50
“What have you learned in your waking hours?” Asked the giant psychic therapist spider.
“Not a goddamn thing,” I said, running through the shadow plane from seven shadow children, who wielded yo-yos made out of fang teeth and gray lollipops and laughter like the choking of wasps.
“Are you sure?”
“Well, obviously. I always come back here when I’m stressed out. Back to this shadow plane. Back to these fucking shadow people with their teeth hollowed out, containing every anxious bad thought that has ever entered into my mind. They collect these thoughts, use them as a resource, eat them, store them. They want me.”
“What was the last thing that happened before you went to sleep?” the giant psychic therapist spider asked me.
“I don’t even want to think about that right now.”
For some reason the shadow realm inside my head was constructed mainly of warehouses and abandoned suburbs. I ran inside an empty, scratched out warehouse, and the shadow children pursued me, hissing and laughing. I ran up a winding spiral staircase and they followed right behind, shaking the railing so that I’d trip.
“You need to think about that right now, otherwise you’re going to keep coming back here,” the psychic therapist spider said.
“I was at the gun range shooting blanks,” I said as I kept running. “I was in the bedroom with my fists knotted in my hair.”
“While others keep a dream journal, I want you to keep a waking journal,” the spider said.
The staircase toppled over. The shadow children dragged their fingers straight through my chest.
“That sounds like nonsense,” I said.
51
I sat at a coffee shop with a fellow writer friend. It’s 3 in the afternoon, I’ve eaten little and my blood sugar took a dive. I’d also drank three shots of vodka before I jumped in my car because there’s nothing more nerve-wracking than a social outing.
Unfortunately, and predictably, this has all culminated in me being a royal bitch and unhooking my brain from any sort of filter whatsoever.
“Most writers are god-awful human beings, and if we’re going to be honest I’m probably the worst of them,” I said, leaning over my coffee cup, nearly spilling it on the table. “Self-absorbed, selfish, with a crippling self-importance, overinflated sense of ego, detachment from reality, expectation of others to get real jobs. I hope that someone rounds up every writer in existence, ties their ankles together with their own undeserved ego, throw them in the river, and see who fucking floats.”
My writer friend cocked her head, nodding. I couldn’t remember if she’s written a book or if I’ve ever read it. She often liked to talk about how it’s possible to be a writer and not read, that she’s never so much as read a book for a freshman English class. This made her disinteresting to me - why would you have any desire to write without consuming the product
“I have a lot of good writer friends,” she said.
I snorted. God, I regretted leaving the house.
“I’m sure you do,” I said.
“You can’t just categorize people like that,” she said. “Everyone is unique. Human beings are a mystery. That’s why I love writing. It’s like an endless puzzle.”
“There’s nothing mysterious about human behavior. I know I’m supposed to think that to maintain my wonder about life, but this is the reason why we have a 50% divorce rate and continue to tolerate assholes. Everyone has similar desires - fuck, food, the upkeep of the ego, feeling like they’re better than everyone else. Yeah, maybe everyone wears different colored underwear, but asshole comes in the same flavor.”
She stopped talking, stared at her cold coffee. She had black ringlets in her hair, a nose piercing, a husband she’d married out of highschool.
“Every action results from a logical place, whether or not the logic is knowable to the person inciting the action. Every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction. Physics may create unique snowflakes, but they’re all comprised of the same latticework. They all melt above 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Physics doesn’t leave room for mystery, only our ignorance does.”
She paid for her coffee and left. She forgot her notebook. I stared at it for a few minutes, running my finger around the rim of my coffee cup, wondering if she’d come driving back after she realized she’d forgotten it.
I pulled the notebook to me. I opened the first page and found:
sonder (From the dictionary of obscure sorrows)
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
Note: This is part of my Psycho-Surreal Memoirs Series. You can find more by looking through my feed. They're designed to be able to be read in any order.
You can find me on Twitter, Facebook, and my website. You can also buy one of my books here.
Other Posts You May Be Interested In:
The Curse of Atreus [PTSD Series: Part 1]
We are Wormwood [My Books]
The Genius with Eyes That'd Seen Fire [Psycho-Surreal Memoirs]
What kind of Content Do You Want to See From Me? [2018 and Beyond]
My Favorite Resources for Writers
Crooked God Machine [My Books]
The Halcyon Spaceship [Psycho-Surreal Memoirs]
Industrial Noir in the Red Earth: My Trip to Oklahoma