Sometimes it doesn’t happen.
Damned if you do —
I would say more but then again I wouldn’t have to speak if I could just rip open my head and let it all spill out in colorful pictures. It wouldn’t be just red paint; it wouldn’t be just gray gel. It wouldn’t be just white chips and the trailing ends of eyeballs.
There has to be something more in there, something more inside. Bigger. Better. Darker. Stranger.
When I was a little boy, my father told me I would grow up to change the world as he knew it. He died believing that.
I am dying, now, never having believed it, and I wonder which of us has been the liar for these past forty-six years. I’m tripping on all the broken teeth of discarded dreams and simultaneously wishing I could be thinking that I mean something. That I have ever meant something.
I am little more than the wet and dry ingredients that make my brittle bones and cancerous heart.
When I am broken down again and reclaimed, I will return with a ferocity I should have always had. You will hear it in my first breath, and know it in my last.
For now, I will smolder down and extinguish myself in all of the ways and things I could have, but didn’t.
I don’t even know how to respond to that, so visceral. I don’t know how personal this is, but from my standpoint, it fairly grabbed me by the hair and smashed me into a wall. I hope you’re okay and that this is your imagining (because, you know, I don’t think you are a boy…), but either way, dreadfully powerful and a bit unnerving. As writing should be.