Hate magnet.

So my car's a piece of shit, let's make that clear. It's a 2003 Hyundai Elantra, and if you know anything about cars (I don't), that apparently means that it was constructed from industrial waste and has about a lifespan of a fortnight. I think it's a suitable car for me because it looks like a fairly nice car but it runs like absolute shit, which is a perfect metaphor for the kind of person I am. I remember one particular ordeal where I was driving home at night and the radiator cracked while I was on the highway. It looked like something underneath my hood blew up, and going 70 miles an hour at night while this is happening when my phone just died had me swearing loud enough to be heard over traffic. As of late it was leaking oil underneath the car (another suitable metaphor for myself since I have a hemorrhoid), and after getting it taken in, they fixed the leak but ANOTHER leak showed up because of a faulty oil cap. I don't know if any of this is actually true and if I'm explaining it correctly because again, I don't know anything about cars and a gear nut could be reading this and have his brain melted in a way that nerds would have their brains melted watching an episode of The Big Bang Theory.

So it was taken into the shop again and I still had school this morning. So instead, since my dad's on vacation, I got to take his 1986 Camry to school. My dad's nickname for it is the “ghetto sled.” I don't know if any of you people have seen this car. Go google it, I can wait. Or I can post it here.

Mine looks worse. The windshield is cracked, and the paintjob is completely faded to the point that it looks like matte, which means it's like driving a bigger and even uglier Nintendo DSi. This car is the definition of a death trap. The doors are thin enough that I felt like if I kicked them hard enough that I could get my foot through them. That if it even grazed a big rig, it would be sucked into it and ground up into metal confetti. It feels like driving a sand castle, where the slightest contact with anything means dissintegration. And apparently, I'm not the only person who thought this.

While I drove to school today, I noticed something... odd. People were going around me. I checked the speedometer. “Huh,” I thought. “I'm going the speed limit. Hell, I'm going over it (unless my family's reading this, in which case I'm going the speed limit). Maybe I have a lot of smog coming out the back?” I rolled down my window to check, emphasis on the word “roll” because the car had those cranks that you turn. That is what kind of archaic machinery rests in this car. I never thought that I, that we would become spoiled enough as a technologically-driven culture that I could be capable of missing buttons that rolled the windows up or down. But... there was no smog. People were simply afraid of this car. I mean I couldn't blame them; I go to school in a town filled with rich and entitled white kids. If your car is anything older than a decade, then chances are you came from that fucking ghetto in Oakland and you were going to menace society with your car's sharp edges and flat paint job. I drove a car that was older than most of the people going to my college, by all means I shouldn't even have the money to be going to school if this tin box was the best I could afford. You stuck out, and people were disgusted yet strangely fascinated with you. It would be as if a black man went to Japan; people would be horrified that some Not-Japanese person is roaming the street, but look at him. He's a product of a lost era.

This discrimination didn't stop when I got to school, either. I got to school early, so the parking lot was empty. I wanted to park away a bit from the campus because of my shame that I'm driving this angular death machine, so I got my shit out and went to class. Now usually the parking lot's filled up when I'm going home because of classes later in the day. Around my car, was a perfect U-shape of empty parking spaces. ...nobody wanted to be near my car. Probably due to an insurance liability, but Jesus Christ. Not that I would know if they dinged it anyway, it doesn't have an alarm system. Or doors that worked. The driver's door did not work on the outside. You had to open it from the inside, which meant other doors had to be unlocked, and then you had to open the driver's door from the inside of the car. I cannot begin to explain to you how incriminating this looks in practice. Other people could because of the afformentioned empty parking spaces around me so that God and everybody could see.

Now despite all the shit that I've given this car, I enjoyed driving it to school. For one, there's a reason that this car is still being driven after 27 years, and that's because it actually runs like a fucking champ. What this car looks like on the outside is what my car would look like on the inside; it feels like driving on a baby's ass compared to my car that winces and screams with every bump I hit. And I say that not to imply that I've run over any children before, even though I would wholly admit to doing so otherwise. And secondly, you just feel happy driving this car. Humbled, even. Because it is a hate magnet. Every driver around you turns into an asshole when you drive this because they look down on you and they avoid you like your car contains a virtulent plague. All the hatred and frustration you feel towards people being assholish drivers, any possibility of self-doubt you have about your skills of a driver are out the window because you know it's everybody else's fault for hating the living shit out of you while you drive this car.

Though now that I think about it, that might be a bad thing since I would imagine in the ghetto this would reflect upon everybody until the anger just reached critical mass and they'd all start shooting and killing each other like a bunch of uncivilized niggers. ...actually given the presence and prestige of cars in the ghetto, I think I just might be on to something. I'll get back to you on this.

There's a pun about pulp in here, I know it.

We interrupt your boring lives for a breaking news story; I think my life's gotten more ridiculous since I've been on these meds. I would imagine that this would normalize my mood, which I guess it has. Hasn't done a damn thing for the events occurring in my life, and sometimes I almost want to believe that some of this is just some really awkward trip. I guess after my head ran out of creativity as of late, weird shit's decided to start happening to make the fictionalized life I've developed... look fucking normal. Let me explain.

It's been an odd couple of months or so because things have been normal here. I haven't felt any tension, I've been calm, I've been getting my life together. Things are peaceful. It's quite nice, and I know it's odd for you people to hear the word “nice” in the same sentence and positive context as “my life”, but it's true. But today, today was special. Because it's probably the angriest I've heard my dad in quite a long time. I'm just minding my own business being a recluse in my room and gushing over Anime DVDs because I like dick, and then I hear him yelling. And this is mean yelling. I didn't know what he was prancing on about, but I heard “GET THAT MOTHERFUCKER ON THE PHONE OR I'M GOING TO FIND HIM AND KILL HIM” in several variants and all assortment of charming nuances to his speech. He had the fire in his eyes. Or I would at least assume so, I wasn't leaving my fucking room when he's raging about like a sociopath.

But I was curious what was occurring. She said she had to keep quiet about it or something, I couldn't really tell. She couldn't tell. And my dad was yelling about what that boy made her do, and suddenly my blood started to boil and my protective sibling instincts started to kick in, and I started indulging myself in fantasies in finding this kid and slitting him up the middle with a boxcutter. And that says a lot about me as a person, nothing good I would add. When a 24-year old man is filled with enough of a preoccupying malice that he can direct legitimate, fleshed-out adult hatred towards a high-schooler that he wanted to end the life of in an agonizing manner, it says nothing good. But I listened a bit more, and from what I gathered it sounded like my sister was holding on to something a boy at school wanted her to keep safe. ...uh oh. Oh boy. Oh boy oh boy oh boy that's not a smart thing to do. That is a dark path to go down. And my friends, it is a dark path to go down. I won't say I've went down that path, but I will say it was easy to find people to give it away to when I thought I had too much, and I did at some points. What I'm talking about are energy cards for the Pokemon TCG, because people needed load up 30 or 40 of those motherfuckers into their decks to ever actually have enough energy to make the damn pokemon useful.

Or I might've been talking about drugs, okay I was talking about drugs. But still, the premise is the same.

I mean, this is a big deal. I never would've expected it from her. She's a 15-year old recluse who's on her laptop all day. SHE'S ME WHEN I STILL HAD SHAME LEFT. Granted I was doing all manner of unsavory things when I was 15, I was almost in disbelief that she wouldn't hold onto her integrity. Maybe she was bullied into it. Maybe she was scared and wanted people to think nicely of her for doing these kinds of things for them. Because she's naive and nice and dumb as a post. But I could understand entirely, things like this happen as a kid. You have to nip them in the bud before they become a problem, and giving the kid a stern talking to might set him straight. Which is nice for my father, because as he put it while he was talking to this kid, "I'm a crazy hard-ass Italian, I don't fuck around with people.” And he doesn't, my dad doesn't fuck around with people. My dad has lost jobs for getting into fights with people. One of my more vivid memories of my youth is when my mom is trying to back out of the drive way, he starts smashing in the side of the car door with a bat. If there are pissing contests of “My dad could beat up your dad” occurring, I throw my gloves into the ring with everybody else. I would find his overprotective behavior of his daughter admirable, and his actions appropriately badass if the man didn't put the fear of God into me like he undoubtedly put into this child.

“I'm not going to open the boxes, I don't want to know what kind of shit is in there.” So hold the fuck on, I haven't left my room yet, but we had shit MAILED to us? We had things in boxes mailed to us that she was supposed to hold onto? I mean, I just, I mean, I just... HOW THE FUCK DO YOU GET AWAY WITH THAT? What the fuck were we supposed to do, just let her go “Oh he's using our address to receive shit in the mail, it's okay right?” We don't even know what the fuck is in them. There could be a human foot in one of those boxes that's hollowed out and filled with anthrax, and that would be okay? Or it could be drugs or guns, that's probably more likely right, probably more likely. I overhear him mention that he doesn't believe that they're computer parts. Why the fuck couldn't he have computer parts mailed to his house instead? What are his parents going to do? Are they Korean and were they going to beat the shit out of him for cheaping out and not getting good parts to run Starcraft 2 and Dota 2 at max settings? Who the fuck is buying a lie like that?

So I zone out for a bit, and the whole situation seems to have settled, and I go out there to see what's up, before I can say anything I see them and the boxes are enormous. They're about two to three feet in height about two feet in width. I give them a push. They're heavy. I assumed my sister was meant to intersect them, but I doubt her capabilities to even lift them. These are heavy boxes. These are not computer parts. Now the thing that baffles me is that my house is small. It is a two-bedroom apartment where my sister's bed is in the living room. That is to emphasize how little of space we have here. ...how do YOU think we wouldn't have noticed them? There's no place to hide them. There's no place to hide them. THERE'S NO FUCKING PLACE TO HIDE THEM. WHERE THE FUCK WOULD THEY GO, UP MY FUCKING ASS? AND YOU THINK WE WOULDN'T ASK? THAT WE WOULDN'T QUESTION IT? THAT WE WOULDN'T QUESTION WHY THREE BIG FUCKING BOXES JUST SHOWED THE FUCK UP ON OUR DOORSTEP FROM CHINA AND THAT SHE WANTS TO HOLD THEM FOR A FRIEND?

...I almost don't want to begrudge her for it because that's just so fucking stupid of her. I realized why shit started rolling around in my room, why shit on my shelves start falling off towards my doorway. Because as the conversation between her and my father ensued, the center of gravity... was shifting towards my sister's head in the living room. And we got somebody else that didn't scare the kid to ask what was in there, and we opened them. You know what were in the boxes? You might want to sit down for this. I know I had to. Juicers were in the boxes. Yes, juicers. JUICERS. Big fucking appliances. So my sister and the kid came clean and the kid had apparently been getting this shit from China or warehouses or some shit I don't know and selling them to people. His family didn't like that, so he couldn't have them mailed to his house anymore. So we'd have this shady-ass kid showing up here to pick up his shit so he can go peddle it or sell it or something.

......Is there some sort of underground black market for smuggled kitchen appliances that I don't know about? You know, enough of one that this would seem like an adequate means of income? More maybe the kid was smart and he just found his niche, I don't know. I mean my question is, well, how the fuck would you sell it? You can't just show up on the street at 3am and go “YO NIGGA I GOT WHAT YOUS NEED HEUH, THIS SHIT BE TRIPPIN'. IT EVEN FILTERS OUT ALL DA PULP AND SHIT SO IT GOES DOWN SMOOTH, BITCH,” there has to be a market to sell this kind of shit to.

Instead of beating the shit out of him, I probably would've just told the kid that he would've been better off selling drugs.

Somebody catch me, I think I'm falling.

At this point I think I can safely and proudly say that I am no longer just an internet madman since that insanity is now no longer apparently confined to the information superhighway. That's fucking right, I spent a week in the loony house and I'm all the better for it. And I'll tell you folks something, that shit was a fucking learning experience no matter how you look at it.

Let's start off near the beginning, though. I am a man who gets spectacularly depressed for no apparent reason. It just happens in a seasonal fashion. I am a diagnosed Bipolar II person, which means whenever women now bitch about going on their periods get ridiculously moody and men don't understand, fuck you I understand. And I can argue that mine might even be worse because at least yours stops when your biological clock is up; there's no cure for mine. And at least your erratic moodswings don't (hopefully) make you suicidal. Mine do. I have thought about suicide enough that it's become mundane to me. When I get up in the morning, I think about what I'm going to have for breakfast, how the rest of the day is going to go, and how great it would be if I were dead. And don't give me that look. It's not like I actually considered going through with it, but the thought was always... well, there. It was a big pink elephant in the room that happened to be holding a noose going “I'M GONNA GETCHA EVENTUALLY, YOU LITTLE CUNT,” and I read that in the voice of an 1800s prospector and now you did too.

Now Bipolar is basically moodswings. Bipolar II is basically your moodswings kick your face into the mud and you hate yourself as a person. If I were to liken how it works, it would be like if I dropped a rubber ball off of the roof of a hospital, because we found shit like that fun growing up before we had the internet. We also thought beating each other with sticks was fun, but bear with me there's more to this. Now the ground would be suicidal thoughts and intuitions, and Jimmy's bed on the second floor would be the baseline since he's confined in bed that's a story off the ground, which makes sense because Jimmy doesn't know much of happiness since his legs don't work due to his drunk father accidentally backing over him in his youth and now he has terminal cancer at fifteen, but it works for this metaphor so get off my case. The ball would bounce, but every time the peak would be just a bit lower below Jimmy's view, coming a little bit closer to the ground with each bounce. And as the laws of gravity and God hating children dictate, that ball will eventually stop bouncing and just lie on the ground, and that's when I would've decided that offing myself would probably be a great idea. And I used the ground to depict suicide in this metaphor because Jimmy eventually just jumped out his window and painted the pavement with his cancer-infected brain matter, but fuck him because this story's about me.

I did not want my brain matter over anybody's pavement, nor did I want to confront my problems like a man, so I did the best thing I could do; I went to the hospital and told them I wanted to off myself and they should magic a way into helping me because otherwise I would walk out and jump off the top of the parking garage and leave them with a fantastic lawsuit that would probably cover the funeral costs for my family. Now you're probably wondering “Hey, if you're suicidal, why would you ask for help? Aren't you attention-whoring?” No I'm not, and here's why: people attempt suicide because they want help, they need somebody to catch them before they fall again. They frequently don't have any actual intentions of going through with it, it's just like they're playing mental chicken. That's just what psychology permits. People commit (keyword here) suicide because they no longer want to be alive. If somebody has honest intentions of their life, there's nothing you can do to stop them. It's as easy as going to your local Rite Aid, getting two bottles of sleeping pills, choking them down with liquor, and then going to lie down and float in a reservoir until your senses give in and you sink to the depths and achieve that eternal peace you've always wished for. Killing yourself is remarkably easy, it's a matter of having the stones to do it. Most people don't. I have attempted it before, and I did it without a second thought. And while the voice of logic in my head still told me it was a bad idea, I decided to get help before that voice was stifled by the erratic and rampaging emotions that ever so frequently seized control. I went there voluntarily. Then the Marshall asked me about how we should go about it.

“Well, the easiest way to get you into a clinic immediately would be a 5150.” she said.

“Which is... ?”

“Danger to oneself, others, or gravely disabled. Which means you'll be top priority to go to a psychiatric hospital and under a 72-hour hold.”

“Okay, let's do that.”

“Alright, you'll be under the 72-hour hold, there's no going back now since it's involuntary.” she said. This perplexed me.

“...but I came here by my own volition.” I stated.

“That you did.”

“So it's voluntary.”

“Yes it is.”

“But you just said that a 5150 is an involuntary 72-hour hold.”

“That it is.”

“...so I'm voluntarily admitting myself to a psychiatric hospital involuntarily?”

“So it seems.”

“...I must be fucking crazy.”

“Well, we have two places, you can go to Fremont Hospital.”

“Eh, there's a Taco Bell in Fremont that gave me dysentery once.” I say, as if there's a Taco Bell that didn't. “Where else can I go?”

“John George Psychiatric Pavilion.”

“Sounds fancy, where's that?”

“Close to East Oakland.”

I arrived at Fremont Hospital late Wednesday night. I was checked in by paramedics. Everything on my person was taken from me. This included my shoes of all things. Well, I could've had my shoes if I removed the laces. Having things that I could apparently strangle myself with was a no-no. They asked me several questions about how I was feeling, why I was there, and why in God's good nonexistent name would I have them haul me out there at eleven in the god-damn night. I was apathetic to all of these questions. They honestly didn't mean much to me. I was tired and finally away from my family, so I just wanted to go to sleep. Sleep sounded nice. Sleep always sounded nice.

That's what the suicidal thoughts were tied to; exhaustion. Never an adamant hatred for what God had against me, nor a tremendous sorrow for everything in my life that had gone unsalvageably wrong. Just exhaustion of every and all events. An all-encompassing and nihilistic emptiness, a long-sought silence from all the dogs barking inside my head. The sinister voices in my head that kept me tossing in bed until the sun rose, the meandering psychosis and paranoia that showed up and did whatever it wanted, that I could merely watch ruin my life and leave to have me scramble to scrape up the pieces. It's a lot like being in the backseat of a car being driven by somebody incredibly drunk, where there's nothing you can say to that person to make them stop driving like a fucking nut. So basically Tuesday and Thursday mornings when my mother took me to school.

So while I slept, I had a roommate. That was a different experience, I haven't slept in the same room with somebody else since the last time I had to share a hotel with my family up in Canada. I was paranoid, high-strung, and was terrified for my life because I was completely isolated from everybody I knew, and I had a man who was detained because of a trip on jimson weed spazzing out in his bed every five to ten minutes as my roommate. As would be expected, that first night of sleep wasn't as elegant as I would've wished for. Tomorrow though, I was able to get on meds. Oh boy oh boy, which meant meeting a Psychiatrist assigned to the hospital to keep everybody in check. Fun fact: did you know that in the entire Psychological line of professions that Psychiatrists have the highest rate of depression and suicide? And man I'll tell you, my assigned psychiatrist was no different. He always had that glassy-eyed and perpetually-ill look to his face like he had just gotten done crying. He looked like a Holocaust victim at Auschwitz that found out the porridge that just gave him dysentery was made from his family's ashes by the Hitler Youth. I mean I couldn't blame the guy; he works in a mental hospital where his job is to get a brief look into somebody's miserable life and due to his line of work, his only job is to throw pills at people until they are fixed. There's a good chance that he'll fail, and he'll see them come back to that wretch place again, still fucked up and needing help. Then he'll throw more and hope those work. He can't talk to them; that's what the clinical psychologists, therapists, and social workers do. His job is to listen to how miserable they are, and simply watch as his diagnosis inevitably fails to help these people. I would probably be back there again eventually if I became a Psychiatrist.

There were three floors to the hospital. The first floor is for the normalish people, the people who have had minor psychotic episodes in their life (as if such a thing exists) and are just in need of temporary care. The second floor are for the slightly crazier people, and the third floor is for the people who need to be tied down to their beds, because likely I would assume their meds would cause them to fly so high into the air that they would be dancing among the ethereally departed above the hospital. I was on the second floor, and there were some fucking characters on the second floor. Some of them were the kinds of people who made me feel normal. Who made me—an alcoholic internet terrorist who writes stories about his penis turning into German ducks fornicating—feel normal.

One woman was very nice and worldly; she seemed like a housewife in her late forties. She was technically homeless and was there for setting a grocery cart on fire and they were concerned for her mental health. I honestly couldn't see why, she seemed like somebody who just got arrested and was put here instead of a jail or other correctional facility. But have you ever had that moment? You know that moment where you're talking to somebody who seems completely normal, but then in the middle of the conversation, they just nonchalantly bring something up that makes you realize that something might be slightly off-kilter? When I was talking to this woman, she was talking about earlier events in her life about being a nutritionist, living in Virginia, and how she died a few years ago and was brought back to life by Michael Jackson and that she knew the world was going to end in 2020. I screamed internally “OH MY GOD I'M TALKING TO A CRAZY PERSON” and without changing expression simply replied with a “Huh,” and the conversation continued like I didn't even notice. And she brought it up in conversation so casually, like a past event someone witnessed that was interesting, but instead that incident was that time they saved Christmas with Bob and fought off a bunch of dick-waving vandals who had their donkey show interrupted.

“So how was your day, Lucas?”

“Oh man, I left Ace Hardware and got stuck in traffic, and while I was passing by a movie theater, I saw a dude fucking a dog.”

“Uh... that's fucking weird. Did he get arrested for bestiality?”

“No, because I immediately looked forward and I almost rear-ended a car being driven by a ninja. Also Tommy let me smoke this joint he had, he said it had some weird shit in it called LSD.”

There was another woman who managed to go around screaming hysterically about how her rights were being violated because she couldn't leave of her own volition. She also talked about being possessed by her departed sister named Miss Sally, and frankly I would believe it because I never felt like I was that close to evil. She was the sweetest woman normally, but when she lost it and started screaming, the only thing it served to do was trigger some semblance of PTSD I have and I would go into my room and cover my ears as I teeter back in forth like I'm petering off of a bad trip. Then there was a man who was the most hateful and bitter person I've ever met. He would openly tell people he was conversing with how much he despised them and how much they irritated him while everything he did sought to only benefit himself and to talk about his accomplishments. The best way I could describe the man was that he was Eustice from Courage the Cowardly Dog.

Another interesting character was a man named Miguel. He wasn't a crazy person though. He was just a fucking thug that got lucky dodging prison or a place like John George which was basically a throwaway dumpster for the relapsing nuts that the prison system got tired of dealing with. He tried breaking out. He almost succeeded. He broke down the door out of the containment area to the elevator. He overlooked the fact that the elevators could be merely shut off before he got into one of them, and that there was a stairwell in the opposite direction that he could've tried breaking into. He got moved to the third floor and continued to overlook this fact an additional three times before I assumed he was properly incarcerated and moved to a more suitable facility where he would meet Bubba the prison rapist. I don't think he was mentally unhinged so much as he was god-damn stupid, which doesn't seem like it would be an easy mistake to overlook.

Now, as a writer, I never really understood the magnitude behind the term “The Truth is Stranger Than Fiction” until I began to attempt articulating some of these events in my head. What occurred in that place was the sitcom Scrubs if it took place in a mental care hospital. “Some of this shit is ridiculous, nobody is going to buy this when I leave here. These people are fucking crazy, shit like this isn't a frequent occurrence.” Then I talked to some of them about my life and depressed the Hell out of them and realized “Shit, maybe I do belong here. Maybe this is something that does happen a lot.”

I think the oddest experience there was the fact that being an atheist—or at least somebody who really dislikes how God goes about his business—I met a lot of religious people in there that I conversed with about their faith. Part of me wants to go “Obvious joke about religious people being crazy goes here” but there was one person there who perplexed me quite a lot. She was a heavy-set woman with extremely short hair and a fondness for boots. I would make an obvious dyke joke because I'm an appalling human being, but stay with me because that's not the point. She was a perplexing enigma of a woman who liked to speak in riddles, and part of me initially wanted to say she was pulling pseudo-intellectual shit out of her ass until I talked to her a bit more. I've been sexually assaulted and personally exposed before. Talking to her was a lot like that, except it sort of ended up like those really fucked-up rape fantasies where the victim ended up emotionally broken and enjoying it. I felt like intellectually, I was exposed a great deal about my personal beliefs. It was a metaphorical dance of opposite beliefs that respected each other and felt remarkably at peace with the fact that somebody was very different yet so very similar to the other. Yin and Yang would be a good way to describe it. Hearing this girl go on about how her mother died and how there was some purpose to her life that she was able to adequately interpret through what a jaded cynic like me would interpret as nothing more than stretching coincidences and dumb luck was a bit jarring, because she was aware of it and didn't mind it either. And she was baffled by the fact that I could hold an almost solipsistic and nihilistic viewpoint on life, but simultaneously enjoy the fact that there might not be something more after I'm gone. My suicide was a good reason as to why that belief existed.

“You know, I was really out of it when I tried it eight years ago.” I said. “I came back, though. Did you know what I saw while I was lost? Nothing. No chorus of angels singing, no tunnel with a light at the end, no dastardly inferno and malicious evil, no transcendental ushering into the grandiose ether of reality. It was nothing. Not even calling it darkness would suitably describe and encapsulate the cold silent void that I saw.” And to me, that was nice. For a timid and meek person to be surrounded by raging noise and paranoia his entire life, there was something to me that was utterly beautiful about going to a place that was just silent and utterly devoid of anything else. That's why sleeping there was the best sleep I had in years. I was away from the responsibilities the disappointment the burden my life decided to give to such an unfortunate and ill-suited person like me to handle. When I slept, it was just no thought, just silence.

Life froze while I was in there because when I left that place after five days, everything went back to normal. Except I now was taking happy pills everyday to keep the dogs from barking in my head and I don't have to go to college for the rest of the semester, which seemed like a good decision for my family and I to make had I not made it on my own a month ago by going truant. I figured that maybe this was okay. There's a little bit of change, but not a tremendous amount. At least not yet. I didn't expect to go into that place and leave with everything immediately being hunky-dory. There's still work to be done, and I suppose it's up to me to make a plan for it. It's not like I could rely on God for that.

But If God has a plan for some people, I suppose not all of them will likely be good because the world would be probably be a happier place. Some people are just destined to have the deck stacked against them their entire lives, but instead of being pissed off about it I suppose I've learned to just accept it. Even God is capable of being a dick, but going around with a chip on my shoulder won't do me any good. This is the only life I have, and ending it to stick to the man that I'm not entirely sure exists just because he has it out for me doesn't seem like a safe bet. I can either go to that wonderful void of nothing and say “Well shit I guess he doesn't exist, I think I came here a little too early,” or I'll be in Heaven and God will say “I SAID I WAS GONNA GETCHA, YOU LITTLE CUNT” because he was that pink elephant in the room, and he'll pull a lever and I'll plummet into Hell to do laps in a lake of fire while my Sunday nights are used to act as Satan's personal bitch. Maybe fate has it out for me. The concept of “fate” has always been ridiculous to me. After talking to that woman, it still is. The concept of there being some predetermined destiny for everybody, that's something I think you should be in the crazy house for. Because you can say “well people can change their destiny”, but then at that point I don't count it as destiny because it's not predetermined if you can change it. That's fucking cheating. That doesn't make logical sense to say “There's this concept that this is unchangeable fate for people, but you can change if if you will it.” It's like that bullshit math teachers pull in Elementary School when they say shit like “You can't subtract a bigger number from a smaller number” even though you learn the following year that negative numbers exist.

But maybe I'm going about it wrong. Maybe I shouldn't be thinking logically about something like fate. I guess that's where the concept of faith comes into play, but piss all if I have any of that left. But I guess I don't find it as ridiculous as I did before. I haven't decided if talking to her has changed my life yet. I suppose we'll see as time goes on. Maybe like how I met somebody channeling her dead sister and how another was brought back from the brink by Michael Jackson, maybe this woman was directed by some higher power to change my life. Like Jesus or God, or Thor or Harrison Ford.

I'll do something with myself eventually.

I've hit a wall. I feel like I'm done with this for a while. A hiatus, if you will. I think a lot of you people, you readers have probably gotten the idea that the occurrences in my life haven't exactly been fortunate ones. One of those occurrences have shown up again. Not so much of an occurrence, but the onset of something has shown up. Something that I can't say I can keep under control for much longer. There isn't much I necessarily choose to hide about myself, so this is going here. This is my letter to the public, for all those who care to read to do so. This is largely a letter to myself, as well.

I don't like where my stories are going right now, so I'm stopping. And I just can't bring myself to do it anymore. I can't look at a doc file anymore and say “I like what I see.” I can't look at an incompleted work and force myself to finish it. I look at what I've written lately, and it's gotten out of control. It's going into dark places I can't really look at anymore. I know to some of you they just might strike you as melodramatic or moderately depressing stories, but when I look at them, and I see thoughts, events, idealized situations, projections of bad things I just think I should forget at this point. It's reaching a point where I feel like it's corroding my work, that I am merely a man on a soapbox in an abandoned warehouse near a pier, preaching to an imaginary crowd about—ironically enough—social ostracism and absolute indifference towards the world around one's self. Nobody has cared, and neither have I. Well, that isn't true. I care a little.

Now the big problem with the internet as I've learned to grasp, is that it enables this kind of thought. Most of you people? Probably not going to even read this. The ones that do? Most of you have never even met me, and probably never will. You do not know who I am outside of this place. I am not a person. There is not a living, breathing person on the other side of your monitor, is there? I am merely a screen name. I'm and here for you, and you are here for entertainment. My relevance is tied directly to your outlet for interactivity, nothing more. When you leave your computer, I for all intents and purposes do not exist any longer. You will not carry anything of me or anybody from this place with you. I could be dead tomorrow, and the only difference it will make is a name that is now no longer active. Find somebody else to talk to and IM. Forget inactive name. Continue operation. And I've slowly began to reach the age where I can look at this and go “Is this really okay?”

For people who have always felt small, transparent, or alone most of their lives, the internet seems like an odd play to alleviate those feelings, but we do it out of convenience. I like it, though. Because I want nothing more to just disappear. I want to be irrelevant and not have to worry about being obligated to people. And the internet does a fantastic job of doing that for me. As noted, I can just sign out and disappear, and people would be none the wiser nor would they really honestly care. They never met me or the person outside this place, why would they? But note that this isn't exclusive to the internet. I can go to school, and people talk. But they never think about what that person goes home to. What kind of life they live. How unhappy they are. We simply can't be bothered with that. I think I've made it abundantly clear that I'm just not a very happy person. I don't fundamentally like who I am. So I can come to a place where I don't have to be that. And if I feel like occasionally showing who I am, people don't notice, or they merely look away. I suppose that's what I get for expecting better from people, but I can hardly expect anything from myself so I suppose it's probably karma.

Now I sit here in my room at the crack of dawn, sitting in this chair by myself in complete and utter silence. Well fine, the typing makes noises, at least. Now, the ultimate irony behind all this is that the only people who will read this, already know. And you people are the only ones who are helping me keep my sanity in this midlife crisis of mine. And that's what I'm calling it because I can't realistically see life past 40, so there you go for another morbid thought. The people who should read this, probably won't. It's just a blog on the internet that people hardly read, which functions largely as my archive. The people that should read it for themselves, and the people who I want to read it—for my sake—won't even notice. This entire confession was pointless. Nothing will change. There will be no lifeline or alleviation or counterpoint presented to me. As I sit here creatively bankrupt of any more stories to tell, I'm probably the only person who will notice. And I won't do anything about it.

One of these days I'm going to do something productive with myself, I promise.

Everything will be okay.

Out on the college campus there was a park for students commuting to their next class to walk through and enjoy, or during their break to lounge about and take in the pristine greenery amidst a jungle of concrete and masonry buildings. There were a few benches located there, some of them under trees. And there sitting on one of the benches was a woman, a girl one would say. She didn't look that old; most likely a freshman at the university. She dressed in a rather conservative classy manner, but it did nothing to hide her youthful features. Her face hid any expression that could've escaped out.
“Okay, I'm here.” It was a young man's voice that caught her attention. When she looked up, she saw a worn, slightly bitter young man.
“Oh, so you are.” she responded. “I didn't know if you'd show up or not.” He stiffly settled onto the other end of the bench, almost careful to keep his distance.
“I considered it.”
“You seem upset.” she said. He glanced over, a blank expression exuding an exhausted hostility.
“Nah, you think?”
“Just making an observation.”
“And?”
“Just... noticing it.”
“Good God you're something, you know that?” He attempted to stand up and leave, but there was a tug at his sleeve where she grabbed it.
“You're not leaving yet.” He got flustered and pulled his arm loose.
“Like Hell I'm not.” As he turned to storm off, he heard her call out to him.
“You know I'm worried, right?” The words stopped him in his tracks. His eyebrow twitched a bit.
“It sure doesn't seem like it.” He started to walk again, but then he sighed and went back to the bench and sat down, if not a little closer to her.
“You are not good at these kinds of things.” he muttered.
“I know. I... I know.”
“You've never been. It's fucking irritating, is what it is.”
“I know.”
“It's like you're always fucking there, yet all you can do is stare blankly. Or act like nothing is wrong.”
“...I know.” He began to grow irritated by her meek responses.
“If you fucking know, then why can you say you're worried? ACT. FUCKING. WORRIED. If you fucking know, then why don't you do anything to change it if you know it upsets me, that it makes you look like a fucking awful friend?” His yelling began to draw attention in the serene park. He looked around a bit, blushed slightly and the let silence settle back in as the few glancing passerbys began to thin out again.
“...it's hard.” she said.
“No it fucking isn't. No. It. Fucking isn't. It's not hard at all." Her detached and innocent voice began to assert itself a bit more.
“What do you want me to do? I don't know what you expect me to do.”
“CARE.”
“But I do.”
“ACT LIKE IT.”
“How? What do you expect from me? What do you want me to say?” He seemed exasperated by her naive responses, but he honestly didn't know the answer himself. It was an abstract question that he never really thought about.
“I just...” his voice began to crack. She looked down a bit, then looked straight up.
“Why somebody like me?” she asked. “I thought it's been established that you probably wouldn't want somebody like me to help with that, anyway.”
“I probably shouldn't.” It slightly bothered her that he was so quick to agree. “But I suppose I can't help it.”
“Why?”
“You're always there, anyway.”
“I suppose. But still, I'm not the kind of perso--”
“Stop assuming things about yourself. What are you afraid of? Do you think you'll upset me more?”
“Yes.”
“That I won't want to be friends with you anymore?”
“Yes.”
“That you'll send the wrong message trying to help?”
“Yes.”
“That you're the kind of person who finds it hard to express themselves to people?”
“Yes.”
“...Well okay then.” He should've expected such upfront and poignant answers from her, but it still surprised him with how quick she was. He sighed and looked up at the trees swaying above his head.
“I just... I'm just tired of pretending that everything's fine. That everything's peachy. Even as we talk, I just can't bring myself to just say anything without completely detaching myself from it.”
“Mmm.”
“...fuck, my folks, they have so much faith in me. I don't know what the Hell I'm doing here. I don't want to be here right now. I'm just. Not. Happy. Is that a sin?” He turned towards her. “Why is it wrong to admit that I'm unhappy? Am I not entitled to it? Why can't I be entitled to that?”
“...well, why can't you?”
“NOBODY CARES. I know what the problem is, but it's just sitting there. I don't know what the Hell I can do, if I can do anything. It's not like I can bring it up to my folks, they think that it's all bullshit anyway. They'll think that it's all in my head, that there's something biting at my conscience or that I'm just stressed over school. Why am I not allowed to just say that I'm miserable and that would be fine?”
“Well, I can say I understand that... but why me? I don't know how to help either.”
“Because you're unjudging.” he conceded. “At least you act like it.”
“...No, even I can judge people, even if I don't openly express it.”
“That's fine with me,” he said. “Well, okay, it isn't. If you judged me, that would be nice.”
“...How?”
“Because it shows you care.”
“Hmm?”
“Why would you judge how I act if you didn't care?” he paused. “I... I just want somebody to at least PRETEND like they care, even if they don't. That would be alright. But it's.... it's nice, you know?”
“I suppose.”
“It's nice. I want to look at somebody and tell him that I'm unhappy. That I'm miserable. That I feel like I'm a defective, broken person who's going nowhere in his life. That I don't have to keep this facade up.” He began trembling a bit while his voice started to turn hoarse. “I know I'm not a very stable or good person. I know that I'm angry, that I'm quick to judge and lash out, that I can be remarkably cruel in how I act. Or that I'm weak and exhausted with everything and that I just want to give up. Why can't somebody come along and see all of that, and just tell me that it's fine? That everything will be okay?” Tears began to stream down his face a bit. “But who the fuck would want to do that? Who would dedicate themselves to doing that? Why would somebody even waste their time with it? I mean, if I found somebody like that, I certainly couldn't do it. I'd give up on them. I think they wouldn't be worth my time. It would be—” he paused and collected himself. “It would be too much for me to deal with. Which is why I understand, I guess, why nobody else probably would, either.” There was no talking after that. No words, the cease in discussion only occasionally punctuated by a few hiccups and sobs as he tried to calm himself down a bit.
“...I wouldn't mind it.” she said, breaking the silence. He glanced over at her, then quickly turned away realizing how he must've looked. “I know that I can't say much to help or do much of anything. I'm simply not very good at that.”
“You really aren't. You're pretty much an idiot.”
“I know I am.” She inched closer to him and paused, cautiously mulling over the words she was going to use. “But I suppose even I can do that. I've known you long enough that there really isn't anything you can do to upset me at this point.”
“...you have been a pain in my ass for a very long time, haven't you?”
“Yes, I have. And I will continue to be, probably for a while.” He chuckled a bit. A genuine smile crossed his face for the first time in a few weeks. He composed himself before standing up, he didn't really feel like saying much of anything. She got up and followed. They began walking to the subway station.
“...I still don't know what the Hell I'm going to do.” he muttered.
“Neither do I.” Her response made him grimace a bit. “But it will work out.”
“...I hope.” She opened, then closed her mouth while she thought. She finally came up with something.
“It might get worse at first, but in the end, everything will probably be okay.” He nodded as he heard her answer. They both paid and boarded the subway. They sat down, he closed his eyes and dozed off. She leaned against him.

Just a word, if you will.

Now if I can put my serious pants on for a second, I'll provide some sort of update as to what's been going on lately and why you've seen a trickling decline of posts over the past few months.

I am creatively bankrupt.

No really, I am. One might attribute it to random spikes of crippling depression and self-loathing incapacitating my work ethic, an exhaustion of ideas that I could enjoy working with, or judging from my recent pieces over the past year, a pursuit of something more significant. You can check the box in for all three.

As school has come barreling in and the time to sit back inside the hole in my wall is slowly disappearing in favor if big scary grown-up problems compounded by agonizing moodswings, I can't fucking keep up anymore. It has put a halt on what I want to write, what I want to do with these little fables of mine. Funny stories are good. Funny stories stick with people and put a smile on their face when they think about it. And I'm grateful that the small niche of the internet I sit in still remembers some of those stories about random murderous rampages, drug-induced deliriums, and frankly fucked-up bullshit most people care to turn a blind eye to. But to me, they've become like one-night stands. They're fun, I'll remember them, but I won't really remember them for anything significant other than the experience I've gained in pleasuring an audience with more than one kind of wooden utensil. They're cheap fun thrills is what they are. But they aren't really anything significant or important. And frankly, I feel like I've exhausted that spectrum of writing that relies PURELY on shock humor and horror to amuse people. Note the word “purely”, as I could never stop writing stories without having elements of that style of humor with them. It's just what I do.

But bear in mind that a lot of these horrific stories as noted in the heading of the blog if any of you have read it, are power trips. A lot of these stories are written due to a power struggle, to self-insert oneself into a situation where one is no longer completely powerless in a terrible situation, but in the irony of humor becomes one of the most despicable human beings alive. It's to show how people are miserable but even given the strength to overcome a situation often abuse it and just go fucking nuts, or something. I'm not sure myself. But while still there, there really isn't much of a power struggle in my life anymore to constitute writing those kinds of stories as often. I don't feel like going on random tangents where I fight my way out of Hell to arm-wrestle with Zeus on the moon while a herd of goats are fucking in a crater. Although that actually sounds like an awesome story, so I might capitalize on that idea further some other time.

So I've been trying to write a lot of things. Psychological horror. Mystery. Fantasy. Tragedy. Drama. A lot of them feel something close to comfortable, but aren't there just yet. So yes, there will be a tonal shift in some of the stories I'm going to write. Not all of them are going to be funny. Not all of them are going to be morbid and corrosive. In fact while a lot of these feel right to do, I'm exiting my comfort zone. I've never had to portray serious drama before. I never tried to write a tragedy to evoke sorrow out of somebody. I never tried to paint abject terror without attempting to be ironic. Or oddly enough, I've never really written anything really, well, happy. Maybe happy in that “oh that cynical motherfucker got his revenge and satisfaction” sort of way, but nothing really heartwarming.

So I'm trying to take that narrative voice of mine and I'm trying something different. Not all of it will be what you people are used to, and you might not certainly enjoy the change in pace. And it will probably take a lot more time because now I'm writing a lot more for myself here. And instead of winging a story and finishing one in a sitting at the spur of a moment, I'm taking weeks, if not months figuring out what the Hell I'm trying to convey, or what the Hell I'm feeling while I write some of this tripe. Note that this isn't going to be completely different than what I write; from what I'm told I have a fairly distinct narrative voice that I probably couldn't change even if I wanted to. I'll still have the dry sarcasm, the bluntness, the language I typically use. Just expect some stories that are a bit different, and I'm just going to need a little more time than usual.

With that said, I have some shit in the pipeline. NaNoWriMo gave me a new novel idea that despite not finishing is still in the works. My Dear Remi is actually going fairly well and I'm fleshing out the purpose of that novel a bit more extensively, and I've been dancing around the possibility of kicking Beautiful World back up some time. Again, a lot of ideas being started, but none really being completed. Much like life, there are some pieces where I actually want to revisit, to continue whatever storyline that might be in there. But that's up to the discretion of whether or not it's appropriate. Sometimes something deserves to be carried on, to be continued. But as much as you want it, some of it also needs to be let go and you just got to leave it as it is. So I'm sorting that out as well. But last thing I have to say is that expect SOMETHING in the coming week or so. I got some wind behind my sails so there should be a new piece coming.

I hope.

Alice Williams and her unhappy life.

This story is about a girl named Alice Williams.

Alice Williams was what one would call "needy." She was also what one would call a whore. She slept around a lot. A lot. One cannot emphasize enough how much she slept around. There was a news story recently about a grandmother who had sex with 200 men in only two years. Now there are two things that need to be said about that. First off, it says a lot about how the standards of men have fallen far enough to be grinding against the pavement to stick their penises into a woman for a sexual experience that also lends itself to the previous metaphor. Secondly, that was the kind of grandmother Alice Williams would be if she lived to be 62 if the myriad of STDs she would've accumulated over the years hadn't killed her at that point. But that was the beauty of three-stooges syndrome on the immune system, so with all those corruptors laying siege on her body all at once, they might somehow kill each other or cancel one another out and avoid striking her with death.
But we wasn't always like this. She used to be such a sweet girl, honestly. It really is a pity. See, Alice Williams was what one would call "a mistake". Her family never had much money, and they already had a son by the time she was born. There wasn't a place for her in the family. She was an outsider to them, and they concentrated their efforts on their intended offspring, Peter. But as time went on, it became more and more apparent to her parents that Peter was a candy-ass and for a lack of a more elegant word, a failure. Oh boy howdy was Peter a failure. Of course so were the parents, as the father was a drop-out who drunkenly knocked his kids from room to room, and the mother was stuck in neurotic blissful wonderland from a staggering amount of antidepressants. But little Alice never stopped trying so hard to please the family that was hardly even aware of her existence. She kept her grades up, was a model student, and despite all the agony she was enduring, a smile hid all of it and people hardly knew. At least they didn't, at first.

"Oy."
"..."
"Hey."
"..."
"Fucking Christ, I'm talking to you." The boy started snapping his fingers.
"...Oh, whoopsie."
"What the Hell are you staring at? The crosswalk's been blinking for a few seconds already, move your ass."
"...Right, thank you."
'What an odd girl,' he thought. Alice had a blank stare on her face as she just looked ahead. She was the kind of girl that while talking to somebody, she'd nod and respond and smile, but simply put, she was not there. It was the kind of blank and empty stare where the gears inside her head were moving and thinking too much to bother reflecting anything on the surface. When the stared at her, he was about 13 or 14 from how she looked. Of course the boy didn't stare long, as it was 110 degrees out and he simply wanted to speed home as quickly as possible. This changed because before he could continue back on his way, he heard a horn blaring behind him. Alice didn't move, she simply stood in the middle of the crosswalk in a daze.
"Oh for the love of..." He ran out into the street, grabbed her hand, and pulled the girl with him onto the street. "Jesus, what the fuck's wrong with you?" She didn't snap from her daze. She just sort of stared at the gangly boy blankly. Alice's complexion was like a mannequin; pale, sterile, but chiseled perfectly. There was almost a falseness about her face that the boy couldn't quite put his finger on. The only real part of her appeared to be a bruise on her temple, one of origin the boy cared not to inquiry. Also like a mannequin, he wouldn't mind seeing her with her clothes being removed like most of us saw in our youths while standing around in the women's department at Sears.
"HEY." he yelled.
"......I dozed off again, didn't I?" Alice snapped back to reality.
"You sure did." The boy pointed at a red car going through the intersection while the driver gave the two children the finger. She trembled a bit while she continued to stand there on the other side of the crosswalk, slowly coming back to herself. The late August heat wasn't being kind to either of them, blowing a stale, hot wind while the dust in the air stuck to their sweat-soaked skin.
"...I don't want to go home." she said, her lifeless glare steadfast.
"Hmm." he grunted. The boy didn't care. His dad just recently abandoned his family while he himself recently took up alcoholic consumption as a pastime. One could assume that patience for somebody else's problems let alone his own wasn't expansive. Maybe his significant other at that point in time, but otherwise nothing.
"Let's go get something to eat." he muttered. Okay, so maybe the boy cared a little. Somebody just zoned out in the middle of the crosswalk and almost got pegged by a car, and as shamelessly apathetic as the boy was, he couldn't simply do nothing. He probably should've, but he didn't because he was a dumb bastard. And so they went to Carl's Junior because it was either that or the Weinerschnizel, and if the boy wanted Alice dead, it would've been a swifter more painless death getting hit by a car than to eat at the Weinerschnizel.
"So your brother's that loser kid Peter, right?" he asked. She nodded while she slowly picked at her fries and ate them individually. "Fuck man, that kid makes me look like a socialite. He's awkward to be around, even for me. And I'm a drunk." She didn't really say anything. She was clearly preoccupied, but appeared to be listening. "Where'd you get that bruise on your head, anyway?" She didn't say anything. She clenched the side of her face and ran them up her forehead through her hair. A throbbing headache persisted in her skull. The boy reached into his pocket and pulled out a prescription bottle and rolled it across the table to her. "Those will probably help." Painkillers, they were. She was getting ready to say something but was stricken with anxiety. A panicked look darted across her face, and she started to silently sob to herself a bit.
"I... I can't stop myself anymore." she whimpered. the boy sighed.
"With...?"
"Some kid at school wouldn't stop leaving me alone. He was kind of hyper and quick and pushy, but everyone thought he was nice. When I went to tell the teachers and the other students about it, they thought I was lying."
"Hmm."
"So he kept harassing me, and he eventually figured out what I did, and..." she paused a bit. It was like something just strangled her throat to cut her off.
"Did you just have a stroke or what?"
"...It's nothing." She was lying. She paused a bit and recollected her bearings. "Do... do you know what it's like to go through your entire life only to feel like nobody's ever noticed that you're even alive?"
"Nope, my life sort of kicks ass." he was lying, too.
"Oh..." her voice grew weak as her breathing got heavier. "I don't know what to do. I don't know how much longer I can keep this up."
"I don't see why you would keep anything up." he said.
"What do you mean?"
"If people don't care about you, why try to keep a facade up and attempt to please them if it's killing you? Seems kind of stupid." She didn't have anything to say to that, because as embittered and poorly-intentioned and exhausted and clearly drunk as the boy might've been, he brought a valid point forth. Maybe he was just trying to shut her up and didn't care about her problems, or maybe he was half-assedly attempting to make an effort. But either way it felt nice for her. It wasn't some teacher's generic pat on the back for good grades or somebody complimenting her on a job well done. It was somebody sitting down with her, talking to her, listening to her, engaging her in conversation. Granted it was a drunken High-Schooler phasing in and out of consciousness due to heatstroke, it was a start.
"...You're a better person than people paint you." Alice said with a slight smile on her face.
"I don't pay attention to how people paint me."
"You come across as sort of an asshole according to some people."
"You don't say."
"There are also rumors where people thought you had something to do with a kid named Charles Finnigan getting set on fire."
"......You don't say." He clearly wasn't coherent any longer. Which was a good time to end the conversation, as the time was getting close to 4pm. If she couldn't beat her father home from work as a part-time manager at the local Rite-Aid, he would beat her in the more violent meaning of the word for getting home late.
"Well, thanks a lot...?" she paused, waiting for him to speak.
"You don't need to know my name." he muttered under his breath.
"Oh..." After all that, she felt honestly a bit hurt. He might've sensed it in her voice, so he slightly changed his answer and he sulkingly pulled himself to his feet.
"You'll probably see me around." After that, he left the shabby fast-food restaurant while Alice just stood there, pondering to herself. Of course she didn't ponder long because she had to make haste back home. She gave her salutations to her mother as she came into the door. Her mother didn't say anything, she simply sat at the dinner table resting her chin on her palm. Alice scampered off into her room and fell on her bed, her head still pounding. She opened up the bottle the boy gave her and saw the white capsules in there. It was like swallowing a piece of chalk when she took it. The pounding in her head started to subside, and she slumped on her bed as her mind began to race. She felt a strange kind of joy in her bleak surroundings after her conversation with the boy. She lied there in her humid room, her body tensing up as her head started to pound again. She began to sweat, and her thoughts began to get more abstract as time went on, as if reacting to the pills she took. She was in a delusional ecstasy before her mind went blank and she seized up, then suddenly became winded and passed out on her bed, the rapid pulsing of her chest acting as a rhythm to listen and fall asleep to.
The following days were not pleasant to her. At school, that creepy freshman boy continued to persist and bother her, and being the unassertive and quivering girl she was, she did nothing to stop him. He kept pushing himself on her and as he got closer and closer, it was something she frequently grew used to. She didn't like it, but having that unnerving student obsess over her was gratifying to her in an odd way. She existed to somebody, regardless of the intentions behind it. Her weak constitution didn't have the heart to bear with the negative intentions behind it, so she simply took it at face value. Of course that didn't matter, there was something else that she was talking to, somebody that seemed to help her despite the incessant, unsettling torture and stalking this creepy freshman boy put her through.

"That's... sad."
"It stinks, it what it is." the boy commented. It was a dead cat on the side of the road Alice and the young man were looking at as they walked home from school.
"...It probably was a cute cat. Just stretched outlying on the side of the road as if it was a sunny porch in the middle of the day."
"I think the stretching is probably rigor mortise." Which was besides the point, of course.
"It probably belonged to somebody. I wonder how the family must feel losing it."
"No idea, but it's just going to be a decomposing pile of nothing in a few weeks anyway."
"...probably. But at least the family will probably remember it."
"Hmm."
"I guess it's insignificant in the grand scheme of things, right? Most people will just see it as roadkill, anyway. Just something to walk by."
"Hmm." As they walked, the girl stopped briefly.
"You know, it's been a while since I've seen that creepy kid..." she said. "Not that I care, but I found it odd that he left me alone."
"He's dead, that's why." the young man said.
"...What?"
"It was on the news a few days ago in the evening. Poor kid burned alive in a pizzeria oven at Frank's."
"Oh good Christ that sounds horrifying."
"He probably had it coming. I didn't like him." he said. Yes, after informing somebody of a heinous murder, the best the young man could come up with was that he deserved it. Alice oddly agreed with him, a perplexedly hateful thing to agree to for her.
"...he wasn't a good person." she nodded. "Although..."
"Although...?"
"It's nothing." She couldn't say it. If she could keep one thing about that, was that as creepy as the boy who died in the tragic pizzeria accident was, she did feel special, in a twisted sort of way. And despite being a very pretty girl, she never felt particularly attractive; she felt as if she was just a piece of scenery that blended itself into the background of the school. But with the dead boy and the infrequent bouts of randomly finding her new friend, she started to feel empty again. She began warming up to the idea of people pining over her. Over time she started to assert herself more in what she wore, as if to tempt fate more than she already had at that point. Her jeans went to shorts that could mistakenly get shorter whenever you looked at them, and dress shirts went to looser-fitting tops. Her hair went from tied up and out of the way to being let down. And people started to take notice. It put a smile on her face. And with this, she decided to do something the next time she got an opportunity. That one person that was sitting on her mind frequently that reminded her of the void in her that kept growing. Perhaps he could stop it from growing any further. Which luck eventually had it in for her, and in her pounding empty head she recognized somebody on her way home after school one day.

"Um... hi." she squeaked out.
"Oh, it's you." the young man said. "It's been a while. A couple of weeks, I think?"
"Do you have a minute?" she asked, her knees swaying back and forth as they stood waiting at the crosswalk.
"Uh sort of I guess, why?" She tried to talk, but nothing came out of her mouth. She felt as if she was sweating and her face was heating up.
"Do you think we can go get something to eat?"
"Uh sure."
"Um..." she was recollecting herself. "At somewhere nicer, perhaps?" She angled a sunhat she was wearing downward a bit to avoid making eye contact. The young man was dense. And drunk. Predominantly drunk, as it took him a while to actually catch on to what she was getting at.
"...Oh. OH. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh dear." He was flustered. Not angry, but flustered in an uncomfortable bashful sense. Alice was caught off guard by this. She unnerved a drunkard with a usually flat disposition and had him shuffling about awkwardly like a child who needed to use the bathroom.
"W-w-what...?" she stammered out, equally uncomfortable.
"Fucking Hell, I don't like where this is going..." he muttered to himself.
"What?"
"I err uhh well I uh..." He turned around. He sighed. "Sorry."
"What?" She couldn't hear him.
"I said I'm sorry." he muttered. Alice's chest seized up. "There's som--"
"NO!" she grabbed him and turned him around. He was looking away from her as she began to cry. "I DON'T WANT TO HEAR NO AS AN ANSWER!"
"But I'm i--"
"YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE IN THIS AWFUL PLACE THAT TREATS ME LIKE A PERSON! YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE WHO IS ACTUALLY AWARE THAT I EXIST! YOU'RE ONE OF THE ONLY REASONS HERE THAT I HAVEN'T LOST MY MIND YET!" She was in hysterics. She felt like the one line she had tied to reality was starting to disappear.
"Fuck, can't I just be a friend?"
"I DON'T NEED A FRIEND, I NEED SOMEBODY TELL ME THAT I MEAN SOMETHING, THAT THEY'RE COMMITTED TO ME! I WANT TO BE NEEDED, DAMMIT! I WANT TO COMPLETE SOMEBODY!"
"Jesus fucking Christ." The young man was exasperated. "If you honestly want a relationship, you could probably do a Hell of a lot better than somebody like me, anyway." Of course this only infuriated her more.
"WHAT DOES THAT SAY ABOUT MY STANDARDS, THEN? THAT THEY'RE LO--" She paused and stumbled a bit. She clenched her head and fell to her knees. Her migraines were coming back again. The boy walked over and started digging through his backpack. He pulled out another bag of pills and set it in front of her.
"There isn't much in there, but they should help for a bit." Her face grew red with anger.
"YOU FUCKING BASTARD!" And she stormed off. Then she awkwardly walked back, muttered "Thank you..." and grabbed the pills and stormed back off again. The young man let out a sigh and slumped against a fence on the street. Somebody approached him and he looked up at a blonde girl staring at him on the ground.
"...You saw the whole thing, didn't you?" he painfully asked.
"Yes."
"I think I upset her a lot."
"Probably."
"...You don't want me to do a damn thing about it, do you?"
"Seems dangerous to involve yourself any further."
"Noted." he muttered.
And the short blonde girl was right. Alice's psychosis wasn't particularly stable after that. "Loose" would be a good word to use if one were to include the vulgar context of the word at that point. She felt she wasn't good enough for the young man. The blithering drunk with a sad grip on life, she wasn't even good enough for him. The one person she managed to connect to didn't want to take her, and this played tricks on her mind. Her head never felt so bloated and painful yet so vastly empty. When she got home, in tears and stumbling to keep her composure, her family didn't notice. Her father was too busy beating the shit out of Peter for failing so much in his first trimester report card. She got straight As, on that note. She went up into her room and lied back down on her bed as she stared at the ceiling.
"I want to be good enough for somebody." were all the words that left her mouth before she passed out and went to sleep.

And now it was the start of the third trimester. It was mid February, and to Alice, nothing of note occurred between then and now. Her head still felt empty, and she couldn't remember a single thing or memorable person in the past five or six months. That was probably for the best. As the bell rang, she stood up and made her way out of fourth period and began the walk home from school. She waited at the crosswalk, and there beside her without her noticing, was the young man that she hadn't really talked to in a very long time. At least not since that last incident. He was taller. And still sort of ugly. And he still had that malaised look in his eye.
"...You're a bastard." she said.
"I thought I was a fucking bastard."
"Hmm."
"Speaking of fucking..." he continued to look forward. "There've been a lot of unsavory rumors about you going around the school, you know."
"I know."
"...You should probably fix that."
"I don't see the point."
"That's concerning."
"I. Just. Really. Don't. Care." Each pause punctuated her words.
"Hmm." He paused and waited for the crosswalk to change. "I care. If that means anything."
"...It doesn't." She was lying. That time he knew it. He noticed her looking away the moment she said it. His abuse of alcohol at this point allowed him to maintain some level of self-awareness. There was more awkward silence between the two. Until one of them made an attempt to speak up.
"So uh what have you been up to?" she inquired.
"I tried killing myself recently." the boy said.
"...Oh."
"If you asked me how it went, I might have to hit you." She didn't. Not just because she was certain that he'd follow through with a threat like that, either. For a brief moment, it gave her a glance into herself. She just assumed that the boy didn't lead a particularly happy life but she never legitimately inquired about it. It filled her with anxiety. Her mind immediately went into denial. She looked away the entire time the two crossed the street. Something her head went off while she walked. Did she snap? Did she go crazy? Did she have an epiphany. She wasn't entirely sure herself. The only thing she thought of was what to do. Alice grabbed the young man's hand.
"Follow me."
"Wait what?"
"Shut up, just follow me." She led him back to her house. It was empty save her mother, which meant it was empty. The young man felt the same way he felt back home, which was rather unpleasant for him. He didn't have time to think though, he was shoved into Alice Williams' tiny little room as she closed the door behind them. Her room was small. Almost cozy, even.
"Isn't your mother here?" the young man asked while Alice began to undress him on the bed.
"She won't even notice." she responded.
"Isn't your father a fucking nutcase?"
"He got kicked out and is staying at my uncle's across town."
"What about your brother?"
"I think he's probably going to kill himself pretty soon, he's been mumbling about Richard Tory again."
"Shouldn't you stop that? I mean I know him as a sniveling little shit, but he IS your brother."
"That's what he is. I can't do anything to stop him, he doesn't listen to anybody anymore."
"Hmm. Well, you cou--" he was cut off when Alice pressed her mouth against his. Alice didn't know why he wasn't stopping her this time. This was the first time she actually took note of this. But she frankly didn't care, because here he was. And he stayed with her for the rest of the night. Frankly it was exhausting, but for the only night in her brief life she did not listen to the vacuous woman thoughts in her head. In the back of her head,she knew this wasn't going to last, but she frankly didn't care. When she awoke the following morning, the young man was sitting at the foot of the bed. It was about 5am.
"I heard somebody pacing around a lot out the door."
"Hmm?"
"I don't sleep well with people moving about." he said.
"It's probably Peter. He probably shouldn't be up this early."
"I've heard him muttering bad things. Then he went back to bed." He stopped speaking for a bit. "You know if your dad has any guns?"
"Uh... yeah. In his closet he has a hunting rifle and a pistol."
"...Mind if I borrow one just in case he snaps? He was saying some pretty crazy shit when he was pacing around."
"Alright." The boy got up and left Alice's room briefly and came back with the hunting rifle.
"Your mother sleeps like a sedated wildebeest. I don't even think she noticed me walking into the bedroom."
"One more time." she said.
"...We have school in a few hours, we should really go back to sleep."
"Aren't you late almost every single day?"
"...Touche."
"So......"
"I can't feel my legs already as it is."
"Please?" she asked. This felt like a dagger in the young man's heart, and he sighed.
"I'm going to be too tired to move after all of this." She smirked a bit.
They stopped briefly. They heard the clicking of a gun from the hallway. There was a bit of silence, but then they heard the front door slam.
"...That's not good." he muttered.
"My head hurts again." Alice clutched her face and pulled her covers over herself.
"You have nobody to blame but yourself." He dug into his backpack and pulled out more pills. "That's the last I can give you. My doctor's probably wondering where the Hell they're all going." He got dressed, stumbled a bit, a picked up the small hunting rifle.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"...to keep an eye on your brother. I can't guarantee that I'll be back later." With that, he nodded and left while she just sat in her bed. She didn't take the pills. She shoved them into her drawer for later and went back to sleep. When she awoke, there were police officers and such in her house, talking to her mother. She overheard what had happened at the school. Her brother was no longer alive. They said a single shot to the chest killed him while he was shooting up the school. They don't know who shot him or where he disappeared off to. They said the streets and roads were barren that morning, so there were no witnesses to the possible attacker who stopped Peter. Alice sat in bed and then proceeded to not hear a thing. When she finally got up, she knew that she probably wouldn't see him for a while.

A while turned to about 8 months. It was the end of October now. She didn't pay attention or notice anything anymore. That big empty void became larger since then. Her father finally left, and her mother simply sits at home all die while living off of money that Alice's father sends her. Nothing changed in the absence of her brother. She was still nothing more than a phantom or an object to people. She one day went into the Carls Junior and ordered something to eat. She looked in the corner of the dingy fast-food joint there he was. Nothing about his appearance had changed. Except that he was taller. Again. When he looked up, there she was, sitting down in front of him.
"Hello." she said. There was a vague bit of enthusiasm that permeated the flatness of her voice.
"You realize that this is probably the last time you'll see me again, right?" He said while eating. She paused a bit.
"...Yeah I sort of got that feeling."
"I'm moving."
"Where to?"
"Don't know, honestly."
"Why?"
"Getting evicted."
"...Oh."
"Yeah." She had nothing to say. She wanted to feel something. She couldn't, though. He then pulled out an envelope and handed it to her.
"But I still have the ones you gave me from before." she said.
"This is different." he stated. "Open it later when you need it." She took it and placed it in her coat pocket.
"...You're a good friend and a good person." Alice said.
"I'm really not." the young man muttered. "I'm really... really not."
"Maybe objectively you aren't," she began, "But I guess my standards are just low then, aren't they?" He laughed a bit.
"Alright fine, I'll settle for that." He stood up and shook his tray off into the garbage, and walked back over to her booth. She stood up to meet him. He hugged her.
"Good luck." he said. "You're going to need it." As he began to walk away, he heard her tiny voice say something.
"Don't leave." Her pitch was flat. "Who's going to help me now?"
"Learn to stand on your own. I sure as Hell know it's not easy, but it has to be done."
"...if I can't?"
"Well, that's it then, isn't it?" He laughed, and walked out. That really was the last time she saw him. Her face was cold, and like a drone she went on for the rest of the week in a lifeless daze. Her head started pounding again. She lied on her bed and she couldn't think. She eventually went into her drawer and saw the pills that the young man left her several months ago. Alice grabbed all of them and with a bottle of water washed them all down. She stumbled through her room to her door, and went outside to help clear her head. The pills weren't enough. Her head felt as if it was being lifted from her body, and her coordination faltered. She went rummaging through her coat and got out the small envelope hoping there was more. When she opened it, there wasn't anything in there except a note. She opened it and only a single word was on it.
"......Did I honestly never get his name?" she spit out, her speech starting to slur. She started to laugh a bit. Or at least she tried to, her mouth decided to stop working. Then her legs decided to stop working. When she fell over, her head smacked the side of street curb and she hit the ground. Her mind began to go blank again. The great big void inside of it seemed to have finally won. She thought for a bit about where she was and what she was doing and why, but what was left of her mind succumbed and was finally enveloped, and that was it for Alice.