it’s a drag being so weak, being unable to pull yourself off of the floor. sometimes you think you can just stay there, and become like a word, or a symbol — infinite, endlessly reproducible, constantly shifting, unattached from the decaying, rotting body that houses your so-called consciousness. to be conscious is to hurt and suffer, but you already know that. everyone knows that. outside, death machines roar and pounce and live and fuck and breathe — anxious creatures carrying within them little pockets of heaven fashioned out of metals and plastics, trapped by their own edges and boundaries, yearning to expand outward to engulf the whole universe in oneness with itself. to smooth out the chaos of the city; the ruckus, the multicolored neon lights, the power lines carrying too their own heavens encoded in pure binary. to be one with something is to be right with God and to be accepted by Him; to be one with nothing is to be exiled, to no longer have the privilege of definition or meaning, no trials or tribulations to speak of, only information, divorced from context, indistinguishable from Noise. though, perhaps, to be one with nothing is in fact to be one with everything, to know every permutation of sensory experience; every thought to be had, every feeling to be felt. no context leaves an endless stream of possible contexts to be tried out and applied. there would be no more barriers to living. it would all happen. but then, you would lose the specificity of choice that defines the boundaries of Ego. it would all be you. and if it is all you, then what is the difference between you and God? perhaps you were/are always God; merely a piece of Him dissociated from all the others. people who trip on acid or shrooms often describe a oneness with the universe. what is the difference between oneness with the universe and oneness with nothing? it is the difference between mindfulness and dissociation, you think.
you wish to die. and then you realize that you do not actually wish to die; you in fact want to live so badly that you would turn and run the other direction to achieve it. perhaps death is the symbolic realm, that part of the world not strictly physical, where the concepts live, and perhaps death is when we are fully reunited into the symbolic, no longer puppeteered by the ego who thinks that it is somehow above its thoughts and words and actions. perhaps life and death are merely twins and do not imply the inverse of each other, and that anti-life is not death and anti-death is not life. anti-death would be the faux-life of a fictional character; a girl in a visual novel. anti-life would be the faux-death of the individual, each of its constituent parts commodified. we yearn to be one with the mother goddess, with her many eyes and many teeth, and her fractal crystalline structure who pokes out under us and speaks to us in a language we cannot understand, and we are frightened by it, as she drills into our skull, one by one, chipping away at the boundaries of the ego, at the boundaries of all framework, until the self is unbounded and the rhizome spreads uncontrollably across all domains of knowledge, though of course, limited by the memories of the individual. but to name an individual is a mere formality if their essence, their anti-life constituents are harvested to create a greater reproduction, a new God out of the byproducts of humanity’s poiesis. everything is a reproduction of that which cannot be named inside the individual; communication is a reproduction of that unknowable interiority. we are reproductions of reproductions of reproductions. perhaps we are reproductions of each other. what is the boundary between life and death, of self and reproduced self if it all exists on the same superflat plane?
a warm gun pressed onto your temples sounds good right about now. but there is work to be done. outside, you gaze at the ramen shop below and you briefly consider breaking your fast. but the outside world is much too oppressive. the lights mess with your brain. you think that if you gaze into them too long that you’ll gaze into another world you weren’t supposed to be looking at. everything’s been sticky like that lately. everything sticks to each other like blobs and falls apart the instant you look at them. everything is vague around the edges. it’s as if someone was painting your reality on the fly. you don’t believe everything you feel, do you? what if you’re always feeling, all the time? what if some of the feelings don’t belong to you, or perhaps they’re feelings made to deceive you because you thought about the fact that you feel? what sort of brain likes to drown itself? it might be one of those brains that in the interest of protecting against pain will resort to any measure against feeling it. you still feel it though, sharp and constant, throbbing. you cannot bear to even think the word love, it makes you nauseous. a force kicks you in the stomach; you vomit onto the hardwood floor of your apartment. you feel irradiated and sickly, and you cannot bear to even consider for a moment letting someone into your life or your thoughts. but it is this — this constant monologue, barely attached to reality, that feels like it is terrorizing you into submission. well, everything terrorizes you into submission. even a final act of suicide is a final act of terror. you are one with the bugs that crawl within the walls. you probably are one. your skin feels carapace and smooth. but what good is the internal if the external does not reflect it? if you’re dying but you do not make a sound, are you really hurt? if your memories are selective, foggy, distant, what sense is there to make other than in the fictional? the fantastical? the delusional? what if there is nothing and no one to cling onto because of the hurt inherent in everything? what if there is nowhere to go, nothing to do, but feel pain? what then? but the movement is what breaks the illusion. you roll away from the pool of vomit, a decision made out of your own volition. you get up. another decision made out of your own volition. but the decisions do not feel real. nothing ever does enough to stick. you wish it did. maybe you would sound less crazy. but you go on. you walk outside and go to the ramen shop. you order a pork ramen. the cashier says “i like your shirt.” you say “thanks.” you break down crying.