Imagine falling. Not just down, but into an endless pit.
Maybe it’s despair. Maybe it’s just gravity.
Hands reach for you. Hand after hand. Grasping. Tugging. Pulling. Voices scream your name, begging you to stay. But you are already dead inside. You are a corpse in the making, limp and cold.
"Please let me fall," I whisper.
It’s so quiet it might not even be heard. It’s too much of a burden for others to carry, the weight of my surrender. So they save me. They pull me back up. Back to the misery. Back to the noise.
Curse the good. Curse the kind. Their blessings smell like selfish piety. I choke on them.
I vomit words mixed with blood, but I see no relief in the insolence of the bonds I’ve torn. I am not human. I am a virus. I infect everyone who tries to hold this shell. I spread insanity. I spread madness. Who in their right mind would cherish this burden? Who would want to carry the weight of black despair?
I am not a person. I am sin in flesh. A demon bound by moral law.
I am bored.
I am lonely.
I am hungry.
What is more perverse than hope?
Does it not feed our wild curiosity? Is it not just gambling?
Can you honestly say you’ve never deceived someone with a little "encouragement"? You tell them they can achieve something, knowing full well they’ll fail. You set them up for a fall.
Maybe it’s small. Asking a pretty girl on a date.
Did you really think she’d say yes? Or was it just a long shot? Haphazard. Reckless. Why do we do it?
We live to die. But we don’t die to live.
Doesn’t that feel...contradictory?
We do everything to cheat death. We avoid bad habits. We eat right. We exercise. We take our pills. We stay social. And yet, we careen down the track toward that same, inevitable, mundane end: a hospice bed, alone, forgotten.
Why?
What’s the point of dying for nothing?
What’s the point of accomplishing nothing?
Even if you are "accomplished," your death is unremarkable. People might remember your name for a while, but eventually, you are erased. Like everyone else. Only a few achieve true immortality. A second life.
The rest of us are just dust waiting to settle.
**************
Deception. Confusion. I wear them like a second skin.
I am misunderstanding.
People want a label, a neat little package to tuck away in a dusty drawer. Boy? Girl? Antifa? MAGA? White? Minority? Which box fits? Try it. See if you can pin me down. Wouldn’t you like to know? What a curious little scamp, aren’t you? Pull up a chair. Let me spin you a yarn that might just illuminate the abyss we’re standing in. But don’t lose the forest for the trees. The greatest magicians are liars. Look at the light, not the dark. The truth isn’t hiding in the creeping shadows between the lines...it’s screaming in the glare. Rip out the spine of falsehoods from your so-called bible of truth. Let’s begin.
My hometown was a bubble. An insulated, suffocating little sphere. And every summer, the world outside would breach the walls, flooded with hordes of retards.
It was a little Victorian Cape Town perched on a man-made island, severed from the mainland by a canal dug during the Second World War. A place askew in time. Streets lined with trees older than the town itself; twisted, gnarled limbs that loomed overhead, reaching down to grab you by the throat. You could watch the sunset bleed into the sunrise.
Old train tracks led away from the abandoned station- now a slightly-modern bus terminal -and vanished into the marshland before reemerging at the canal. Rusting rails hung precariously over the edge, always dragging me back to that winter day: my father, drunk and negligent as ever, failing to see me careen down the bridge’s snowy slopes. I bailed into the hard earth, tumbling for what felt like an eternity, watching my small board spin into the dark, slicked ice and rocks below.
I have always been afraid of heights.
But isn’t it natural? To avoid what humans were not meant for. The sky. The sea. What a dubious task one undertakes. What peril one faces, and for what? Adrenaline? Excitement? Are you stupid, or were you just born that way?
Fucking stupid.
Humans have this penchant for danger, as if Death were some excitable friend, some jovial companion. Death grins while you exchange hours of your life for so-called thrills. Death laughs while you die. You chase so-called adventure, but you’re just being selfish and egotistical. You want to do what others do to be cool. To be known. To be someone.
You are the same as everyone else.
Jumping out of a plane doesn’t make you a hero. Climbing a mountain doesn’t make you a god. It makes you an idiot.
Risking your own life is meaningless. Pointless. Irrelevant. When you die, you become information fodder: data. Sometimes a warning. Sometimes a joke. Mostly, you do not matter. Just like every person who died in a bed, your life came to a single, finite point.
You will not be immortal.
You will be forgotten.
I won’t.
**************
The town had a rhythm: quiet, then loud, then quiet again. I hated it.
"Nothing happens here," I’d tell myself. The silence wasn’t peace; it was a held breath, waiting for something to break.
I didn’t know yet that I was the crack in the glass.
We arrived after The Event. I’ll get to that. It’s in the past, but it’s still bleeding.
Our house was a Victorian corpse. It had been patched up by amateurs who thought a fresh coat of paint covered the rot. The floors slanted like a drunkard’s stance. The windows didn’t sit right in their frames, rattling in the wind. There was a concrete box tacked onto the back: it was a room that felt less like architecture and more like a tomb. Both bathrooms downstairs were just shells, waiting for fixtures that would never come. The yard wasn’t land; it was an open wound of weeds and debris.
We spent weeks in a hotel. Three walls were unbearable. My family, cramped together, was suffocating. I had already mourned the loss of our spacious home up north, where there was distance between us, where I could disappear into the corners. Here, there was nowhere to hide. We were trapped until we dug our way out of the previous owners’ lives.
Seven dumpsters of trash. That was the inventory of a life discarded. Abandoned clothes. Dead electronics. Empty bottles, crushed beer cans. Needles, glinting in the dirt like tiny, silver teeth. And so much underwear. Women’s underwear, tangled and stained, as if they’d been ripped off in a hurry.
"Fucking hippies," my father spat, tossing another armful onto the growing pile.
Hippies. I pictured the movies: flower crowns, giggling, high on weed, preaching freedom. I looked at the mountain of filth and wondered if this was the price of that freedom. Living in the shit you created.
Not that I’m any different, I thought, bending down to pick up a piece of trash.
Home.
What a joke. A farce. A ruse. A cue for a madman’s monologue.
I had never felt at home. Especially not with these people.
My father worked, drank, and painted. He had that stupid mustache, and he was scrawny, trying too hard. His paintings were trite. Amateur nudes, snakes, roses...the stereotypical Harley-Davidson trash art that nobody wanted to hang on their wall. He’d been in a biker gang, maybe, or just liked the idea of it. He liked to pretend he mattered, that he had weight. But in his drunken stupors, he’d confess his uselessness. He was a tag-along. A mule. A scapegoat. He knew it. And he took it out on us.
My mother...I barely knew her. She did the housework. She cooked. She cleaned until her hands were raw. She was always thin, pale, though she ate enough. Maybe she had an eating disorder. I would have found that darkly funny, if I hadn’t been too tired to care. Otherwise, she read. Sometimes she gardened. Mostly she talked on the phone, her voice soft, her eyes distant.
She only insisted on being close to me when we were in public. It was as if she had a repressed trauma of being abandoned, even though I knew what her parents were really like. She treated me like an infant: emotionally and mentally. Not physically. I wasn’t swaddled; I was contained. I never felt loved. I felt owned. Control was the verb of her life. Once my sister was born, I ceased to exist. I was just furniture now.
Now, looking down at their bloody, lifeless faces, the only regret I had was that they wouldn’t get to see how much I did matter.
