Discipline. 

 

 

 

The fuck is discipline.

 

White bowl of chips. White bowl of mild salsa.

A heaping dump of sour cream.

This is my soul.

 

 

        I'm washed up on the beach of my wood grain kitchen table. Collapsed over it, hunched; a monster. I'm not collapsed, I am collapse. I'm twin towers after fire, the action movie after the siege scene. I am free falling, motionless. I'm not even hung over. Sweet, sweet sobriety.  

 

With great effort I right myself, almost sitting. My skeleton's a rebellion and the flesh is a sloshing riot. My shoulders and spine hang heavy with the fruit of my fat. My eyes swivel around the white washed stained grey room. They need me to focus on something. I see the tortilla chips and together we try to end the inevitable.

“Welcome back!” screams reality.

It never works.

“Welcome back!” it croons again. Legitimately welcoming. Friendly, not cruel, but it might as well be my funeral dirge. A torture song.   

 

The familiar color of despair drips out from my brain and down over my eyes like wet teal paint. Thick on my irises. "This is real. Real. Real, real, real, real." It's a goddamn song, and I don't know if it's me or Superego's singing. God knows. 

“Welcome back!” and now I don’t know which one of us is screaming but I respond anyway.

“Fuck you.”

I stuff chips in my face and ride a current of crisp, crunch, dunk, sloosh, smush. A tactile world with only the most mild interruptions from that screaming welcoming void around me. 

        “Real. Really really real. This is your life!” screams reality over the crunch of chips, the sea of tongue. I can feel superego bearing down on me, a B-52 over Afghan, an Apache over Gaza. The voice is a whining nag. Fuck that voice. The kind of voice who would have been an RA in college. Fuck that voice. Fuck waking up. But the chips are finite.

 

        My clothes are wet on me like a cocoon. Like I've been living in them. It's hot. Everything’s hot. I know I have AC but the world's just hot. The emptiness around me is boiling me. I'm a thick chicken stew.

My head is burning. There’s no headache, but there’s no word for the pain of normality. I want to dream, but there's no way I can sleep, I've been asleep for sixteen hours. My dreams are already the lofty pollution of an unlived life. The too perfect distraction. I can't have that now.

 

        There's nowhere to go, but I stand anyway. The feel of my muscles sliding over one another makes me sick and I swear to God I can feel my skeleton. It's hard. The scaffolding for a work of shit in process.  

 

        I peel back the kitchen drapes, they've been sweating too. It's 6pm, but the summer’s here and it's like Rah's fucking scepter is pointed at my kitchen window. Like the fucking beetle I killed one summer is now ascendant in heaven and finally God's given him the magnifying glass of my obliteration. If I had wings they'd be his smoking husks. I have to look away. 

 

        My hands stumble through the assorted fantasies on the table, an inventory of soulless salvations. Games, music, books, perfectly packaged, like the store has been sending me presents in the mail. God: I want to buy something. 

        "Welcome back!" the nightmare in my head reminds me.

I don't even deign to respond this time. No, this time, I open up the computer and let my stubby, scaled hands pick out the closest video game in sight. I don't care what it's called. I don't care what it's about. I don't give a shit. 

 

There's nothing for a time.

 

Again, I wash ashore on the wood grain varnish. A waxy sea of brown lines. My eyes tremble, waver, and I follow the lines along their ripples, I imagine these are my thoughts. Wrapped around and around me, never touching one another, occasionally crystalized in little knots of... knots of what?

        I stand again, repulsed by the way the muscles in my back slide over my skin and fat and scaffolding. The drapes are cool. Cold. Midnight. I hear flies buzzing in the courtyard.

        "...welcome back..." they buzz. In that moment I know every one of them. Understanding doesn’t breed empathy. 

I have to go. Have to move. Superego's chasing me down; a Russian riding a steamroller, assault rifle in hand, and if I go now, I can outrun him. Outside... the flies.

        "...welcome back..." they buzz.

 

Well at least he's done screaming. 

 

        Black summer air is like slush. Thick on my tongue, black and orange from the

streetlamps.

        "Restock, reassemble, take a minute and remember who you are." It whispers.

How very reassuring. Superego's my shadow, tumbling along after me and screaming at me in

incomprehensible Russian. But so long as I keep moving I'm one step ahead. 

 

        The suburbs around me are stale, pretending; trying not to be the funeral homes they are.

Cardboard box dreams fused together with rent and rain. I can see the dollars dripping out of

them and the passing cars occasional melodies. 

        “Stop and write about it. You have so much to say. What's even happened to you

anyway?” Whispers.

I always liked the phrase hostile intelligence.

        “Don't you remember what you were supposed to be?”

Not today. I should have brought something to listen to. A lecture, a book... the old band that only I know about. Anything. 

 

        I keep walking. The city's a kind of porn, and I watch like the fetishist I am. Towers and valleys. Black smoke cum. Exhaust fume sighs. The billion little light bulbs are a billion little winking smiles.

So long as these keep games going, I feel like I can outrun the nightmare in my head. Can somehow escape the sweet talking, AK-47 wielding psychoanalytic concept hunting me down. But they collapse in on themselves, and soon I'm just watching porn in my head... bored. 

        “You can keep going if you like.” So very understanding. I never trust understanding people. They’re only understanding because they’re winning.

I stop, and look around. Where the fuck am I... Some enormous lawn. Gardens, niceties, clean streets. I must be in a rich neighborhood because there are no streetlights. There are no distractions in the dark. I can feel him coming.

         "It's not too late. You can put yourself back together." He rolls over me less like a steamroller and more like two pieces of peanutbuttered bread wrapping themselves around my head.

 

        "Remember that one time?"

 

I don't have to remember it, I can see it. In the stands, in the dark auditorium, with her. In the darkness we found each other, ourselves. She leaned her head into my neck, I buried my eyes in hers. We didn't want to see the show. Couldn't. Wanted to feel one another's blood and heat. A clinging, thick, wet discovery. Our tears.

        “...and you said,”

        “Not this time. Don't worry.” his words, my mouth. Lies I didn't know. I said them then... now like burrs in my tongue. The theatre's swallowing me up, I'm falling backwards into the velvet seats. A plush red universe. I can't hold it all. I'll fall on some rich man's lawn. 

 

I move my hand over my throat. Imagine the knife in my hand. Move the finger across the windpipe. One quick thought. Sever the plumbing. The red waterfall runs down from my throat and over the insides of my eyes. The plumbing in my mind is burst, but the other red universe is gone. 

 

I'm on a rich man's lawn. On my back. Looking up at the absence. No stars. No more running. 

 

“Here's what you'll do. You'll go back. Get some sleep.”

 

“I'll get up early and go to the gym. Yoga.”

 

“Exactly. Four days a week. Six if you can manage it.”

 

“Six. I can do six.” 

 

“Of course you can. The class is at six, so you'll need to get up at five.”

 

“That'll be good for me.”

 

“You can go back to work.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“You need to.”

 

“Yes. I do.” 

 

“Two hours, exercise. Two hours, writing. Two hours...”

 

That's me. My words. I don't even want to run anymore, I believe me. I've been silly. I've been insane. Sick, I'll say. I let my mind turn into pudding. Tore myself in two. But I'm back. Back to normal. Back. 

                                                                                                                 

Oh the things I'll do. Now I'm in control.

 

The flies buzz. 

“...go to sleep...”

 

I do.