Your name is Adam. You are twenty six years old.
You work at the grocery three streets down, you’ve been home for three and a half hours.
It’s 9pm and Kaitlyn is still on her closing shift at the pet store-the one on the corner down the road, you’ve been together for three years.
You sit in your chair, singed glass pieces and a displaced grinder on the low set coffee table in front of you.
the flashing waves of colors from the television glaze over your eyes and you sit locked-motionless.
Your laundry room’s walls indent into the neighbors’ apartment.
In this moment you feel as if you’re behind your own vision, watching footage of your life play out from behind plate glass. You are unsure of agency.
The lights are off, your limbs feel numb and your circulation is slowed.
you will wait until she comes home. Thirty minutes or so.
> he will sit and wait until Kaitlyn comes home
> I will go to the laundry room
you stay in place within the chair, now sinking into stretched faux leather-you try moving your eyes, desaturated colors and patterns from in distinct programs cause a dull pain behind them. You can’t move them, it hurts to. They feel sluggish. Abrasive and jagged on their surface beneath the eyelids.
simply staring on at the basic cable television as one show bleeds into another and into another so on, seeping into commercials. You can’t move, can’t sweat, your tongue feels dry and your heart like it’s calcifying in your chest beneath an invisible weight.
some other Network is playing now, re-runs of late 90’s era Jerry springer fluff programming. The footage is compromised, grainy and popped with colors-the people on stage look like particles of dust that have been shepherded into clothes.
Only on the camera’s close ups can you make out any human features, a peach colored blob, you can’t make the sounds out beneath the ringing of your ears. Warbling warbling, more warbling, the audience laughs Gnashing and dull explosions. Like you’re underwater.
Something deep in you is taking your body.
The camera comes in close on one of them as you sit within a pool of sweat, a grainy face with pitiful animal eyes cutting through the muddled video. Like a child’s. There’s a blur of a microphone in front. He speaks when prompted by rushing water static from an off screen Springer.
“I wish I could kill myself in front of an audience. I think about it a lot. Too much. I think I’ve hit the point where i just want someone else, anyone, to know. It plays out in my head to the point I can reach out and touch it. Sometimes in front of people I know. strangers too. I put my mother’s target pistol in my mouth and blow the back of my head off. I picture the aftermath as much as I can, the reactions. I want the validation more than anything. I used to want to do it to the people I didn’t like-my dad, my brother, that sort of thing. I know I’m passed that part of it now.
If just one woman out there could look on the pavement and think ‘you poor sick thing. We should have treated you better, I should have done something. why would someone do this to themselves. What could we do as people to not make someone feel this way’
then that would make it worth it. I want to make some impact in my life, even if it’s through such an ugly thing. I want someone to reevaluate, to think about everything and guess themselves. To think about me for once.
I’d never do it. But I really wish I could. I think about having that in me. I cling to it everyday I wake up and go to work.
I wish I was strong enough.”
You stare into the shape for an insurmountable amount of time, and he looks into you. your phone lies inert on the table-dull chimes playing below white noise. Your 10pm alarm, you’re unaware of how long it’s been sounding off. Kaitlyn’s not home.
> get up and grab the phone
>don’t move, watch the tv
His voice cracks beneath the weight of the footage’s quality and braces against the flatscreen’s speakers. As every node in your body demands that you stand, that you break from paralysis-the grimacing blur on tv writhes in anguish of saying his piece. He keeps going, you only catch pieces as you try to move again, grimaces and expletives,apologies and heaved sobs. “I’m sorry, god I’m so fucking sorry.”
Pitiful rabbit eyes leak, you can see the shimmer and mentally trace the veins on screen even from this distance. They’ve eluded the rotting compression. The phone’s alarm bleats on, a war drum compelling you to finally rise from the wet crater in the chair. Something fires off in you, a renewed focus-and you begin to gasp and breathe.
The speakers crackle on. “Other people get a chance, everybody, everyone else gets a fucking chance. God. Oh God.”
Your eyes finally move, and your body follows suit as you begin to hungrily drink in the air around you, the rush of sensation nearly casts you to the ratty carpeting beneath you.
The buzzing in your ears leave and sound rushes back into place as if you’re pulled from water. Your hand swoops down to the table in one motion, grabbing the phone. “please god don’t think I wanted this, I didn’t ask for it god.”
TIME: 10:45
You bring your finger down upon the button, finally ending the late alarm. there’s not a single part of you actively registering and processing any of this-but the underlying panic, and residual tightness in your chest didn’t leave when you stood.
You stare into the bright screen, notifications are sparse-only the automated ones from a selection of apps. Clutter. No one has contacted you.
As you stand in the living room’s center, at the table’s edge. The noise and distortion clear from the television’s speakers, and a clarity washes over the room as the noise clears.
It’s enough to draw your gaze back to it.
Tortured eyes stare up at you now. Pleading. Wet. He speaks as if he were in the room with you.
He speaks to you.
“Bad things shouldn’t happen to Good people.”
The tv goes black, and the apartment is in darkness.
>you will turn on the lights
>i will go to the laundry room and face the wall
>You will call Kaitlyn
Interesting stuff, & it seems like it could be inspired by some real nihilistic introspection coupled with a unenjoyable high. +1 to consensus.
