Monday, October 20, 2008

The Last Year of Life

Day 24. Couch. 7:04PM
Another abrupt awakening. I put myself into a coma with a couple gulps of NyQuil when I woke up this morning. Dread filling the entire expanse of my head now. Complete, like when you are a lost child at the county fair and the lights are bright and the people are laughing maniacally and you are shaking just wanting to see your mother again. You'll never do anything bad again. Unbridled panic. Sweat soaked through my thin shirt, labored breaths. Am I alive? What am I doing here? Why am I here right now? Why am I alone? I can’t shake the feeling of fleeing. Getting the fuck out. Getting out. Getting the fuck out of this place. Off of this couch. Out of this dank apartment. Getting out of this exact room, the frozen stone, at this exact time. Where could I go? Where would I go? I would like to go to the beach and drink icy beer, die there and be gently washed out to sea- my body torn apart and eaten by tiny crabs; I would like to go to the city and feel small, die in a dumpster and be compacted into a small cube. No, not at either of those places.
I wanted to go to a hotel, a hotel in a small town. I wanted to go to a shit hotel and buy a large amount of some drug, one that I have never tried before. I wanted to drive to the hotel with beer my hand, slugging it down casually as I passed the other motorists. It would have to be in a shitty town, one that I could feel better than; a place like the place where I grew up. I got out of there as soon as I could so I could feel better than it. Like I was victorious and I didn’t let it beat me like it beat everyone else. I wanted to feel like it didn’t suck me into its vapidity like it sucked everyone else in; They became stale parents going to elementary school sporting contests on cold afternoons, and they all got married to each other, and they all got jobs working with children because the children keep the town from sinking into the surrounding lakes. Everyone stayed but I didn’t stay, I went somewhere else. I got out. I didn’t get out. I just changed the scenery. I got a shitty job that I hate with people that smell terrible and I smell terrible now, too. I am just like everyone else, only I am here and they are there. I reek worse than all of them. I am lonely. I am unsure how it got like this. I am unsure how I could undo the things that I have done with the definitively concise time I have left. Like disbanding my own interests in favor of this city. I was supposed to propose to the girl that I worked in the amusement park with, the girl that loves me. On the day that I moved, we had red eyes from crying together in the bright sunlight.
The town I wanted to go to now would have to have been a shitty one that I could feel better than, and I would have done this drug that I never did before. And I wanted to turn off my cellular phone and leave it in the room where I am writing this right now. I wanted to toss it into the toilet and vomit all over it. I wanted no one to know where I was except for a girl that I don’t know who it could be right now, not the girl who I left who loves me, but a girl, a girl who might understand me, would be down for this sort of thing. I would ask her to come with me, and we would take the drugs together and jump on the bed in the room of the hotel in the shitty town that I’ve never been to. We would sleep curled in each other, two crescent moons. I watched Sunday afternoon infomercials until it was time to go to sleep because I have work in the morning.

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