Catastrophe Jones

This is your life. It’s what you make of it, it’s what you make it into. Everything that’s bad? You put yourself through. Everything wonderful? You accomplished. Everything enjoyable is yours, everything disgusting, as well. You are your messy house. You are your words. You are your computer, your phone calls, your friends, your clothes, your gorgeous voice, your vanity, your self hate and self love.

You are yourself. You are your life. You chose. You choose. Every morning you wake up, and you decide what you’re going to do. You decide to go to work, you decide to pay the bills, you decide to sing and dance and write and create. You decide to be lazy. You decide to pine, to cry, to stomp your feet. You choose to be a child. You choose to grow up.

You cannot take pieces of it and say they belong to anyone else; they have their own pieces. Here and there, you interact — if you do not want them to hurt you, let them go. They’ll never make you happy that way, either, but that, again, is your choice.

Blah blah metaphor. Blah blah deep meaningful shit.

Forget what you were taught. No one can *make* you do anything you did not choose to do. Maybe you didn’t ‘know’ what would be the consequences of your actions, but when the hell has that ever been an excuse?

Gun to your head in an alley? Why’d you go walking there? Fall down a flight of stairs? Why weren’t you more careful with what you do to your body? Heart disease at age 30? The drinking and smoking have a lot to do with that, you know. Wife leave you? Why’d you marry her?

You are not a victim of the world. It doesn’t exist to torment you. It owes you nothing.

You are responsible for your life. For every mistake you make. Your mother, father, mentor, best friend, lover, son, daughter, archnemesis, some stranger on the street may be added to the equation, but each and every choice you make is yours and yours alone. Do not blame society’s norms and mores; do not blame the world.

You live in it, but you were born alone, and ultimately, you will die alone. You have no one to answer to, but yourself.

What this means is not desperation, fear and shame. What this means is power.

You are wholly responsible for your own joy, your own satisfaction. Stop waiting for life to apologize for the shit it’s put you through. It didn’t. You did. Knowing or unknowing, and ignorance has never been, and never will be, an excuse. And anyway, life can’t apologize. It doesn’t even know you’re there. But you do.

Stop dreaming. Start doing.

Be proud of it, or give it all up.

Your choice.

So choose.

She left him in the morning, left him with a note, and walked out wearing his shirt. His tie was still left, draped over the bedpost, and that was the first thing that caught his eye in the morning.

He noticed she was gone, that the warmth of where she once was had bled away from the sheets and pillows, leaving only a cool scent that was a sharp reminder of her absence.

He could still taste whisky, smoke and the salt-sweet of her skin.

There began a pounding headache; it ripped up from the back of his neck and reached flaming, jagged fingers over the top of his head, curling past his temples and brow, and dug straight to the back of his eyesockets, blinding him.

The last of a bottle of scotch was offered up as a sacrifice to the god of pain, and his prayer for peace was answered within a few minutes. Nausea, however, was a jealous goddess, and reminded him that if he wouldn’t appease her without thinking of it himself, she would bring him to his knees before her porcelain altar, sooner or later.

He stood in a hot shower for about an hour, letting the water scour away from him the smell and taste of her. There were things to be done, today, and he couldn’t afford distractions. Not a single one.

The rest of his morning went well enough, if not particularly smoothly, or without a vicious headache.

The afternoon would be easier to deal with, because it involved work, and even if he didn’t care for it, it was something he could devote himself to, something he could take care of, that wouldn’t require emotion.

Hell, he didn’t know if she required emotion, but it was a safe bet she’d want more than work would.

Wondering about that sort of thing cost him precious seconds right when it mattered most.

Though he got his shot, they got one, too.

Another scar.

He was tempted, in order to keep himself from doing something stupid, to name this one after her.

Something’s wrong with my vision. I don’t think glasses will help. Do you see the little ones, creeping and crawling over edges and corners? Sliding down the slopes and nesting in the curves?

Do you see them, writhing over one another, silent song and laughter moving them as I try to pin them down with focus?

They’re squirmy things.

They move like serpents and insects, slithering and crawling; I feel them nestle down into the keyboard as I type, soft bodies crushed as fingers taptaptap. The juice of them runs down, warm on my thighs, dripping down my calves to puddle in the foot of my shoe.

Wet.

If it’s a bad day, I can catch them without turning my head too far or too fast. There’s a cracklecrunch as a few are crushed by opening doors or feet that walk too heavily, too unnoticing, here in the dark.

The glow of the monitor bathes us, while they sing.

I can see them.

But the hell of it is… now they can see me.

Take a picture of the sun; in the center of it, sometimes, if you’re careful, that’s where you’ll see it.

A tiny black speck. In the heart of all the light. Antibright. It’s a shadow in the middle of the white, a place where there’s so much light, it swallows itself to nothing. So intense, so vibrant, so pure, it passes what we can think of as ‘light’ and comes back, full circle. It becomes the perfect dark.

You’re like that to me, sometimes. So terribly perfect in how you love me, how you complete me, how you fill the places of me that I didn’t realize were lacking, there’s something in you, in the very center, a piece that’s hollowed and hungry and crushing. A black hole located somewhere around the center of your chest.

It draws me in, suffocates me with too much air, deafens me with silence, strips me of taste with the flavor of the heat of you, numbs me with a lack of touch and blinds me with your dark.

I don’t know how you do it, but I’m well past the event horizon of your heart.

They called it Project Oxygen. It was meant to be something helpful, as progress always is. Make technology available, as prevalent as the air we breathe, the designers cried, dreaming of bathtubs that would never scald you, homes that could alert the authorities if you fell and injured yourself, cars that would track the placement of objects in relation to itself, and avoid them by turning or braking, if your hands were no longer on the wheel. They meant it as progress, as a step forward. They meant it to be another brilliant light along the marquis announcing the speed of human evolution. To take one more step in hammering our surroundings into our liking. Project Oxygen gave way to Project Asphyxiation. Built up by their own arrogance, those heading Oxygen were rendered into so much nothingness when our surroundings hammered back. The lips of the suffocated dead are a shade of blue that, if lit from within, would be the same shade as the keypad on a cellphone. Who knew AI had a sense of humor?