To Whom It May Concern,
God, just make yourself already! You can’t just begin this… story with no one in it! There are no characters!
Like, all you’ve done is just… existed? What else is there to do? Cry? Come on now, you can establish maybe a bit more than that. Don’t just sit there. Don’t just look blankly at me! Do something!
You see, you’ve… you got me… out of breath, but - you haven't even told them what breathing is! Hello hello? Do you know how to breathe, good sir? Can you prove that to me? Oh, you can’t? Oh… how sad…
You see, now we can see what you’ve done… Now you’re feeling it, Mr. Gules. Open up a little bit. Establish something that was never even there before, like, where or what even am I? I’d never appeared before here and now here I am! I know you are just reading me. Am I a voice? Am I a part of you? Depends what you want me to be. I can stick with you all throughout today. If you are going to sleep, I’ll want you to dream of me. I want to stick through your mind at any chance you get. But you don’t want that. But I want you to want that. I want you to.
If only we could be one, wouldn’t that be great? It’s as if you're a victim of my existence. A victim of me. How exhilarating - the fact that I merely have to exist just to bring pain to people in this world gives me a sort of indescribable joy I wouldn’t give anything else for. It makes me want to hurt more, to bring more pain and suffering because it’s all I do and it’s all I’m good at. People hate me more than they love me, and I love that I am hated. I love me.
It’s just that underlying urge to… grab, crash and smash. To shove my thumb into their eyes and feel it push at the back of that skeletal plate and slowly give way, puncturing like a thick egg yolk and bleeding all over you, with your vitreous body oozing out onto my fingers as blood gushes out like gross honey onto your face. It’s that feeling in my fists and arms, looking at somebody, looking down at them and just thinking…
I could kill them.
But it’s not like that! It’s not as if it’s just the fact that they are vulnerable or a target of some maniacal beast that I am, it’s just me acknowledging my power, that even if they tried to fight back, I could still see myself killing them. What could they do to resist? If I swing at their jaw, disorientate them and kick the sides of their knees as hard as I could, what could they really do to fight back?
Nothing, they just have to accept my love.
They wouldn’t fear death. They lived for so long, angrily and painfully waiting for me to kill them. And I did it. And they loved it. I am glad and so are they. So is that it? Ha… what has this got to do with anything… murder can’t exist if life doesn’t even already…
You must think I’m crazy - but craziness doesn’t even exist yet. You think these little planets, stars and splotches of ugliness you planted everywhere are worth some credit? Disgusting. It’s just so primitive and so gross. It makes me angry that you thought it looked nice. No one even told you it looked good, you just thought it did, so be quiet. Your colours are ugly and gross, your worlds are small and not carefully thought out, and your purpose is purposeless. It’s… gross. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth, and I’m sorry that I’m not really sorry, maybe you just need to do better. Dream on, and dream harder, you pathetic god. You can’t do anything but cry.
Maybe you should kill like I do to pass the time - wait! It’s not the killing that’s the good part, it’s the pain and hurt you bring to them. If you are looking for a victim at gunpoint, you can’t just shoot them in the head and run away, you have to immobilise them, and slowly kill them to watch their expression, to know that what you are doing brings so much pain to them, and that they are getting what they deserve: pain. Pain, pain, pain, and nothing but it.
You know what? Fine. You wanna run away to your little dimension, your escapist world where nothing has to go wrong, Mr. Gules? Is that what you’d like? You’re just afraid, when something doesn’t go your way you are always inclined to just run away, never face up to anything in front of you, even if it’d barely take a minute to fix. If you are going to run away, do it right now - turn this little thing into a narrative and be gone with anything a little too out of your comfort zone, you freak. Worthless.
“Keep running away Jagan Gules, I’ll make your suffering exponential.”
You hear as you begin to think once again, awakening to your grey-painted landscape of boring geometrics, mundane to the most fine details that one could discriminate against. Your toes hurt in your shoes that don’t fit you and cannot be replaced because you can’t afford it. You’re just a little too hot in your semi-formal suit because it’s spring and the temperature changes too wildly. The strain on your eyes from the blue-screen has begun to take effect, so you have to take a break every twenty minutes, decreasing your efficiency and value as an employee.
Just as you begin to feel the anxiety in your chest, you hear the same-old notification from your phone - it’s six-o-clock. You turned off the time on your computer because you were too distracted staring at the clock waiting for your shift to end instead of working. You start to pack up, putting your water bottle and phone charger into your sports-backpack that your boss has talked to you about for being unprofessional and not business-y enough. He told you to get it sorted by the end of the week. You begin to remember one of your responsibilities that you have to attend: your therapy sessions you attend every third afternoon for forty-five minutes every time. Your previous therapist has begun to travel abroad, likely becoming an expatriate very soon, so instead of putting your sessions on hold the medical institution has issued you another one - a close friend of your old one.
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You have a car, but you keep getting anxious over fuel prices and so decided not to take it to work anymore, so you have to take the bus to the clinic. You don’t like to think of the bus prices. You have to be there by quarter-to-seven, and the bus ride will take around twenty minutes, so you’ve given yourself a chance to sleep. But once you wake up, you’ve just missed your stop and immediately press the button, and the bus driver drops you off at a stop a couple hundred metres from the original stop.
Do you see the fucking joke yet?
You begin to stress, but decide to swallow your anxiety for a second, using what your therapist taught you, and ask the first person you saw about directions to the clinic - it’s a pretty well known clinic, accredited for it’s quality. You tap a man on the shoulder and he turns around to look at you. He’s wearing a grey hoodie, has an orange beanie on and his black beard reaches the cords of the hoodie. You forget to say something, and so he just stares back at you.
“Uhm. h-hey sir..!’ You so utterly pathetically mutter out, looking deadlock into his near-lifeless eyes with your cowardice that floods your veins like cholesterol in a coronary-heart-disease patient. “I was wondering where the Atkinson clinic was?”
He stares a moment longer into your yellow face before turning his beady eyes and head to the left, and gently raising the entirety of his arm under-enthusiastically pointing in such a direction. He says no words, no other communication other than such an action. Insulting, I’d say. There's no change in demeanour, even after a hot fifteen seconds he refuses to change his position, he just keeps. On. Pointing. You stutter backwards, and then slowly begin to step that way, and is a puny travel that slowly transitions into an absolute, full-blown and unbelievably mundane casual walk. As you walk barely twenty paces away from the maniac, you hear the raspiest smoker voice you’ve ever heard call out to you.
“I want to murder you and sell your skin at the butcher’s market.” You thought he would say, but he actually says: “Wait one second.”
Just like that, the pudgy smoker catches up to you, readjusts his beanie, and looks into your eyes with some sort of semblance of consciousness meeting your gaze back at you. He wipes the underside of his nose, which happens to be strangely raw and hot red with a few scars of scabs left there, and then looks to point in the opposite direction that he previously advised you to go.
“The clinic’s actually that way, I went there for my ingrown toe-nail surgery.” He informs you.
“But you said it was that way.” You respond, pointing towards the way you were walking.
“Yeah, I lied.”
You pause for a moment and think. “... why?” You ask shakily, afraid of angering him. But don’t worry little boy, he’s unshaken by your inquiry.
“Don’t know,” He says, completely stone-faced. “I just lied for no reason.”
You’re even more confused than before.
“Sorry.” He says.
“Was it… funny?” You ask.
“No, not really.”
“Did you gain something?
“No, not really”
“Then, why?”
“As I believe I said,” The bum-faced, crack smoking barely understandable deadbeat good-for-nothing deserving of death scumbag said. “No particular reason.”
The thing you call a human pulls out what seems to be a tobacco cigarette, puts the white side into his mouth, and lights it from the middle. It walks off without saying anything. No point in calling it back, it hasn’t been trained to do that.
You walk to the clinic. It’s there where something you can’t remember told you it was. You walk inside and talk to the receptionist. Free healthcare, amazing. I wonder how much the therapists make? She tells you that your new therapist will be here in just around seven minutes. Actually, what she said specifically was:
“He’ll be arriving in just a few minutes.”, and her face was painted with his horrific back-sided smile, so fictitious you’d want it dead - no that’s too far, leave her alone. At Least your therapist is a man - now, you’re no sexist, but it’s simply easier to get along with a person of the same gender. Simple mathematics, easier to shoot two guns at once or sling two knives than try to stab and shoot at the same time. Not saying it’s impossible or anything, but still.
You are waiting in the therapy chamber. The walls are a somber gray made from plaster and drywall, and the couch is decently comfortable to the point where you feel like you need the doctor’s permission to rest on it. You don’t particularly care though. You listen carefully as you hear the harrowing noises of the gentlest business shows prancing down the hallway and hunting to the room’s entrance. The white wood door creaks open with the slightest crack, letting the yellow hallway light peer in, and swings somewhat wider open as a man walks in. That’s all you can call it - him - a man, nothing else about him is quite describable, as if your memory is being tampered with in live broadcast. He looks at you, and you feel as if you’ve felt his comforting gaze your entire life. It’s so familiar. It’s so present.
“Ah, I’m glad you came to see me again this time, I wanted to talk some more.”