pure angst
return of old fantasies, long-dormant. imagine graphic injuries done to specific people, for the first time since my sister was an infant. back then I wondered what it meant that I should see so often in my mind’s eye her screaming head reduced to bloody rubble by a wall; now I know that these dead customers, their frozen gapes and chair-impaled eye-sockets, don’t mean a thing, really. at least not in the way you’d think.
fantasy of abdication—ultimate fantasy. not a death, but a leaving-intact of my body and mind (which I have often been told were promising) in the care of another, that they might find some profitable end even as I desert their unhappy shores forever. let someone else jangle these limbs for a few years; all I want now is rest. the bitterness in this is undeniable—You try being me and see how easy it is!—but the hope is stronger—You try being me, please, I’m all out of ideas.
I think about my first-grade class, I suppose because that’s where I would have been around the time of my sister’s birth. there is a girl about whom I remember very little except her unfortunate white-trashy name and her merciless bullying; she killed herself (my mom tells me, much later, a little too happy) sometime during her teenage years. and there is a boy who was the teacher’s pet until I showed up and started doing everything better than him; I’m pretty sure he’s still alive, though in what state I couldn’t say.
I think about the third-grade class I entered the next year; but I wasn’t there long before we moved again, and I struggle to remember anyone at all. I think there was a tall happy boy named Bill, someone I wanted to be like. I don’t think I succeeded.
and so began my long training for comethood, twelve or thirteen years of the most thoroughgoing aloneness the human soul has devised for itself. from time to time, a friend, a boy or a girl, jokes and games with fingertips; but nothing of intimacy, nothing of love, nothing growing, no-one there.
all of which is to explain how I ended up here now, all glass-cased and half-dead and sad-eyed as an octopus. only I cannot quite understand how I came to be so weak in my unfreedom.
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