Thursday Evening

(The Mask Slides Off And This Is What Is Beneath)

Furiously, like a madman, I am hurtling my car at close to 80 up the road to the street on which I live to the cul-de-sac at the end with two abandoned and neglected basketball hoops. My tires screech to a stop on the pavement. A light snow has begun falling. I don’t know why I was driving like that. I simultaneously feel like a pressure cooker about to burst while having enough drugs (anxiety medication, psychiatrist perscribed, taken as needed) in my system to make me barely able to keep my eyes open, barely able to clench a fist around the wheel. I’m looking out of the windshield, at my lights hitting the house, at the snow falling in their glow. I wonder what the night sky would look like if there weren’t lights anymore. I had been thinking of that for the entire drive home. Okay, enough. I open the car door and the pool of blood I’ve been sitting in for the entire commute home, about knee high, pours out and trickles almost like a brook down the driveway. I stare at it blankly for a while. Then I ignore it. Stumbling up the driveway in the cold. On the front porch. I prepare my key to unlock the front door and see a house key with car keys attached already inside the lock. I can almost see, in the light fog from the snow, the words “abandon all hope ye who enter here” form as mist and then blow away. Using the keys already in the lock I open the door. Home. Inside, warm again. Glasses off so as to purposefully be seeing the world in low definition. Greetings given. To my room. Oh yes, oh yes, it’s injection day. But first, more drugs. This time I smoke. It takes the edge off of life. Everything is moving in slow motion, and my mind is foggy, scattered. I can barely think a cohesive sentence. But that, I think, is from exhaustion and not eating in close to 12 hours. It’s hard to tell what is actually happening and what isn’t. Although I know that all of it is actually happening, it feels like I am detached, a piece of me not there, but somewhere else. All of a sudden I am sitting with my pants down and the pen pressed to my upper thigh. Somewhere along the line I rubbed the area down with alcohol, as there is a ripped open packet next to me. Unlock. Press button. Slight pain, but it fades as I simply cease to pay attention because I am focused on listening for the sound of the click indicating that the injection is complete. Click. Click. All done. I remove the pen and see the syrienge. Okay, so it worked. But what if? What if? What if? What if it somehow didn’t? What if it somehow didn’t work even though I felt the sharp pain, momentarily, of the needle piercing my flesh? These thoughts burn my flesh as they pass through my mind. I don’t know. I guess it must have worked. I dispose of the materials and picture the night sky with no lights. I picture an empty expanse. Back laying on my still made bed, I close my eyes and listen to music and smoke some more. But I’m at the end of my supply, and I have been thinking for the past two weeks that I may need a tolerance break, so I plan to go cold turkey for a while once this runs out. Not to worry about, though. The song “Shellstar” by the band Deafheaven plays. I have my eyes closed. I can picture the song perfectly. I can see it moving through my head. In images and in motions. I don’t know how to explain it. I suspect it is some form of synesthesia, but I have never gotten this professionally confirmed. Even with my eyes open I can see, literally physically see, what I am seeing in my head, in reality. Not that it would even make a difference anyways. Whether every trait gets diagnosed by something or not, it still exists. I still experience reality in this precise manner. And I swear I can feel my spirit completely dissolving. My head has literally cracked open and my thoughts are bleeding out. In that moment I do not exist. I open my eyes. 7:02 PM. I suppose, unfortunately, that I do exist. Have to go outside again. So I get up, and don my boots, and winter coat (that I think makes me look like the final boss of the 2005 video game Shadow of the Colossus), and my hat. While I do this I think of some trivial workplace drama. Why do I even care at all? Outside. The dog might be with me, or I might just be seeing moving shadows and shapes in the darkness. My eyesight is poor. The sky is clouded. I cannot picture it as if there were no lights when the whole sky is tinged an ominous and somewhat sickening shade of orangey-yellow. This tinge genuinely disgusts me. I think about the fact that I have to eat dinner. I am, genuinely, disgusted by that fact. Why do I dislike eating so much? My hands are literally trembling from the hunger that has been literally painful all day (or from the cold, or from the baseline hand tremor that I always have, which is, I think, related to my neurological condition for which I need a injectable subcutaneous intervention, but I don’t know that for sure). Well, it doesn’t matter anyways. I have to do it whether I want to or not, so I will. But I truly do not want to. And while I eating I am overtaken, possessed really, by a gluttonous spirit, and then I am back in the same state that I was before and feel no different really. I feel so utterly exhausted in every dimension that I can feel my soul arriving somewhere, but not here. (That’s the song I am currently listening to, by Porcupine Tree, a great progressive rock song that is such an immersive soundscape and so densely yet precisely layered, always been a favorite, I used to listen to it on the school bus home, June 2017, when…) I silently curse myself as I remember that I have therapy this fine winter evening. I wish that once, just once in my life, I will be able to see the sky as it would have appeared to people, say, two and a half or three hundred years ago. I want to know what it might have looked like to the people who lived on this spot before that sight was to be gone forever, never to be seen again by generations later. Just once I want to feel as though I am in a time before the one that I currently exist in. Oh well. I get up, take the laptop that I have currently been typing this on in my hands, move towards my desk, and… and suddenly it is later, and I am very cold. The night sky is still sickening out my window. It might snow this weekend, and I

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Author commentary: I don’t really have much to say about this one. I don’t know if I would even call it a poem, or even prose at all. Is it trying to be a poem? Maybe. But it might also just be me letting my brain wander across the keyboard without thinking for a while. I’m not going to say anything about what is fact and what is fiction or dramaticized.