you drag a finger across your blood-heated skin, and feel the places that your decisions have made it ever-unchanging. scars, ink, broken bones, muscle memory, all pushing you further in a direction that becomes set in stone, a painting that can be read and commentated on by others. walking wasn’t ever really your strong suit, despite claims you had heard of humanity’s saving grace being its legs, and so you find yourself hobbling along as you seek destinations unremembered.

every moment somehow dissociated from and remaining the only frightening real, a twisted and sick combination of lacking presence and lacking object permanence, leaving you simultaneously never anywhere and never anywhere else. place your hands upon something to try to feel it, right? may as well run through your memories to see the last time that worked. drive down the city-street-grid of your recollection and watch as the roads wash together like so much abstract impressionism. was it really him? or someone else?

the only way to know is to hope it happens again. aren’t you better at remembering things, now? or have all these years just taken you further from something you once had but have now lost? you remember vowing to yourself in those long-gone teenage years never to look back with fondness, and you’ll make good on that promise, being sure never to remember it through anything but a haze of screamed words and reactive convulsions, stained underwear and emotions you can’t find anymore.

look in a mirror and try to see anything, even a sham of yourself. recognize nothing, and decide to start over. this time you can build the pyrrhic home out of the opinions of other people, out of whispered echoes that pass as statements about your true nature, comments and compliments and insults that degenerate endlessly as they murmur in your mind, looking for any purchase on the cliff-face of stainless steel that is the hole where your identity would’ve gone. maybe everyone feels this way, and you’re the only one who can’t put together a mask to hide it out of beliefs thinner than the ricepaper you force down your throat. the ones you see that remind you most of yourself are the dregs of humanity, the ones authority figures told you to look away from, like holding even the light in your eyes from a reflection of them was letting yourself get too close to being inside their bodies, to feeling whatever it felt like to huff something, or scream into a microphone, or touch skin that wasn’t the right sex of skin.

quit lying to yourself and try to figure out what it feels like to be alone if you want to end up anywhere that isn’t dead in a ditch.