Negative Space

Someday I’ll wake up and it’ll be like my life’s already over, because it’ll be dozens of years from now already and I’m still the same. Sets of mirrors facing each other, expanding space and me and every moment I’ve been here. Nobody knows me, because I haven’t left anything for them, and I can’t stand to look half of them in the eye.

All the world blurred, a vibrating hemorrhage, and it was fine because I could finally feel how little impact I’d ever have on the world. Losing that dread that one day you’ll somehow ruin everything, for yourself and everyone else. The realization that I could simply leave and the world wouldn’t miss me.

The worst part about knowing anyone is knowing only that tiny sliver available to you.

Time compresses the older you get. Days turn to weeks turn to months turn to seasons turn to years, until your life resides in just one moment expanding forever, where each step and breath folds wrinkles into your face, carving minute, irreversible wounds between your joints. Pressing down the notches between your spine, driving your ankles and knees to ruin. I feel it now and it’ll only be worse in the future.

He told me the planet had nerve endings. Sprawling out toward stars they’d never touch. He told me that when he breathed, the Earth felt it, and when the Earth breathed sometimes he could feel it too. He told me he wished his mother had miscarried.

As long as I can remember there was that low hum of suicide ringing through my body. I’d close my eyes and have flashes of strange industrial machines punching holes in my skin. My form cracking on rocks beneath a jagged cliff. A thousand blades reducing me to ribbons. Rearranging my body in ways not available to me in life. Pushing me across a threshold to be reborn as something novel. That was one reason I followed the Forum—to see all the examples of brave individuals radically altering their state of being. Knowing that there was no chance of ever coming back.

No matter what happens to you, everyone eventually makes you pretend like everything’s back to normal.

You’re going to die becoming what you need to be. But when that happens you won’t need who you are right now.

The most important thing anyone can know is this: just by existing, by inhabiting this planet and space, we are put into communion with entities we cannot begin to understand, in manners we cannot begin to understand. We float on the surface of an unfathomable ocean, and though we may stick our hands, our feet, our faces beneath, we can never go much farther without drowning. Once made aware of this, a man can no longer see the Earth as a sphere. It is a serpent. It is a length of rope, forever curling around our persons.

I dreamed about a super computer that could erase anything in existence. First I erased all the spiders. Then I erased all the people, including myself. I wasn’t there anymore, but I could still think and remember, and I wept and wept, wanting to be all the way gone.

I’ll whisper to Christ.” “You don’t whisper to anyone. You’re calling on God for this. God doesn’t have a name.” He said that God was unpredictable; that God didn’t even know we were here.

It’s easy to be shitty when someone loves you unconditionally.

the loop is everything that is happening or was happening or will happen. the loop meets its self and either it ends or it starts again.

The myth is clean and sensical because it needs to be. The truth is stupid. The truth never makes sense unless you force it to, just like anything.

The basement and music had become this incomprehensible landscape threatening to split me open. Like meeting God finally and learning he hates you.

As we pulled onto the road, I noticed a black and beige shape on the sidewalk. A goose. A goose, but everything about it was wrong. Its neck broken, twisted into a spiral. It dragged its head along the ground, waddling in circles, screaming. No one seemed to notice except me.

How much does a thought weigh? While no one would deny the substance, the physicality, the realness of those qualities grouped under the banner of endosemiotics—cells, hormones, nerves, etc.—psychosemiotics is generally considered to belong to the realms of the subjective and physically insubstantial. This, however, has already been disproven. Using the neuron model for consciousness, physicists have determined that a thought (defined as a piece of information), when converted from neuro electricity to mass, possesses weight roughly equal to that of a water molecule. And regardless of its humble size, this measurement still demonstrates thought/information manifesting in the realm of physical; a real energy. Importantly, information only enters the physical upon interpretation. A man sees a piece of art. In the process of interpreting that art, information manifests as a thought—not just conceptually, but, as elucidated above, physically. Here, an essential question emerges: Where does this information go once it has been manifested?

I don't know whether I actually did anything. Whether I was actually responsible for or had any influence on her escape. But I let her believe it, because it meant the world could be something more than just the people trying to destroy us.

And that’s when I’m certain. The part of me that loved him no longer exists. Not even in memories, when he was someone else entirely, if only in my eyes.

The sun rose awful yellow and the cigarette turned to a tower of ash. I mouthed goodbye to no one and got onto my feet. That’s where I am now. In the space between my gasps. Where I will always be.

When Man’s State inverts, these positions shift. Mind remains at the right angle, but now Spirit shares its base. Body occupies the highest point. Here, it is essential to remember this schema represents not a hierarchy, but a state of yearning. Man’s State yearns toward Spirit, while its inverse yearns toward the Body, for all things yearn toward what they do not (or no longer) possess.

What forces are we unable to sense that nonetheless influence our existence? Is it possible for us to become aware of these forces? And, perhaps most terribly, what do these forces intend for us?

The future pushed forward. Max went frail and splintered and perished (he went to sleep and stopped breathing). I took over his shop with his boyfriend, until he went frail and splintered and perished. Then it was me and Eugene, until he went frail and splintered and perished. The polar bears went extinct. East Boston sunk beneath the ocean. The west coast burned to cinder. Thousands died in a tube shot through space, floating frozen and static forever. I’m still here. Here for some time.

I never really knew whether my parents loved me or not. I guess I knew later. But those first seventeen years only ever felt like tolerance. They knew I was their fault, and because their god ordered them to love me, they held back their knives. But I knew the stories of fathers who cut their children to pieces, so most often I tried to make them feel like I wasn’t there at all. Most often failing completely.

Tyler falls to his side. His body like rags. He begins to cry. A sound like colony collapse.

I dreamed about a super computer that could raise anything in existence. First I erased all the spiders. Then I erased all the people, including myself. I wasn’t there anymore, but I could still think and remember, and I wept and wept, wanting to be all the way gone.

There were things I missed from the world before, manifesting inside me as splinters and reflections of things that I’d become sure were gone for good: mother and sister and friends and jobs and drugs and fucking and an endless pursuit of distraction. Maybe it was really me who had died. Maybe the afterlife was just one final trip, seconds stretched out into forever because the mind can’t recognize its own end.

My father. My father is a tree, roots pushed deep through the floor. He stretches his branches to the sky in agony. He has no face but I can see his teeth clench, clench until they break. His body dangling rigid, somewhere outside. His body filled with wasps. It’s all there, beneath his bark and inside his rings.

The walls are coiled. The four boys are here. I can’t see their faces but I know who they are. The walls slither. They coil away from us and turn. The walls are a single mammoth tube. A serpent with no face—just a smooth, round nub at its end. It buries its nub in the black muddy earth. The boys approach the serpent’s body. As they stride, their skins snag on air, and the air lifts their skins from their bodies. Their skins separate and rise from their frames, like a magician’s kerchief lifting from where a box or birdcage had been. The boys are void beneath their skins.