APPREHENSION

I woke up too early and couldn’t fall back asleep. I dreamt I was falling down a long tunnel. It was a tunnel made of lacerated people of different races and sexes and such, but they all had my face. They laughed at me.

As I fell, I recall a flesh-colored spider chasing me down, waiting for me to hit the bottom and eat me. This was evidently some trap it devised, this spider requiring as much psychological suffering for nourishment as flesh and fluids.

When I hit the bottom, impaled on hairy spikes made of legs the spider had shed like a snake sheds his skin, the spider started to eat me. I screamed and kicked, but it didn’t help. I could feel teeth sinking into me, moving upwards, swallowing me.

I’d set up my room to be the most comfortable thing for something like me. Dark, because the sunlight stabs my eyes and gives me a splitting, screeching headache like tearing metal in my mind. By the end of the day I feel like the sun is eating me alive like a million cockroaches.

Cold, because if it hits sixty I sweat like it’s eighty. At ninety degrees, standard this time of year, I’m so drenched in the stuff that a fifteen foot radius is uninhabitable. The stench is like rotting fruit on a whale carcass in a cess pool. So bad, in fact, that everyone in the immediate area will not hesitate to tell me about it.

Dry, because of the aforementioned problem. My lips get chapped to the point of being rock-solid, but I prefer that to soaking in my own goddamn perspiration. I have to soak my lips in Vaseline so they’re greasy and slick, like fish-lips. I feel like I’m dolling myself up for a night on the town, but all the girls look at me like I crawled out of the sewer drenched in the blood of children so screw it. Life is life, she doesn’t bend to my will.

I lay in bed, on one end of the attic. Away from the window. I painted it black, because I always fear opening my eyes and looking out and seeing something staring back at me.

Bookshelves, a computer at the table and a rug. Night table with a clock and lamp. Boxes of shit I didn’t unpack when I moved in.

My mattress lay on the floor. Why? Because that’s where it is. Why the Hell would you ask such a stupid goddamn question?

I can see, to a degree, in the night. I see the outlines of things, the red light of the alarm clock and the outlines of the bookshelves and boxes.



IN the blinding light of school in daylight, I walk through hallways. It’s something I do in a zombie-like fashion, though it’s not (in fact) some pretentious protest of the fact that everyone else goes through their lives without any real, significant meaning. Just from what daylight does to me.

There’s a girl, I don’t know her name, who hangs out with the people who take every morning to seek me out like vultures and surround me. They work like coyotes or raptors, Getting me when I’m somewhere I can’t get out of like the bathroom or the locker. They all throw their various insults, all designed to take away whatever cornerstone I have holding me up. I sometimes wonder if they’ll just keep killing me until all that’s left is my body.

The one girl, though, she doesn’t do it. She wears a blink-182 t-shirt, which identifies her as either on the very far edge of what is considered ‘normal’ this year, or in the exact center of a three-circle ven diagram of popular, hippie and emo. Or maybe popular, edgy and goth, if you have a more positive view of the last two. I have only an encyclopedia of the names, but not an understanding of what they mean.

One cannot choose but wonder, as H.G. Wells said.

Sometimes I look at her, hair slick and blonde like fresh spaghetti – did I just say that? Jesus, that sounds like something a goddamn twelve-year-old would say – but anyways, yeah. Greasy hair, bloodshot eyes with too much mascara and the band t-shirt over the white skinny jeans. I dunno what that makes her, but she doesn’t laugh at me and I wonder why.

I can’t read people.

That begins another day when every person who wants to lets me know how bad I suck, and how much better off everything would be if I just went home and put a bullet through my head. Of course, they don’t use so many words. No, they use more than that – every curse ever thought of (including the C word, which is unexpected. And from more girls than guys, which I can only describe as ‘wait, what the Hell?’) and every possible indignity that they can get away with without a juvenile hall sentence.



“RANDALL, ya ever think maybe you’re the cause of all your problems? If you hate School so goddamn much, why do you come? You wake up in the morning, you put on your clothes – jeans and a T-shirt every day, usually Star Trek or Jurassic Park-related – and what do you do? You come here, to this place you hate, and you put up with these people who try to drive you to suicide, and worst of all: You bitch to me about it! That’s it! That’s your entire order of business when you come to me! What gives, Randall?”

He shook his head. He was sitting in one of the futon-couches they had installed this year. In the past three months, they were practically drenched with so many stains they looked like the hides of some leathery, spotted animal. A big lizard, maybe. I sat as far on the other end, because anything else would be gay. I shouldn’t have to explain that, unless you have absolutely no memory of being a teenager and thus shouldn’t be reading this. Or maybe it was different in your day, I dunno.

“Well, who am I gonna bitch to? The wall? The air? They don’t give me any answers.”

“I dunno…a psychoanalyst? Hypnotist? Social Worker?”

Kostovski, in spite of the Russian name, had no accent or culture to him. He was a fat kid, and since he was a teenager that either made him jovial or sociopathic. As it was, he was jovial.

He wasn’t even that fat. He was rotund, sure, but worse had come by me in the halls, so who cares, right?

He always wore khaki shorts, and a white hoodie. He would put the hood back up immediately after being told to take it down, as was the order of business amongst teenagers. OOOOOOH! HOW EDGY AND REBELLIOUS, RIGHT? RIGHT!?!?!?

“Look, you’re never gonna get anywhere until you learn to live with what’s what or deal with what’s wrong with you.”

I gave him a look like I just bit into an orange.

“Wrong with me?”

He was shoveling Beef Jerky into his mouth, which made me jealous because I didn’t eat until late in the evening every day.

“Well,” he said, licking his lips and drinking some water. “Remember when Mr. Vidas said that the pyramids lined up with the stars, and you pointed out that they don’t anymore, since they’ve moved?”

“That’s…”

“Don’t comment on whether or not it’s true, Randall, just tell me if that happened or not.”

“But…”

“No justifications.”

“O.K., fine, I corrected somebody who was wrong. Issue?”

“Issue? Dude, this is Social Skills 101. You need to let go, and let some people be wrong sometimes. Sometimes, people want to be wrong. The adult thing to do is to respect that. And besides, if you were to do that to your boss, you realize he’d fire you even if you were right or not?”

I shook my head.

“Well, then I guess I’m not working for that jackass.”

“Then how are you gonna have a job?”

“Find one where the boss isn’t a dick, move on. Why accept a job you can’t stand when being jobless is clearly preferable.”

“See, Randall, that’s an honorable trait, but sadly economy works exactly like ecology: survival of the fittest. Honor isn’t a beneficial tactic in that world.”

“Lions have honor.”

“Example?”

“Alpha male goes first. Even if he’s fought more than once to be the alpha male, the betas all respect him. Beta male goes next. Even if the Deltas…”

“Gammas,” Kostovski said. “Gamma comes after Delta.”

“Right,” I said. “Even if the Gammas fought like Hell to be Betas, they respect him going next. Look at ants, termites. Go to war with the neighboring hill. Even if it’s suicide. Go down for the Queen, for the good of all. Are you gonna tell me that’s not honorable?”

Kostovski shook his head.

“So you’re not?” I asked.

“Randall, Randall – how much of a brain does an ant have? Do you really think it’s doing that because it’s honorable?”

“Doesn’t matter why they’re doing it, it’s honorable either way. You think every soldier who dies knows that’s his fate, the minute he goes into battle? No. But he does it anyways and if he dies, we reward him. So here’s what I have to do: find my cause, and if necessary, die for it.”

I swept my hand out to indicate the room full of chattering people, who took no notice.

“Anyone who stands in my way be damned.”

He laughed.

“You see anyone standing in your way, Randall?”

At that moment, because God either has the best ironic timing or twisted sense of humor, some kid came up behind me and dropped his water bottle in my lap, letting it spill all over my crotch and making it look like I pissed myself.

“Sorry, faggot.” He said, leading his friends off laughing hysterically like animals.

Kostovski stifled a laugh and gave me a sympathic, palms-up ‘what-can-I-do’ shrug.

“See, those people are standing in my way,” I said. “Every day this happens, I just sink further and further into hopeless depression that’ll probably kill me. Like how people in nursing homes lose hope and die. That happens, right?”

He laughed.

“Now, Randall, here’s what you need to figure out: What is it you wanna do, exactly, and that these people are standing in the way of?”



THERE was a fire drill, again. This makes one, two…four times this month.

I hate fire drills. I need routines to keep my sanity, to assume there’s some kind of order in the goddamn universe and that it’s not all just a jumble of matter and energy, expanding for no reason into void.

But fire-drills seem like rips and tears in all that, dragging us out to the open areas to stand around in total anarchy while the teachers throw around words that they pretend give them some kind of power over the writhing mass of hormones and raw, undistilled human evil.

If they actually believe they have control in this situation, they are sadder than me. And that’s pretty goddamn sad.

The day has become grey, thankfully for me. The cold is harsh, like needles piercing my skin down to the bone, but that’s a small price to pay for a pretty sky. The rain was starting to fall, but it wasn’t totally here yet. A distant, faint rumble rolled through the clouds. Thor was apparently a little less half-assed than this fire-drill.

Maybe he was having a worse day than I was.

Some kid with no belt and a baseball cap decided it would be hysterical to come up behind me and scream in my fucking ear.

I jumped a good twelve feet, felt like. Almost stumbled over, shaking.

Jackass and his friends all laughed hysterically. His ‘girlfriend’ – that phrase here meaning the least repulsive creature this idiot could find to make out with him in the hallways – literally tear’d up. I saw her thick layers of makeup smearing and melting under the salty tears.

I threw my best insults at him, and he did that thing where the guy gets up in your face and holds his arms out like a mentally challenged bird. “What’re ya gonna do, chickenshit? What’re ya gonna do?”

I hear animals try to make themselves look bigger to scare away predators. I wonder if that’s what the retarded spread-arm thing is.

When the School took up again, I sat in the back of the class and panted, trying not to let anyone see how panicked I was.

The Science Teacher sure-as-hell didn’t take his sweet-ass time in resuming the lesson. In fact, if anything he seemed more fanatically devoted to cramming his planned lesson into the period without stopping for breath.

So I guess disruptions in routine piss off someone other than me. What a comforting thought, right?

“The Universe,” he began, “As far as we can tell, came into existence about sixteen billion years ago or so. Prior to the Big Bang, as it were, the universe existed as a concentrated singularity which may have been no bigger than the size of an atom. Time did not exist, so the question of what ‘came before’, is moot. All the Universe today – us, the stars, planets, everything there is – is the result of the expansion caused by the Big Bang. The movement through time that we experience, and hence the energy that drives the molecules that make up existence, is caused by this same expansion.”

He stopped for breath, barely alive.

I had the overwhelming feeling he’d memorized this speech before, and was now repeating himself at speed without actually comprehending what he was saying.

“Energy and matter cannot be created or destroyed, just recycled. The planets and moons of our star system are formed from earlier material, pulled into the sun’s orbit by gravity. We are made of the same stuff as the interior of stars, because the material of our planet and the life on it was birthed from a dying star. Like Carl Sagan said, ‘we are star stuff’. In the four billion years or so of Earth’s history, that star stuff has recycled itself over and over again until we are…”

The bell rang, and everyone exploded in conversations that drowned out whatever he was trying to say.

Since I have no friends besides Kostovski, who wasn’t in this class, I got up and waited for everyone to leave first to avoid anyone who might try to fuck with me on my way out.

I saw the teacher, just slumped there in his office chair. Legs sticking out, one of his scarecrow-arms hanging over the edge of the chair while he put his right hand over his eyes.

He seemed to be mumbling something to himself, on the verge of crying. In spite of my better judgments screaming at me to do otherwise, I went up to him.

And I didn’t just go stand in his presence, his perimeter, either. I actually talked to him.

“So, uh, about that – ”

He jumped, his chair rolling back into the green chalkboard.

“Jesus, Randall!” He panted. “You scared the holy shit outta…” he must’ve realized he was cursing, because I was grinning like an evil bastard in a bad crime movie.

“Wow, a teacher cursing. You must be really stunned I cared about your lesson.” I gave a weak chuckle.

“Well, I was kinda lost in thought there for a minute.”

I nodded. “Yeah, you seemed kinda lost in thought just now, teaching.” I laughed again, trying to coax one out of him. Even if I failed, I could say I tried to cheer him up at least.

“So, I really liked what you were saying. I mean, about the scale of everything. The way the universe recycles itself, the scale it does that on. Really impressive. Really interesting.”

Normally, the word ‘interesting’ is a polite way of saying ‘creepy’. However I got the idea he would either understand my meaning or be oblivious to the double-meaning of the word given how awkward he was.

He nodded, smiled. “Yes, it is. I love it. Hell, that’s why I teach. It seems like, every year though, there’s less and less of kids showing interest in Science. In everything. We’re heading towards an idiocracy, seems like.”

I shook my head. Typical miserable adult attitude. I mean, I’m miserable too, but my miseries aren’t dependent upon my perceptions. They’re dependent on my situation. I can’t fix it any more than a stab-ee can fix the stab wounds. Other kids make my life Hell, the god-damn-end.

But anyways, if I could improve his situation a bit, I would.

“Well, every generation thinks that of the following one. Remember the pissed principal in The Breakfast Club? He said the same thing as you. Thirty years earlier. You turned out alright, too, as far as I can tell.”

He laughed. Oh, good, I was able to make somebody else laugh for the first time in my life.

“You’re observant.”

“Thanks. But, anyways, your speech, about the raw magnitude of it all…it really does fascinate me. All of it.”

He nodded his head.

“Well, you better get to your next class.”

I nodded.

“Have a good one, bro.”

He laughed, good-naturedly, and said, “Back at ya.”

I think, for him, at that time, all might have been right for the world.

I can dream, right?



REMEMBER  the blonde with the greasy hair and pale skin and scarecrow figure?

She came up to me today.

I sat there, on the sidewalk outside the school, nursing a black eye. Some scumbag had come up to me, called me a tranny, and then when I told him off he popped me. His ‘girlfriend’ laughed.

I decided I could be late to class, if life was going to give me something like this.

“What happened?” She asked.

I looked up. I could hear the class nearest to us through an open window. Laughing, shouting, teacher trying to calm everyone.

“Why do you care?” I asked. “What am I to you?”

She smiled.

“A person, just like everybody else.”

“Really?”

“Really-really.”

I laughed.

“Thanks. That’s more respect than I get from anyone else.”

She tilted her head, an adorably disarming dog-like gesture. Reminded me of an Ewok in Return of the Jedi, and George Lucas knows they were designed to be cute. If this girl were trying to sell toys, she’d certainly succeed.

“What about the big guy you’re always talking to?”

I sighed.

“Kostovski?”

“Well,” she said, rolling her eyes and holding up her hand. “Idunno his name, but I know you hang out with him.”

I rested my head on my arms, propping them up with my fists.

“And how do you know this?”

She plopped down, next to me, looking at the grey sky.

“I watch you.”

If not for my fists under my jaw, it would have dropped open.

“Me?” I asked.

She looked at me, her eyes mascara’d or eyeliner’d or whatever the Hell that was, set on a pale face and with long, unwashed blonde hair hanging down to obscure her undeveloped breasts.

“I like to know how the losers are holding up, Richard. I don’t like what my friends do to you. It’s a really shitty thing, finding you every morning and basically gutting you like a fish.”

I opened my mouth to say something, held a finger up and pointed at her. I should be offended, but what she said was true and if truth offends you you’re probably in a-Hell-of-a worse situation than me. After about ten or twenty seconds of me being stupid, I put my hand down and looked away. It’s hard to figure out how much eye contact is appropriate, swear to god it is.

“Mind if I smoke?” She asked. I saw her reach into her black backpack and pull out a pack of ‘black devil’ cigarettes. To my understanding, this brand is very popular with teenage girls. Because it’s black, and therefore seductive and sexy. Yes, even small boxes can capitalize on the fact that sex sells nowadays.

I shook my head. “Whatever floats your boat. Or fills your twinkie. Or whatever.”

She laughed, took the cigarette out and put it between her off-white teeth. I saw she had a gap between the first two in the front.

“So are you alright?” She asked.

“Alright with what?”

She exhaled a ring, holding the cigarette between the base of two fingers, like you’re supposed to.

“With your lot in life?”

I laughed. An honest one, which I hope she realized meant I wasn’t laughing at her.

“No. No, I’m very un-goddamn-happy with my lot in life.”

She nodded. “I was hoping you’d say that.” She said, inhaling and blowing the smoke in my face. “Is it humid? It feels humid out, doesn’t it?”

I stopped, trying to figure out what to say. Do I respond to her being happy with my unhappiness or do I respond to the idiotic universal place-holder, talk about the weather? I’m about to respond to one (I don’t know which) when she lifts her sleeves up to show me her tattoos.

My eyebrows shoot up into my forehead. Not only is this girl a senior, she has blood-colored Sumerian writing on her right forearm and a dragon curling around on her left.

“I’m not happy either,” she said.

“Why, because it looks like you carved a chant to Cthulhu on your right arm?”

She giggled. A raspy, kinda little-girlish squeal.

“No, silly. I’m sad because of what people do to people like you.”

“Really now?”

She rolled her eyes, shrugged her shoulders.

“Really-really-really.”

She blew smoke out her nose. Like a Dragon.

“Why are you out here?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“Didn’t wanna go to Class. Saw you there, figured you were trying to avoid my friends.”

“You must be a neuroscientist.”

She looked at me weird. “Huh?”

“A brain doctor.”

“Come again?”

I put my head in my hand.

“You must be super-bright, to figure out I wanted to avoid your friends.” Before she could get pissed at a good-natured insult, I cut her off. “Why do you hang out with them if they’re gonna fuck with people like me all day? You said you hate that shit. Why support it?”

“You see me hurling insults at you? You think I don’t try to stop them? It don’t work like that, Richard – ”

“Randall.” I said.

She stopped, mid-smoke, to look at me.

“Really?” She asked, blowing smoke in my face.

“Really-really-really-really-really…” I coughed on the smoke and she giggled.

“Jesus Christ,” she said, with a totally straight face suddenly enveloping the one that had just been giggling. “That sucks pigballs.”

“Don’t remind me.” I looked up at the sky, begged whatever Gods there may or may not be for it not to rain and force us inside.

“So are you gonna sit here all day?” She asked.

“If I goddamn well feel like it, yes.”

She smiled at me, and for a minute I had nothing in my head beyond the chemical responsible for happiness, whichever one that was.

“You shouldn’t run from them. They’ll never stop, you know. They’ll always be fucking with you, with anyone they can. It’s just how the world works. You run away, people will fuck with you wherever you go. Doesn’t matter if you go to Bangkok or Madagascar or Mars, someone will not rest until they make your life a living Hell. It’s just the way the world is. You think the other girls, in their little packs? You think they don’t fuck with us? It’s nature, Randy – can I call you Randy? Randall’s and ugly name, no offense.”

I nodded and put my hand up in an ‘O.K., sure, just keep talking to me’ gesture.

“But there’s no escape. I know that sounds emo, but it’s not. It’s just true. If you get all depressed about it, then it’s emo.”

I nodded, begged for rain not to fall. As I did so, forcing all my energy that I wasn’t focusing into listening to her into a manic prayer, I felt the drops of water smack against my face.

“So what the Hell do I do…”

“Tess. Call me Tessie, even once to be cute, and I will stab you.”

I laughed.

“I’m not kidding,” she said, spraying some spiteful smoke in my eyes. I waved it out, quickly, trying to hid tears and moving on.

“Right, Tess. What do I do, if I can’t fight it? Just be miserable forever? Is this life? Is this all I have to look forward to? If this is a minute longer…” I tried not to cry, not in front of the first girl who’s ever said more than one sentence to me. “That’d be too much.”

The rain started to fall, heavier, trying to push me inside. Even if I just sat there under it, I would get made fun of when everyone came outside at the end of the day. Even if I left and went home, my parents would send me back. No escape, no way out.

I put my head in my hands.

“Every day I have to go in there, it’s so…I just…”

“It’s scary?” She asked.

I nodded.

“Yeah. Yeah, everyone treating me like shit, like I have no purpose – if so many people hate me so much, there’s gotta be a reason. What’s wrong with me?”

I looked at her, pleadingly. She gave me a look something like a protective, maternal kind of look. But different – something about it. The wrinkled forehead, the half-smile, her blue eyes. Something like a partner, not a mom.

Not a look I’ve seen before.

“It’s alright,” she said. She put her hand on my back, patting it hard. “If I go in there with you, will you be alright?”

I didn’t know how to react.

“But…everyone’s gonna laugh their asses off, Tess. At you, at me, it’ll be Hell. The other girls, especially…”

“Oh, fuck ‘em.” She said. “I’ll live. If it’ll help you, I’ll do it. C’mon. You have to.”

“Why? Why should I have to?”

She shook her head, smiled. “Because I said so.”

She took my hand.

“Now let’s go.”

I walked through the doors with her, holding her hand and absorbing her wide, cheery smile, and felt like I was being dragged through the gates of Hell.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked.

She smiled, again, her eyes almost closed and her lips together.

“I don’t want you to be scared anymore.”

We walked into the School, and immediately I saw a girl bulge her eyes. In those pale, milky orbs I saw neurons flaring, sending the messages that could be translated as ‘OHMYGODISTHATHERTHATSHEROHMYGODANDSHESWITHITWITHTHATTHINGOHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD’

And she touched another girl on the shoulder, who looked with her.

She vocalized something not much different from what her companion’s thoughts were.

They all turned, seeing their former ally with something like me, and laughed hysterically like demons.

She smiled at him, her eyes mascara’d slits on snow-white face and her lips round and framing a beaming smile.

“Don’t you mind them,” she said. “In a week, they’ll forget all about this.”

My hand swung in hers, only lightly.

“I’m not scared anymore,” I said to her.

That Day I went home and went directly to bed.



I fell like a rock and dreamt of the sickly blonde. Tess.

She was dead in my arms. Her baggy eyes, blue as the fountain of youth, staring vacantly into the sky. Her skin, already deathly pale and cold and colorless, becoming blue with necrosis. Her limbs limp. I hold her in the classic pieta pose, the one that monsters on 1950s movie posters would use to carry away the unconscious heroine.

Then she fell away, dissipating, evaporating forever.

In the dream, I ran around screaming and crying and begging everyone else – friends, enemies, teachers – to help me. To help me deal with the death of her, or figure out why she disappeared.

Every single one of them told me they had no idea who I was talking about. That no such person had ever existed. The sickly blonde was nothing but a figment of my fevered, lonely imagination. Delusions. Insanity. To be this devastated over a mental construct.

The dream ended when I looked at my hands.

I saw I, myself, was beginning to fade away.

Lost to everyone else’s memory, and thus erased forever.

Everyone is made of Star Guts, if my Science Teacher is telling me right. Since Science is the study of what is, and not what should be – just ask Robert Oppenheimer – we’re all very different from our origins to begin with.

If I replace my voice, would I still be me? If I replace my nails? Skin? Hair? Eyes?

My personality changes. Everyone’s does. Parts just gets taken out and replaced with other, pre-used ones. My parents were different people when they had me. They were optimistic, happy. Now they’re miserable. They haven’t had a pleasant interaction since I was born. Bit-by-bit, their personalities were replaced until they were no longer the people they used to be.

I think of my cat. When we first got him, he was lithe and small. His fur was black and soft and every individual hair seemed to want to stick out in a separate direction. Clamoring for individuality to hide from seeing themselves attached to a single whole.

Now his hair feels greasy, because he’s too obese to lick it all clean. He has eyes of a faded, pastel color. He never opens them all the way. Many of his hairs are tipped silver or grey and there’s a light patch on his chest.

All his cells have doubtless been replaced over the past ten years.

Is he the same cat?

If I die now – truly die, bullet-in-brain and noose-on-neck – I will re-play this game over and over again. The only way to win is to keep playing, even if I lost time and time again. Since every wrong I don’t right is counted against me, and will be forever, the only way to un-fuck everything up is to right everything as best I can now and hope that’s good enough for this trip on the ferris wheel.

I am made up of atoms. Particles, condensed to a certain vibration – energy. And energy cannot be created or destroyed. So while this particular formation, my current self, may be temporary, the energy that makes me and everything else up is eternal. I cannot die, because death is not real. Nobody dies. The energy simply disperses, to different somethings and somewheres.

I am everything, and everything is whole.

If someone I know dies, I will be devastated. But they replace all their cells after five years. Why don’t I mourn them every five years? Because I’m not attached to them. They aren’t there. They’re particles. I’m attached to the idea. Just like the dream – I dreamt the blonde died, so I was devastated. And if she died in real life, it would be one and the same.

I’m not attached to her, or Kostovski, or the cat, or anything I own. I am attached only to ideas, the things that those concentrations of matter and energy represent to me. I only see so little of the visual spectrum. To be so attached to ideas, and to dwell on them so much – meaningless. Meaningless, all.

If they were to begin dying, I would try to help them. If the blonde were shot or Kostovski stabbed or the cat run over, I would do everything in my power to keep them alive. To reduce their suffering, that is objective. I’ve been a selfish jackass for years. I’ve been too sucked into my own world to understand what I am, what I mean to others.

No reason to be afraid. No such thing as death, or pain. Think of it like Dreaming, Randall. Make it the best dream ever.

If something goes wrong, think of it like a nightmare. Not real. No threat. No pain.

Death is an illusion. Life is an illusion. And suffering in any way, shape or form because of an illusion is so ridiculous that it actually makes me laugh. I’m laughing the hardest I’ve laughed since I was a little kid. Tears, breathlessness, rolling on the goddamned floor for the first time since I was five, watching a freaking cartoon.

Tomorrow will be a good day.



I sit in the Library, in a single black chair. I look out the window.

I had tried to tell a few people about what I realized. Got written off as “fortune-cookie lies” by the older teachers, and just with maddened laughter by other kids.

Oh well. To get angry over it would be the same as to get angry over a dream.

Strangely enough, that scumbag motherfucker who picked a fight with me for no reason during the fire drill sat down next to me. I mean, well, not next to me, but in a nearby chair.

“Hey. You alright?”

I shrugged.

“I am how I am.”

He laughed.

“So, um, listen,” he said, sounding awkward for what was likely the first time in his life. “I wanted to say sorry for fucking with you during the fire drill. I was pissed about something else. I shouldn’t have done that, man. I’m sorry.”

I nodded.

I guess he was waiting for me to actually speak to him, because he continued.

“I fucked up.”

I decided to say something to him.

“We call out other people on their flaws every day, even if we just do it in our heads. You had the balls to admit your own flaws. That’s enough for me, right there.”

He laughed.

“Thanks, man. That actually means a lot to me.”

“Don’t mention it.”

He lifted his hand for that pseudo-high-five the kids who are into rap do.

I obliged him.

“You seriously don’t hate me? I mean, after all the shit I put you through.”

I looked out at the wind, rustling the trees and slithering between the lush, green leaves. The sky a vibrant blue and the sun as bright as ever. Birds swarming in their organized flocks and bugs chittering, small animals running back and forth in the underbrush.

A soft, cleansing breeze blows in through the open window, washing over me and blowing away anything bad that might have still been attached to me at this late date in the story of my life.

“Nah,” I said. “I couldn’t really hate anybody on a day like this.”