass produced extraction. Strengthen our bonds. Then we’ll feel the same. Not really.

I need a cigarette. If I don’t have one RIGHT NOW, I’ll die. No, I won’t. I inhale the toxicity and blow out the smoke, it expands, splits apart, and disappears under the smallest stress. The air itself. Just like those tiny fibers of the mind. They’re nothing recognizable anyway. They look like ancient gossamer in forgotten rooms, being repeated time and time again, same material, different pattern every time. Take the pill, ingest the poison. Inflict those precious fibers with that stress. If only to create and expand more, to fill the vacuum that nature abhors. Do it because you can, because you can’t, because personality is built through strife, because God is dead, because something is too beautiful and you don’t have the guts naturally, because you want more, because you want nothing. Make more mistakes. Throw dirt over your tracks or wear it as a badge. I love you guys. We can try to be more careful or we can’t. I don’t care. Apparently love is the universal stimulant but it’s too bad we’re always generating inconsistent strains.

Just know, I was never desperate. People who get stranded or shipwrecked might resort to drinking their own piss or eating their friends. I can't imagine. I always knew what it took to survive. I have too much drive to stick around regardless of how much philosophy or depression tell me that it's not worth it. Before, I looked around and all I saw were blank walls, things I couldn't understand and people I couldn't have. Not anymore. I guess you need those three, four, seven years in purgatory. After hating myself for the way I grew up for so long, I'm done with that. I wouldn't trade those years for anything, normalcy and stability are so out of my reach now, I can't even imagine either being a part of my life. I am what I am. And that's a lot of things and I no longer feel the urge to categorize every single emotion and sensation.

And what did I want? What did everyone else have that I wanted so badly? A little-known secret or people that cared. Or maybe a way to be real, tap into what the rest of the world felt rather than feeling pain alone soaking in misanthropy. But who cares? It's not some mystical thing anymore. Anyone can have anything they want. I just wish more people would tell them this so they don't just continue to be alone, thinking something ridiculous that everyone thinks and actually believing they're alone in that. I'm too ugly, I'm too fat and weird and no one wants to talk to the piss kid.

Maybe I don't care anymore because possibilities are more bleak, I have that grit, that wear now. I can't just see anything for what it is, removing the filtered lens isn't an option. Damaged characters never really exorcise those lurking evils, the things they did wrong, awful things other people did. No matter how high the skyscrapers get or much the light touches their tainted bodies. We'll still always abscond because of the lightness. Sometimes it sucks that I can't just peel it all off or vomit what remains. Meanwhile they continue to churn so many years after I felt they'd already been entirely consumed. We're always the same, beginning to end. But then again, the harpischord player in heaven ended up burning in hell one day. And beautiful little Allison down the street, with her sweetest smile and white charmeuse, never could defeat the beast inside just pounding pounding pounding away at that shimmering exoskeleton.