"Adam? / I remember everything / I can't forget a single minute of it / I know everything he did now / I was blind, and he ran rings around me / I made mistake after mistake / He killed everybody I love except for you" — Antimemetics Division.
So here I am sitting at the tabletop of my drawer with my GF2 around me and my Canon FL 55mm f/1.2 and my water bottle and a yellow banana and a pair of headphones and books and coffee, sweet coffee, bitter coffee, roasty coffee.
Let me begin again. I lied to protect myself just now, and then. I lied in saying I had something due tonight, half an hour before midnight, hours after the start of that stupid awards ceremony that took an hour to begin, just now. And I lied then, talking to Sasha and Shruti days ago, about why I took such a massive hit of mushrooms on my first attempt, about how I was chasing an epiphany that doesn't exist. The former lie constitutes. The latter lie omits.
I ran out the door of Joey's room just now — muggy in my throat with half a cup of mimosa, a bitter orange juice — two new people, no three, and I just sat on the bed and I didn't stand and I didn't say hello and I just sat and sat and sat until the embarrassment came and when it came, it came as hard as the trip was, and now I see it perfectly, I see it this is it, I see the fundamental question I tried to answer: Why do I not talk to people? Why am I so socially anxious that it costs every word I speak? Why do I not initiate with people, and by proxy, my own life?
Possibly I am dead to myself. Possibly I am autistic. Possibly I have a fatal social flaw. Possibly I have schizoid personality. Though in descriptive power and dramatic answers these are not fundamental enough answers. The answer I need to hear is me. The epiphany is me. Every time I ignore people and do not speak it's a grain of sand on a dune in a desert, and the desert is my right temporoparietal joint. Locus of sociality, my muscle memory and my wit, all of it — all of it irrelevant — theory of mind buckles without the first gear, the ignition, the key.
They told me they were grateful I stuck around to take photos at that impromptu awards ceremony in the Hitchcock Lounge, but even that gratitude is losing on me now.
I lied to protect myself. It was me, it is me now. I searched for psychedelics to kill myself in a way and in that sense I am already dead and without movement I speak only in a whisper. Air through the trachea. I would talk to Shruti. Will I, though? Solace and silence and predictability these vices divine.
You're sick of hearing this, and I'm sick of living it, and I'm sick of being here, in all the ways "being" and "here" and "being here" could mean. Compositional semantics, there.
Sasha hasn't come down yet. My lie must've been good.