28
May
Black Because It Matches.
22 years, 6 weeks and 3 days into the life of you-know-who and I’m about ready to give it all up. I have headaches every day, 7 days a week. It used to be because of little, specific things: dog shit on my doorstep, lines at the ATM, jaywalking violations. A garbage truck gets a flat beside my window, a power outage screws up my hard drive.
Nowadays it’s everything. Everything.
Two seconds after I wake up, it’s pounding away like a stripper at a bachelor party. White spots behind my eyes like solar flares. Deep bass in my ear canals. A Rick Astley video in high-speed reverse.
***
There are a million and six ways to kill yourself, or so I’ve read. About half of them are gay attempts at looking for sympathy or, even worse, ways to look reckless and edgy. If you’ve ever had a friend who showed you scars on their wrists saying, “Nobody cared” or “I used to like hurting myself,” you know the kind of retard I’m talking about. Idiots starved to death for attention. It’d be funny if there weren’t so many of them.
I always answer, “You should’ve cut deeper and diagonally, then held your wrists in a basin of warm water so your blood wouldn’t clot.”
And they always just stare back at me blankly, as if the idea of killing themselves had never actually crossed their minds.
***
I’d like to kill myself, one of these days.
But the thought of one of those numbfucks standing around talking about me afterwards makes that impossible:
“Did you hear about that guy? He finally went and did it. He was always treating us like we were dirt, but it turned out he was all screwed up inside too.”
“Yeah. He was just like us, but he denied it. All this time, he denied it.”
Whispering behind wafts of smoke in some trendy new club, wearing t-shirts that read, “I wear black because it matches my soul.”
I think about it some more, and the stripper pounds harder. The white spots flare. Heavy thuds reverberate in my skull.
Those fucking posers.
***
I’d like to kill myself, one of these days.
In an effort to remove myself from this Shit we call Life. (Or Life we call Shit, depending on your previous half-empty/half-full response.) But there are question marks all over this next paragraph, and I need to be certain.
Will it actually work? Will the trademark white light envelop me in its copyright-infringed radiance? Will someone pull me away suddenly, jerk me back to Shit/Life, belly-up in a wading pool of red? And if no one comes, will I then go on to Anti-Shit/Anti-Life? And more importantly, will the stripper stop pounding? Will Rick Astley be silenced?
Too many question marks. And I need to be certain.
***
22 years, 6 weeks and 4 days, and there’s no end in sight. I wake up chained to the bachelor party, the pounding stripper, the white hot solar flares, the deep, deep bass thuds. I slap my hands to my face, but there’s no blocking out what’s already inside.
***
22 years, 6 weeks and 5 days, and I know the truth: There would be fewer question marks if I actually tried it.