I can’t think. I’ve tried. I really have. Hour after hour passes like a string of sand through an hourglass and all I have is 2000 useless, uninteresting words that I just don’t care about. The question is why? Why do my own experiences trigger this reaction? I think it’s simple; I know them. Inside and out I know every aspect of them. I’m not surprised I live them every night before I sleep, those I don’t I have carefully suppressed behind showers of tears and endless bitter headaches. These things made me, I know that. I know that they are what made me what I am, yet I cannot stand them. Whenever I write them I feel strangely pathetic. Why do I presume anyone would give a shit about what actually happened to me?

I don’t. I was there. I am certainly not the only one to have had these experiences, after they happened to me, they have happened to others, nothing that has happened to me, sans the order they occurred, has only ever happened to me. We all have problems, we all have experiences, we don’t all know how to share them, but we have them and we tell them. To our friends, family, fellow lost souls bogged down by the stench of alcohol and cold sweat, we tell them. They are a social thing. I like them there, when you can be held in the moment of memory, not teetering away figuring out the best way to phrase something, to find the right words to illuminate the contrived overwrought bullshit that made up my life.

When I speak, it comes upon me again, I feel it and it is spoken at a determined pace. I have control over the imagery, if I miss something, someone can interject and ask a question, force a detail, here, on the page, I get nothing. Only the white space that demands to be filled. No feigning interest, no control, only memory. A single tinted marble held and examined over and over until it transforms into a constant bitter taste and nothing more. Examining memory changes it into something else. Into something mundane. The more I think about it, the more I hate it. The more I think that no one could ever possibly find it to be of any use. I’m not that interesting. Not here, in this black of black and white, I can hide behind others, figments I have created to distract everyone from the face that I am as wrong and clueless and tempestuously lazy.

I can lie. Forced to examine truth I find the kernel of whatever qualifies as truth within, but it has no meaning to anyone else. And the idea of framing it so others can see what I do seems presumptuous. Why would anyone want to think like me? To close their eyes and see the shattered pieces of mirrors tethered together but this sack of meat I call a body. It reflects all of me, each piece an asset. A friend of mine once described the way she perceived the way I think. She said it was a group of boxes littered across a small room. Me, being the way I am, would haphazardly run from one part of the room to another picking things from the boxes and throwing them out of my mouth into a slew of unpalatable verbal sludge that no human person would want any part of. She didn’t say that last part, she meant it as a compliment, or at least as a endearing observation. Regardless she is not wrong. At least at the heart of it.

The only difference is that they are not boxes, they are reflections, pieces of me, aspects that shout and babble in unison demanding subservience in the name of some hidden agenda that I will never know. And sometimes I have no choice but to let them run free, lest I risk some sort of body wide conversion and the world see the sickened sociopath I am nearly certain resides in 85% of those reflections. It’s a plan, not a good one, or a sound one, but it seems to work. I am neither dead nor locked away in the dank bowels of a forgotten asylum. And while this may be some sort of global oversight, for the most part I function. I live, breathe, and consume whatever world affords me like a ravenous dog.

The more I consume the more I realize that my voice carries nothing interesting behind it. I don’t have some epiphany. I can entertain (with the right reader and even then only sometimes) but I possess no white hot wit, no brilliant grasp of language. I am adequate. I am evolving. I am becoming something, and as times goes on I am increasingly unsure how or what that is.