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