The ground is still a long ways off, hidden away beyond the impenetrable darkness. If there even is one. I suspect that there is. Supposing that I'm correct, it's a little bit closer now. I must have fallen from somewhere, a cliff or building or other structure, which ought to stand on something, so there necessarily has to be a ground. But I don't remember. I can't always have fallen. If I did, could it really be called falling, technically? Doesn't feel right. A little closer yet. I look up into the void, or down, I can't tell, and through the clouds of now vaguely materializing forms, the letter "L" looks back at me. Less than an inch away from my retina. Some more letters dig themselves into my cheekbones, creating a sharp pain all over the right half of my face. I lift my head off the keyboard. Not yet sufficiently sober, my body sways from side to side, forcing the center of mass beyond the chair's edge. Figures. I haven't stopped falling. Thud. Face to carpet, back to darkness. I awaken to the high-pitched voice of my younger brother and a light tap on the shoulder. “Hey, I thought you were gonna show me the around the school today.” The young boy in front of me is beaming from cheek to cheek. “Yeah, definitely, I was just… waiting here for you.” “I dunno Vi, it kind of looked like you were sleeping.” “Sleeping? In class?” I smile widely and blow out some air through my nose in hopes of making the act more convincing. “How dare you accuse your brother of such delinquency?” “If you say so. We did homeroom-introductions with miss Wagner today, everyone seems really nice!” “Wagner? You lucked out then, her classes are pretty low-effort. You didn’t talk to anyone, did you?” “Of course I talked to them, duh. They’re my new classmates, and I told you they’re nice.” “Any word you speak to those vultures is ammunition against you. Just wait until they find their first target and you’ll see. I’ve done school for a bit now and the best way of being ignored is ignoring them. They’re boring as shit anyways.” Was I still being sincere when I said that? Was I sincere at any point? When did it all get so painful, so dark and callous? Why did I feel like I had to experiment with him? Why did I poke everything until it broke? “I am no longer him!” “No longer who?” , Lloyd responds in the muffled, barely understandable tone of a man mumbling into his pillow. “Don’t even worry about it, I… I need to take a shower” “Woah, what kind of epiphany has led to taking action as drastic as basic hygiene?” “Yeah, yeah, whatever.” Even as warm water beats against my face and layers upon layers of filth and dead skin are relinquish their grip upon my body, the thoughts persist. I can’t live like this. I need absolution. Just some, just a little bit, not actually from the good one himself though. That’s worthless, he’ll forgive anyone. He already forgave me for fuck’s sake. How much could that possibly mean? I open my mouth and take in the jet of disgusting, metal-tasting water, in hopes that it will drown me before I can bring this particular train of thought to conclusion. My half-assed attempt at suicide proves unsuccessful. There has to be a place for this kind of forgiveness. Fuck talking to some religious dipshit, but sad, directionless teenagers playing psychoanalyst for each other, so they don’t have to deal with the reality of their own misery for a bit? Now that’s something I can get behind. And forums like that ought to exist everywhere. A few google searches and DMs to angsty teenagers in Lo’s comments lead me to just the place I was looking for: “The Glaring”. A wall of absurdly pretentious confessionals, ten times the wordcount they would require, were the people responsible even remotely as interested in conveying their actual issues as they are in convincing readers of their depth, stretches down farther than any reasonable human would ever dare to scroll. The site was apparently created by a lifestyle blogger named Jessica Heine, who became somewhat famous amongst the goth-adjacent six years ago after unexpectedly killing herself and leaving multiple novels worth of purple-prose as her suicide note. Further digging into her uncovered this site, which she assumably set up in order to help herself, but which didn’t gain any traction until the connection to the now dead pseudo-e-celeb had been revealed. That is to say: quite a bit too late. The girl however succeeded in becoming a messianic figure for depressed assholes who think that she somehow sacrificed herself to bring them this site and therefore save their lives, miraculously unaware of the existence of suicide hotlines. I guess I shouldn’t be too cynical of the whole matter, seeing how this is exactly what I needed. Thanks Jessica. For a moment I consider contemplating how incredibly macabre and creepy that thought was but decide against it. Instead, I start reading a post.
“There is no out. There can’t be. The thing we want to escape from once simplified to its most basic, nuanceless core is reality itself, or rather the human experience that is the lens through which we conceptualize it. How could there possibly be anything outside that except death? Anything that seems like an out is just another in, a pathway to another corner of the same shitty old building where the only way to escape is jumping out the 21st floor window. It still sucks, wherever your path leads, but at least it sucks in a way that’s new, refreshing almost for a while. It puts past shit into perspective despite not being an exit and becomes the new, interesting shit, which might just be enough? As long as one keeps taking the “out”s that aren’t really, and continuously turns the old shit into the new shit, the grind stays interesting enough to be worth it, maybe. Maybe that’s the point of it all.”
“If you’re still looking for the point, you have already missed it, because there is none and that is the point.”
“Wouldn’t that mean that there is one? Isn’t that just a “the path is the goal”-type twisting of words, that denies the initial discernibility of a thing’s nature, but not the verisimilitude of its existence. That’s even kind of the thing I described above.”
“It would be, if I, like you apparently do, operated on the assumption that “points” or any comprehensibility-serving abstraction of physical reality is an inherent property of it, rather than a foundationless attribution made by flawed human minds.”
“In that case you’re just being needlessly obtuse by referring once to the point of existence and once to your point about existence with the same word in the same sentence. Being hard to understand doesn’t make you profound, you know?”
“Well what’s profound?”
“Anything that makes people go “oh, I get it, the world’s like THAT” in the form of a very neat, memetic sentiment. No more than a paragraph. The kind of shit middle aged women go nuts for. didn’t miss that you changed the topic btw.”
The commenter didn’t respond to this. What IS profound? THAT, yes, sure, but also more, right? There has to be more. It’s not satisfying like this. There has to be a more profound explanation of profundity. Did THEY, the commenter, find it satisfactory, of did they just not reply because their ego had been bruised? I come to the realization that that becoming cognizant, not knowing, but actually becoming cognizant of the fact that other people do exist and have thoughts is genuinely the worst feeling imaginable. I take a large gulp of rum straight from the bottle and the burning sensation in my throat distracts me from the terrifying thought that some guy on the internet had maybe been given a glimpse at the true nature of things that simply doesn’t cut it for me. Why did I go here? Where did the rum come from for that matter? Sometimes it seems like alcohol just appears around me. Wait, right. This was about Lo. It’s hard not to feel pathetic in this situation, despite the overwhelming work I put into cleansing myself from such feelings forever. The space girl would surely have a blast observing and commenting upon my fucked-up coping mechanisms, but then again, there are few pathological behaviors with which she doesn’t have a field day, this tendency of hers very much included. I came to whine. I came to pour my heart out about the crimes that no one even has the decency to hate me for. I came to have my fucked up psyche obveranalyzed by someone who hasn’t been stuck in its gears for countless eternities. It that so reprehensible? Is that so reprehensible to anyone except me?
“This will probably sound really stupid. For context, I have talked about it with people whom I trust implicitly about that sort of shit, and therefore know for a fact that it sounds stupid. I'm even inclined to agree. The problem is that so far nobody has been able to find the logical flaw in my thought process or at least to adequately explain to me how I'm mistaken. And it's hard to convince yourself of a different philosophy if you can't find out how yours is wrong. So here goes: I am convinced that my parents will let me live in their house indefinitely and after years of trying to find one, I am certain that no activity that I am forced to partake in will ever not make me miserable. Call my existence pathetic all you want, but there is nothing higher than this to strive for from my perspective. I realized that all these things people feel tethered by, while they are certainly real for others, don't actually exist in my case. I am free to do anything and that includes doing nothing. Stupid or not, it seems pretty sound logically and that's the problem: I don't want it to be. Sometimes I just want to be a fucking person again, and it's all because I thought too much, I poked at my own mind again and again and it broke. I broke and there's no recovering if you're so broken that you think you're fine most of the time. I poked at others too, poked and prodded and broke. Truthfully, maybe my self-prescribed confinement to this room is preferable to the damage I might wreak otherwise. A friend once called me demonic and as the months go past, I am inclined to agree…”