Staring blankly at the plain wall confronting my eyes, I sniffed, scrapping my nails across my skull, remaining the perfect picture of calm as new ideas and uncertainty wrecked through my mind. Crap, I already thought about enough messed up insanity, and did not need to be completely reevaluating my entire existence.
I’d finished organizing the neatly hung up clothes in my closet and paused the video playing on my laptop for entertainment three hours earlier, finding myself lacking anything to waste the rest of my night on. After spending ten minutes aimlessly wandering the house and stopping when my mom struck up a quick, meaningless conversation, I decided that I needed to be pulled out of myself and have a break from being me.
I knew that the most effective medium for successfully doing this was a book, and May had come home from the library the day before with a stack of novels, carelessly dumping them on our dusty dining room table and not yet having bothered to relocate them to a more sensible location. Like, maybe, the bookshelf.
A quick jaunt to the toppled pile and scan of the titles produced a little book, barely a hundred and forty pages, that looked interesting and was focused a screwed up main character who both heard a voice and had a younger brother who’d accidentally killed himself. Extremely philosophical, quick and easy to read, perfect for distracting my mind from itself. Exactly the cure I was seeking out.
So I’d curled up with the short novel in my favorite chair with the mottled cushions shaped exactly to my limbs, curled up in a blanket, and flipped it open. I spent the majority of the story frowning at the pages with a confused squint, trying to riddle out what was going on and decode the confusing plot.
Basically, this kid had been fighting over the remote with his little brother when he pulled out their father’s gun and mistakenly shot himself. Years later, during the bulk of the tale, the main character went through this impressively average school day. He was bullied, pushed around, ignored, and ridiculed by his ex girlfriend, all the while being forced along and tormented by this singular voice leading him through the painful hours in his head. His life majorly sucked and he wanted it all to end, so he stole his mother’s prescription pills after getting home and downed the bottle.
This would be the end, if the voice in his head didn’t yell at him to wake up the next morning, and endlessly prompt him to repeat the exact same day. By the third do over, the protagonist realized that he was the one barking at his parents – who were just trying to be kind and help – shoving kids aggressively aside in the halls, and snapping at his ex for no reason.
It turned out that the day he was living over was the one year anniversary of his brother’s unintentional suicide, and when his old best friend wanted to meet up with him in the back stairwell, it was to ask if he was going to the memorial service, not beat him up. Despite discovering that he was the source of all his problems, the boy can’t control his preset actions, and still swallows the deathly medication.
Eventually, the book jumps forward three or four months, and it’s revealed that the main character had, in fact, attempted to end his life with those handfuls of lethal pills, unsuccessfully, and the voice was actually his therapist, coaxing him through the day he’d been reliving in a hypnotic treatment. This all led to him now knowing that it was by his own design that everything was dreadful for him.
Naturally, this completely and totally fucked with my head. It was a great book, for sure; I whipped through it in three hours with nothing fleeting through my mind except for the exclusive thoughts that were spotlight focused on the story. But I did not appreciate being subjected to ideas that scrambled my brain further than it already was due to its constant commotion.
Frowning, I allowed the book to fall closed, toppling out of my grasp and flopping into the crevice of the cushions. Rubbing a hand across my stubbly chin, I shifted further back into the chair, prick of pain appearing in the back of my head as I contemplated the reality of every slightly annoying or bad that that had recently happened to me. My eyes went hazy and unfocused, staring at some random point but not seeing, head tripping over itself to try to make sense of what I’d read and apply it correctly to my own life.
What if I was the one with the distorted view on reality? Maybe I was the bad guy. After all, every antagonist is battling for good in their own mindset. Nobody intentionally benefits evil. And who’s to say that it wasn’t me who had it all wrong?
Hitler honestly believed that he was improving the world and making our planet a better place when he committed his currently universally despised mass genocide. Bullies were strongly confident that they had the right to put down the weak and thought their victims deserved what they received. Fuck, the Joker definitely thought that he was helping bring about the greater good when he attempted to destroy Gotham City.
This was not something that I wanted jolting around my skull and screwing with the lens – however smudged and cracked it may already be – that I experienced everything through. Junior year had done enough to jumble my mind and alter what I had previously conceived to be undoubtedly true; very little was simple fact to me anymore. It’s true what they say, that there’s two sides to every story, but humans are so impossibly bad at both recognizing and accepting someone else’s version of an event or contrasting opinion.
So, despite my being more ticked off than helped by considering the possibility of myself being the one who was constantly incorrect, there were certainly many who needed to let themselves realize that it might not always be the world beating them down, and rather themselves limiting their abilities and ruining opportunities. I, of course, was a prime culprit of this offense, having often gone through bad days internally moaning about how life was so unfair and silently begging for something to freaking go my way for once. However, I was fully and comprehensively aware of the fact that the universe was not concerned in the least with my well being – or lack thereof- and that there were no evil gods intentionally working to wreck me.
That being said, when I consecutively stubbed my toe on the bottom of the fridge then got ridiculed by an empty freezer, looking hopelessly up to the sky and pleading with a God that I didn’t believe in to stop pointlessly torturing me was perfectly justified. Nonetheless, I knew that there were far too many people on this planet who solely blamed themselves for every single thing that had ever and would ever be anything less than perfect in their lives. You know, those kids who get thrown off their bike and bit asphalt who then reprimanded themselves for not seeing the branch that had awkwardly caught their wheel rather than viewing the accident as it was; chance, random, and unavoidable.
I was not a positive human, by any means, but I was also surprisingly realistic. I tended to watch the world with an unbiased mindset, mostly seeing things the how they actually, truly were. Some were voluntarily negative and others had fucked up brains that did not allow them to realize the good in everything, but I was right in the middle of optimism and pessimism.
Fully knowing all of this when I tripped, spilled my change, and nearly walked into a hairy old man all on the way to the grocery store, though, did not have any effect on the insistence that I was doomed by some ancient curse that always slumped into my head. And, on the opposite side of the spectrum, it was always the self-deprecating words splintering my consciousness - encouraged by not knowing how to solve a math problem that our teacher had never taught us how to do, something that could not possibly be determined my fault - that had a razor scarring my skin.
Knowing something and really believing it, are, sadly, not remotely near being the same thing. It’s quite strange how little opinions and knowledge actually contribute to actions. Humans will do anything to talk strangers off the ledge while teetering on it themselves. We desperately ache to save others while destroying ourselves without a care.
If only everyone didn’t see themselves as the exception to everything. Sure, this applies to the dicks who think it’s fine to double park and will still key other’s crooked cars, but also to all the irrational people who preach about beauty being both unimportant and inherent, yet cringe away from mirrors and obsessively avoid their reflections.
Resulting from this extensive thinking, when the chilled water cup next to me tipped off the windowsill, splattering the plastic sheathed library book and my crumpled torso, I glared at the droplets with irritated eyes, immediately contemplating why I deserved to have my drink flung off a ledge by some malicious cosmic force. Right after that, though, as I was standing up and seeking out paper towels to clean up my accidental mess, I realized that it was only a random interaction between the wood of the sill and condensation under the glass that caused it to slide to the floor.
It was very conflicting, since I wasn’t a religious person and didn’t really believe that a higher power dictated the events of my life, yet I was still ticked off by an invisible force sabotaging me whenever something slightly bad happened. Science was what I put my faith in, and there was definitely a simple explanation of the sequence of reactions that had gravity winning, the cup plummeting, and water flying everywhere. Surely if I paid more attention during physics and possessed a technical mind, I wouldn’t put the fault of that spill anywhere, because it was natural and normal.
But, then again, I was neither religious or scientific, head still trying to decide which one of those mindsets could more accurately determine the cause of my recent annoyance. And maybe I was to blame for the water drenching our living room walls, because if I’d pressed the drink back further against the blinds, wouldn’t it have stayed steadily in place? Or, perhaps, I should have placed it on an actual table, where there was next to no chance of it toppling over. But then again, some mythical God could send a lightning bolt to knock it down or nature could strike it out with an unfortunately landing meteor.
Eventually, kneeling on the old hardwood and mopping up the splattered water, I concluded that there were very rarely any powers - of whatever origin or background - purposefully conspiring against me. No higher forces affected my existence, nature was indifferent to the life of one teenager, and I myself in no way directly caused any of the little inconveniences that so quickly built up and consistently tested my cracking sanity.
Anyways, it didn’t matter. I was probably the only person who gave two shits about what made my drink spill. And none of the everyday irritants that plagued me were actually to blame for my occasional borderline mental breakdowns – those were all on me and my mind being a fantastic fuck up. Over thinking was my biggest, and, really, only pressing problem.
So none of that even mattered. I cared about the most stupid, pointless things, and practically everything that really was significant and important had absolutely no ability to induce any emotion in me anymore. Fuck it all.
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I don't even know if this chapter makes any sense and feel like none of you will like it but this book (I intentionally didn't mention the title because I basically gave away the entire plot) really fucked up my head for awhile and I needed to get it out of my thoughts. That's why I wrote this story, to let things out, but I feel increasingly pressured to actually make it good and really don't want to let anyone down, so... I tried. Please comment and vote! (On the bright side, I got YMAS tickets today, yay!)
xoxo
Rose
(If you really want to read that book, look in the comments. I've relayed its title and author like 50 times.)