Sorry, Babe, I Don’t Want to Be You Anymore

He drives Highway-7 South like some headless horseman.

Something in the mind snapped like a tooth’s roots from the gums.
Too much gnashing of the teeth. So much grinding, his teeth had begun to form deep abfractions.

Nothing, now, but static. A moaning dial tone. Radio Silence. Like the nightmares he had as a kid. And his head feels like a balloon.

A thought loop. A current. A broken record that skips. An obsession he can’t pull away from. A madness.

Stuck.

He keeps trying to pull over, but he no longer has agency. A quick glance at a passing exit…another missed opportunity. But then again nothing can delay the inevitable.

7 years of bad luck. Then 7 times over.

But he doesn’t know it yet. He still hopes this can all be avoided.

Tunnel Vision. Here, time runs slow and thick like syrup. Thoughts drip out like a broken faucet. The band plays, but its muffled and haunted. One thing’s certain.

This ship will sink.

The Fall.

I had just met with my “psychologist”. I use quotations because I’m not sure she was fully qualified to be called that. She was a Psychology graduate student. I was an Anthropology graduate student. Our meetups often devolved into debate. One time, I told her I couldn’t find time to “socialize with friends” because “the workers are separated from the means of production”. Time is money. She rolled her eyes at me. I had a crush on her, but I have a crush on everybody.

I’m 26. (At the time). I’m an alcoholic. I have PTSD, ADHD, chronic anxiety, and severe depression. But I’m taking life straight, no chaser. Like…look at me, I’m so tough that I’d developed zero healthy coping mechanisms.

I had a knack for dissociating. I’ve always been a little Houdini. An escape artist. I can withstand hard blows.

“if, by chance, I start to cross 5th avenue…and don’t make it to the other side”-Houdini

I don’t “give a fuck”. What I mean is…I give so much of a fuck that I can’t stand to look in the mirror anymore. I don’t recognize my own reflection. It’s a distorted image, like the portrait of Dorian Gray.

She diagnosed me as Bipolar, a misdiagnosis, and a psychiatrist prescribed me medication.

“Take your medication, socialize once a week, practice self-care, sleep, and perform cognitive behavioral therapy.” She had even written it down on a stack of reading materials she insisted I take home.

I was under a lot of pressure. Outside of graduate school, I had a full-time job as a line-cook at a restaurant. That job was no joke. It was located just off the square and was one of the most popular stops for lunch and dinner in the city. They offered me a career in management. I’d rather kill myself. In exchange for grant money, I also worked part-time as a Research Assistant for the Anthropology Department. I was busy. Stressed. Very busy. Very…very stressed.

I threw the medication in the trash. “Yea, I’m not taking these.”

I wasn’t feeling the diagnosis. I didn’t want to be medicated. I took her assessment as more of an educated guess. A suggestion. (I wouldn’t say I was wrong. Years later, psychologists would tell me there is no indication I have bipolar disorder.)

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy involved reading these really cliché scenarios and comparing how they should have been handled. Like those Goofus and Gallant strips from Highlights Magazine I read as a kid. I remember this particular scenario was something about a father’s overreaction to his son’s baseball game. I skimmed over it as I sucked on an American Spirit. There was a loud banging coming from the laundry mat next door. The only working dryer ate up everyone’s quarters, so you had to kick it a few times to get it started. I looked at my car. The back window covered in duct tape. I’d backed into a dumpster while leaving the archaeology lab. I shook my head and began to dissociate. It was a hot and humid Mississippi summer. A glare of light struck me in the eye as a truck passed by, causing me to squint. The cigarette’s smoke snaked into my other eye, causing it to water. I looked back at the printout. “What is this shit?” I mumbled. I put my cigarette out on the paper and threw it in the trash.

I was always running out of time. I had hours of reading and writing assignments due every day. Presentations I had to prepare for. A thesis I was supposed to be scrapping together. I didn’t have time for CBT. I didn’t have time to socialize. I didn’t even have time for these damn therapy appointments.

I was so pressed for time that I kept my books in the dish pit at the restaurant so I could sneak off and catch up on a few chapters between the lunch and dinner rush. At night, I self-medicated with whisky. Maker’s Mark. Each morning, I nursed a hangover with a pot of coffee.

Let’s get this straight. I’m not ok. I know I’m not ok. I’m under no delusions that I’m not a broken person. Just look at my hand…see it shaking? Believe me. That’s why I reached out for help. In the meantime, there’s Maker’s Mark.

My relationship with Maker’s Mark whisky started after I met Cliff. Cliff had been a heroin addict. The first time he overdosed his girlfriend saved his life. Afterwards, he switched to drinking Maker’s Mark full time. I never saw him without a fifth in his hand. I watched him spiral into alcoholism. It was tough to watch. He was always so sweet and hilarious, but when he drank, he slipped into a stupor and it could be a lot to handle. He could be rude. Not belligerent or cruel, but wild, and reckless. He’d run into people, knock things over, fall over himself, struggle to walk or stand, and end up slouched on somebody’s couch…blacked out til morning. Once, he blacked out in one of those white, monobloc lawn chairs in my neighbor’s backyard. He was still there the following morning. I think that was the first night I realized something deeper was going on. That it wasn’t just because he liked to party…it was something darker than that. Something I recognized in myself.

Years later it would be me being 86'd from several Portland clubs, bars, and liquor stores for acting the same way. Thanks to ole Maker’s Mark, my trusty sidekick.

Cliff and I used to do heroin together. I’d just returned from wandering around the country, a failed seeker, when Anaiah, a lover, first introduced me to heroin. It was the perfect drug. The warmest blanket on the coldest day. Her and I had a falling out…as we do…often. I stopped at a local bar and there he was…stumbling around, a dead head with long hair and tie-dye, out of place in the suburbs. He was yelling something ridiculous at a DJ. To be honest, he looked like shit. I could tell he started using again. So, I just picked up where Anaiah and I had left off.

Some guy, I think his name was Cody, started using with us. In the Walmart Parking lot of the soul, lightheaded, afraid I might pass out dead any second, he turned to Cliff and I and said, “We’re going to hell if we don’t change our ways.”

“Fuck you”, I said. It gave me the creeps. “Why the fuck would you say that right now?” He took a long drag from his cigarette and solemnly shook his head.

I don’t believe in God. But I do believe in Hell.

Cliff and I went to buy cigarettes at a gas station. Slouched, sideways, stumbling, he put his ID directly in front of the cashier’s face. “Look at this cute, handsome boy. What happened to him? Huh? What happened to this handsome boy?” He slurred.

What did happen to you Cliff?

In high school, his mom had been my 9th grade Biology teacher. “My boy will be in high school next year and y’all better be nice to him.” He was a good kid. Quiet. Awkward. A bit shy. Smart. Goofy. Always smiling.

We sat, smoking outside the gas station, in the parking lot. I asked him about death. “What did it feel like?” He shrugged and took a long drag from his cigarette, staring off into the distance as if in contemplation. “It was cold.”

Twice in my life I’ve talked about death with someone who would go on to die just days later. The first happened to someone I worked with at the YMCA. Jessica, a recently married woman in her mid-twenties, brought up a friend of her’s that had just passed away. “It was so out of the blue.” She said. She seemed shook. They had just talked to each other the night before it happened. “One day you are here and the next you’re gone”, she told me. Days later, while on a midnight jog, she was ran over by a 16-year-old boy in a pickup truck. He had been drinking and driving.

The following night, Cliff and I met up for the last time. I could tell something was off with him. He brought up his ex a lot. “I never asked her to save me.” I didn’t know what to say. The cigarette in his hand trembled as his left arm moved all over the place like he was conducting an orchestra. “I see double”, he mumbled. He was trying to find the ash tray. I scooted it towards him. His eyes were vacant. His face emotionless. Two men directly behind us kept staring. I began to feel paranoid. They looked like cops, and I had .4 grams of heroin in my pocket.

I’d already come too close to going to prison several months earlier when the house I was staying at got raided. Friends in low places. Jacob and I took in a third roommate from hell. I don’t know where Jacob met Marshall, but after that I seriously began to question his judgement in character. Marshall was a manipulative, sadistic, narcissistic asshole. He’d enter my room with a shotgun and ask me to try out his bullet proof vest to see if it works. That kind of shit. Mental. I never felt safe with him. He’d give me shrooms and acid for free…only to psychologically torture during the trip. Not even my room was safe from him. He would just pick the lock and enter. He was a drug dealer. That was his trade. “The Candy Man.” He had started growing copious amounts of shrooms and selling to all sorts of sordid characters. Everyone in our neighborhood could see the red flags. It was a trap house. Last I heard, he’s in prison for armed robbery.

“How much did you take?” I asked Cliff. “I don’t know…2, 3…5(packs)? I don’t know.” I wanted to leave. I just wanted to go home, put on some music, and curl up in a blanket. Forget the world and my shitty life. But Cliff looks like he’s about to pass out in front of everyone in this bar. I paid our tab. “Let’s go.” I told him. When we got to the parking lot, he asked if I had any plans. “I’m going home.” I told him. I was ignoring all the signs in front of me. I just wanted to be alone. To be nowhere, doing nothing. To be no one. To get high. I just wanted to leave. I knew he lived just blocks from the bar. I figured he’d be ok. I was surprised when he gave me a hug. “You know I really look up to you.” He said. “You are a good person and a good friend.” I didn’t know what to say. “Are you good to drive?” I asked. “Ya, don’t worry about me, I’ll call you when I get home. I’m going to stop by a gas station and get one of those…those…what are they called, little Starbuck’s Frappuccino things.” But he never called. I didn’t even notice. I was curled up under blankets, lights off, listening to music, blissfully going in and out of consciousness like the light on my laptop.

He died that night. I found out two days later scrolling through Facebook. Even now, that night plays over and over in my head on repeat. Some things don’t have silver linings. Some things are just horrible…and that’s just how it’s going to be.

I failed my friend. Just like I failed my first dog, Gizmo. I was 11. It was the hottest day of the summer. I left him outside all weekend without food or water. I was too busy playing video games in my room. I remember walking down the hill to check on him. He was on his side lying in the cooked grass beneath an angry hot sun. I patted him on his side. It was like I’d just beat an old rug. I coughed as the dust filled my lungs. I began to shake him. “Gizmo…buddy…Gizmo…”. I walked around and looked at his face. I stared in horror as hundreds of ants crawled in and out through where his eyes had been. His beautiful soul replaced by two black holes it had disappeared into…swallowed up. My fault.

My heart is damned.

My head is empty, and my toes are warm. The Antlers’ “Kettering” softly plays as I continue to coast down the highway.

“I am going to kill myself.” I say out loud. I needed to hear it. I needed to understand it.

(Hunter S. Thompson: “I would feel trapped in this life if I didn’t know I could commit suicide at any time.”)

(Frank from It’s Always Sunny: “Suicide’s badass.”)

My Ipod shuffles.

Frank Ocean’s “Swim Good” begins to play:
“I’m about to drive in the ocean.
I’m about to swim from somethin’ bigger than me.”

“So, is that the plan?” I asked myself. I checked google maps. A 5-hour trip from Oxford to Gulfport. I could make it by nightfall. It’d be poetic to drown. Painful…excruciating even, but poetic.

Ophelia. Virginia Woolfe. A Baptism. Totally, aesthetic.

My friend Shane was swallowed by the undertow into the Gulf of Mexico while on a mission trip in the Dominican Republic. I used to stay up all night wondering about him. Did he drown immediately? Did he drift out to sea, alone, scared, until he couldn’t swim any longer and he began to choke down water? It worried me. He was a sweet guy, a beautiful singer…why him?

Now, I know better than to ask that question. How many more affirmations do you need? I’m dissolutioned. I want to believe…I just can’t. But hey….by all means…if you need a delusion…there’s plenty out there just look around you.

As I drive Highway 7, I’m reminded of Andrew. In elementary school, Andrew was my best friend. His mom was a 1st grade teacher. My grandmother was his mom’s assistant teacher. We’d stay after school for hours just playing on the playground or running through the hallways. We went to the same church. We lived in the same neighborhood. Birthdays at Chuckie Cheese and Discovery Zone. Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers. Although we hadn’t spoken or seen each other in years, his death continues to haunt me. His car engulfed in flames. It’s seared into my memory. Although, I didn’t know it was him at the time. It occurred on this very highway…just months after Cliff passed. I was on I-5 that morning headed in the same direction. From Holly Springs to Oxford. Then I noticed a long line of traffic had formed. I could see the smoke. There had been a wreck. I had to call into work and tell them I would be running late.

There was construction on the highway that morning. Andrew’s car came to a stop, but the car behind him didn’t. The driver wasn’t watching the road and plowed into him at 80 mph. His body was immediately incinerated. People got out their phones to record the spectacle. I remember watching as the remainder of his car was pulled from the wreckage. It had been mangled, crushed like a tin can. I didn’t learn that it was Andrew until Thanksgiving. Apparently, he had just finished his military service and was headed down to Oxford to sign up for Aviation repair school. I saw his parents a few times after his death. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say.

I knew I was going to kill myself, but I didn’t want it to be painful. I especially didn’t want to fuck it up. Quick and easy. I’d just finished reading A Bell Jar. I’d stole a copy from a local coffee shop. “I’m going to Sylvia Plath myself.” I decided. My apartment even had a gas oven. But I’ve a Bachelor of Arts degree…not a Bachelor of Science…so I was clueless how I could leave the gas running without accidentally killing everyone else in my apartment complex. I don’t know how gas works.

So maybe the ole wrist slit? I heated my machete on the stove. Tried a few practice runs. The hot blade ran through my skin like butter causing a line of red to form up and down my forearm. “Damn, that really hurts.” I said to myself.

I thought about K. I thought about the note she left me, smeared in her blood. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.” When we dated, she would cut herself all the time. I never understood it. I tried to get her to stop. I would wake up in the middle of the night and realize she wasn’t lying beside me. I’d run to the living room and find her crying, hair covering her face, soft wrist covered in fresh wounds. It was awful. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I tried to get her to sit and talk with me. I had this stupid idea that if she would just look into my eyes and make a sincere connection with me, then she would let me know what was going on and I could help her. But she wasn’t an open person. There were things going on inside her I couldn’t see. I wouldn’t understand. I started threatening to tell her parents. Then, I began cutting myself in protest. After a while, I stopped reacting to it. Our relationship had begun to drift apart. I grew desensitized. Calloused. I told her to stop crying. Stop acting like a child. Stop being so damn crazy all the time. “I don’t care what you do K., I’m going to sleep, I can’t take this shit anymore.”

The ghost of Christmas past nods her finger. “No take backs.”

I met K. at a coffee shop. I’d just come back to Oxford after spending a month in the Mississippi Delta doing archaeological field work. It was a beautiful day. Late Summer. A cool, crisp breeze reminding that seasons change. I rode my bike to Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s estate, which is open to the public. Summer afternoons I liked to spend at Rowan Oak. In the fall, I liked to share whisky by his graveside. I took a nap in his concentric circle garden under the shade of tall, mystical looking Rowan Oaks. Scottish like my ancestors. I counted my blessings. Then, in a slip second decision, I decided to ride my bike across town to get some coffee.

I sat in the coffee shop, alone, reading Kerouac, when as I looked up from the page, I was immediately struck by piercing blue eyes. They belonged to the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. She didn’t look away. Like in Virgin Suicides, when Trip meets Lux. Our eyes were locked. I felt like I was in a trance. She was the sweetest thing. I knew right then that I’d met her. The girl I’d looked for all my life. And everything around us fell away. It was just her and I. It was holy. Briefly, just for a moment there…I think I believed in God. “Uh…” I struggled to find the words. “…hi”.

We hit it off. We carried on a caffeine induced conversation for what seemed like hours. I was so star struck by the experience that I nearly left without getting her number.

A week later, a friend from work and I took psychedelic mushrooms in a park with friends we met the night before. It was magical. I felt giddy. I had butterflies in my stomach. Big changes were happening in my life. My professors wanted me to apply to graduate school! I had just met someone who might be the love of my life. I was meeting interesting, like-minded people and forming new friendships. I became convinced that I had finally beat whatever curse was making my life fucking miserable. Sure, things might have gotten a little fucked up there for a while, but all that was finally changing. I could see the light.

I was happy.

“I think I found the one. Like I think I found…the girl I’d always hoped to find.” I told my wide-eyed friends…spun off mushrooms and nitrous oxide. I meant it to. I really felt that way…I still do. A comforting delusion. “Congratulations man!” They all seemed genuinely happy for me.

Romeo and Juliet. The Baz Luhrmann version. Although I wasn’t much of a Montague, as much as I aspired to be a 90’s DiCaprio, but she was certainly a Capulet.

At the peak of my mushroom trip, I headed to the bathroom and made the mistake of looking in the mirror. There she was again. No, not K. Another girl. A version of myself…hiding underneath my entire life…observing me from behind blue eyes. She’s soft and delicate. She’s quiet. She’s confused. I’m confused. My body is practically buzzing with feminine sexual energy. I panicked. I had to hide her. I looked away from the mirror. I tried to put my identity back on like a hat or jacket. I pulled on the doorknob, but the door was jammed. “Yo! Can someone help me out? The door’s jammed!” I yelled. After several tries, the door flung open. My new friends stood in the doorway just staring at me. They seemed confused. I’d a strange feeling they could see her. Or feel her presence. Or at least tell something about me was off. That maybe I hadn’t succeeded in tucking her away. I felt ashamed.

Who am I?

Days later, I woke up to a flooded apartment. A pipe had burst, and I had to have commercial grade fans installed to dry the carpet. The fans were placed underneath the carpet making the floor look like a moon bounce.

I met K. on the square. “Wanna come over to my moon bounce castle?” I asked. She could tell I was weird. She liked it. I think she saw it as a good kind of weird.

We went back to my apartment. She seemed depressed. “Hey, don’t let life get you down. It’s not that serious.” I pulled a carton of eggs out of the fridge and chucked one against the wall of my apartment. The yolk ran down. I grabbed a cut-out of a woman from a magazine that I had lying around for some stupid art project I was working on and pasted it to the wall. “See, it just doesn’t matter.” She laughed. A good sign. I gave her the carton and headed to the bathroom. Then, I began to hear thuds. When I came back to my living room, she was chucking all dozen eggs across my apartment. “Oh, shit.” I thought. I laughed. Strange girl. The good kind. I liked her. A lot.

I met her father. I was wearing pants that were rolled up at the ankles. A button up polo that was entirely too small. I looked stupid. I was nervous. My palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy. “He’s about to graduate with his bachelor’s and go to graduate school to become an Anthropologist.” She bragged. Her father, a fan of Roman history and architecture, seemed impressed…or at least he showed an interest.

Strong handshake for dad. Keep it cool. Don’t seem weird. Don’t fuck this up.

K. is 19. A freshman at the University of Mississippi. She’s a musical prodigy. A clarinetist. Like the Lisbon family, she has several sisters. All gorgeous. Roman Catholic. Dad’s a big shot lawyer. The family seems well off. And K. is ambitious…there’s nothing she can’t do…the world is hers.

I can’t let them know who I really am. A fuck up. I was kicked out of the military at age 20. I’d spent the last three months of my naval career spun off cocaine and cough syrup while playing guitar hero every night. Out of boredom? Out of a desire to escape? Out of my mind. I’d eventually go AWOL. Return to base. And fail a piss test. (I’d smoked weed with an ex-girlfriend on Halloween just days before turning myself in.) I Spent 3 months on restriction, locked away from the world on the top floor of an old, drafty building in Great Lakes (aka Great Mistakes) Naval Base, Illinois. I returned home an outcast. A pariah. I’d an OTH discharge. Other than Honorable. It’s between ‘general’ and dishonorable’. It’s not good. My family was ashamed of me. I was alone. The most alone I’d ever been. And I was lost. I stumbled around, hopping from city to city, trying to find some rhyme or reason to my life. I’d only ever wanted to be a soldier. A Navy Seal, Army Ranger, or a marine. Now what would I do? Girlfriends and friendships came in and out of my life. Nothing was stable. I didn’t know what was wrong with me.

But I did find my way. And here I was…a happy, healthy, intelligent, and might I add…good looking young man. I might even go places. I would start over. Reset. Life was beginning to feel brand new. This time, I could really be somebody and make something of out my life. I could marry the woman of my dreams. Start a family. A career. I could make my family proud of me again. I could finally cast off the guilt and shame that had been eating me alive for the last several years. I just wanted to live. Not roam aimlessly like the walking dead. K. validated me. School validated me. Having friends validated me. They all gave me a reason to an otherwise absurd and wasted life. Oxford felt like the first place I could really call home.

I first kissed K. at the park, in a rose covered gazebo. In Autumn, we climbed trees in strangers’ front yards and watched the leaves begin to change colors. I walked her to class each morning. She played in the college band for home games, while I drank and partied in the Grove. After games, we always met in the same place, on the same steps. The breeze was cool, soft, and gentle. Everyone was so happy. I longed for that feeling my whole life. I started to believe this is how I’m supposed to feel. Maybe it really is that easy…to be happy.

I remember nights in Memphis. I’d walk with her down by the river side. We held hands as we crossed the train tracks. Giddy with excitement, we’d snuck into an empty ballroom at the Peabody Hotel. It felt like a classic movie. “Want me to throw a lasso around the moon?”

Loving her was easy. Natural.

She met my family. They adored her. And my memories of that year are warm, ethereal, and dreamlike.

Then it ended.
She’s married now. She looks happy. Good for her.

I carried on with school. I graduated with honors. I got an award for being “Most Outstanding Senior in Anthropology.” And nobody cared, least of all me. Why am I even here? I’d sunk thousands of dollars into debt and spent years of my life trying to earn what? Respect? I didn’t have respect for myself or anyone else. I couldn’t take control of my life. There was this sinking feeling in my chest. An unraveling.

(“Just a broken guy, got a few screws loose I guess.”-Richard Russel ‘Sky King’)

I only ever went where things seemed to be heading. When things reached a dead end, I left. I started over.

For example, when Cliff died, I started dating the manager of a coffee shop in Holly Springs. She had just hired me. She was a mess. So was I. But she helped me get off heroin. She was mean. I was mean. It didn’t last. The coffee shop failed and she left for Nashville, Tennessee. I’d been working a second job 45 minutes south in Oxford, Mississipi. I figured I’d just move down there. And since I was down there I thought…might as well go back to school. That’s how I ended up in Oxford, working at a restaurant, and going to school. That’s how I met K.

A couple weeks before my first semester of graduate school, I sat alone in my apartment. I was depressed. Beyond depressed, I was mortified. I felt stuck. I needed to get unstuck. Being so busy, I barely had time to really sit with myself and feel what I was feeling. I didn’t have the skills to navigate my mind…safely…effectively…in a healthy way. I’d been distracting myself with work and school. I couldn’t keep up anymore. I couldn’t distract myself from myself. I knew I was fucking miserable. And I was now inching closer and closer to self-sabotage.

I needed to escape for a while. I decided to revisit an old hobby of mine. I drank a bottle of Robitussin. It didn’t seem to be working so I drove to a Walgreens and bought more. Classic mistake, and a rookie one no less. I’d say I’m an impatient patient, but I’m no doctor. I chugged the second bottle. As I drove home, it began to kick in. Hard. It was at that moment that I knew I had fucked up.

“You’re turning violet, Violet.” I said to myself as I stared into the mirror. My skin was a purplish red. I was overheated. I got naked and ran a cold shower. I stepped in. I felt like I’d melt into a pool of blood and run down the drain. I was certain death was closing in. Convinced that I didn’t have long to live, I started to reflect on my life. I began to cry. A hard cry. A defeated cry. Then the cry turned into laughter. A sick laughter. A “Walter White in the crawlspace (Season 4, episode 11)” type of laughter. “Such an idiot, I’m such an idiot”. I said to myself. Hysterics. “What a fucking idiot. I’m going to make it into the Darwin’s award. Shit, I guess I’m getting all types of awards.”

(“Staring in the devil’s face but you can’t stop laughing.”-Danny Brown, Atrocity Exhibition)

When I gained mental clarity, I noticed my headphones were really loud. I couldn’t figure out how to turn the music down. I pulled the earphones out. Music was still playing. A cacophony. Disorder. Dissonance. “Oh, the laptops playing.” I fumbled the Macbook around trying to turn it off. Then, I noticed an Ink Spots record was also playing on my record player. “Books, books, why are there books?” I’d been sifting through books apparently. Circling things. Scribbling nonsense like a crazy person. Then the audience gave me a standing ovation. I looked out into the crowd. “Me?” I pointed to myself. K. kissed me as I stood on stage holding my award. “Well…I haven’t prepared a speech. What’s this for again? A Darwin’s Award?”

It’s funny. I always fetishized madness. As if it indicated true genius. But I wasn’t a genius. And madness isn’t an aesthetic…its real. It’s very real. And its horrifying. You can’t appreciate just how horrifying it really is until you’ve crossed that threshold for yourself.

Suicide had always seemed like a way I might rewrite my life. In this narrative, I’d become the martyr. Like, if you kill yourself, suddenly everybody knows who you are. You’d been misjudged. Misunderstood. You’d be missed. You’d become a martyr for all those lonely hearts and complicated artists…a niche, regional mythological hero. Delusions. Now, I could finally see suicide as it truly was. A prescription. The urge to pull the cord. To log off. Make it all stop. The final destination. The “one really serious philosophical problem.”

I was surrounded by an all-encompassing blackhole, yawning into oblivion. I was a deer in headlights. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t look away as my life headed into the woodchipper…chipping at the bone until there’s nothing left. And after burning all those bridges and pushing everyone away, I finally have enough space where nobody could hear me scream. It’s a waking nightmare. Your dreams are nightmares. Your thoughts are nightmares. There is nowhere you can run. No place left to hide. Checkmate.

You might as well be on the Titan submarine. You’re fucked.

I tried to keep moving forward.

I smoked with Tessa on an Indian Mound. She acted like it was something spiritual. But, under the leadership of Andrew Jackson, my ancestors had committed genocide against the descendants of the builders of these mounds. All for land. These are their ruins. Not ours. Ancestral guilt swimming around in my blood. It’s haunting. “I’m not supposed to be here.”

We took some acid and sat hitting whip-it’s on my living room floor like a couple crackheads. She tried to fuck. I couldn’t. I got embarrassed. The way she looked at me. I felt ashamed. We watched Inception. She kept talking over the movie. I thought she was an idiot. She left my stove on all night.

After my house had been raided, Jacob spent two years in prison. I’d been lucky and left that weekend to stay with my sister in Chattanooga. He’d finally been released that summer. We took a trip to Savannah, Georgia to see our friend Hayden. He lived in a trailer park. We took acid with psilocybin mushrooms. They started a rap battle which escalated into a fight. The fight left the trailer, through the screen door, off the porch and into the grass. I remember thinking…boys…stop it. Like I was their sister. And they were my two dumb brothers. It had always felt that way, I recognized.

But I wanted to be like them. A stupid dude. Just a dumb, stupid dude. To prove it to myself, I got extremely drunk, and Hayden and I dove off a pier. I literally jumped over a stingray someone was fishing out of the water. The locals screamed virulently as the lifeguards chased us down. “There’s sharks down there!” A woman yelled. I tried to Navy Seal my way up the beach without getting seen, but it was useless. We were caught. We each got fined a thousand dollars. A reminder that not even madness can escape the rule of law.

I robotripped with a friend. Again, we were hitting whip-its like crack. Three sheets to the wind. Each time I hit the whip, it felt like my brain was being ripped in two.

We smoked DMT on a farm in Water Valley. Slowly, I lay’d back into the grass, shuffled into the everchanging patterns of it all. Sometimes, I wonder if I’m still lying there in the grass…about to wake up.

I started graduate school amidst a full-blown psychosis.

I had these solipsistic thoughts. I began to believe that I might have imagined my whole life and everyone else didn’t really exist. A metaphysical simulation, holographic…projection of the unconscious…or some shit. A dream within a dream. Trapped in a time-loop like Bruce Willis in 12-Monkeys or La Jetee.

I was caught in a panic attack that wouldn’t end. My heart pounded out of my chest. I thought I would have a heart attack.

One morning, in my living room, my knees buckled. I started crying, wailing on the floor. I had never cried like that before. It was disturbing.

Hallelujah.

I would stare into the mirror for hours. Trying to find myself. But who was seeing who. Was I seeing her seeing me…or rather than the other way round? I felt like a Russian doll.

I didn’t want to embrace her. I didn’t want to let go of who I thought I was supposed to be. I wanted to see myself the way K. saw me. Not this broken person in the mirror. The man she thought she loved. The man I thought I was…briefly. In this mirror, all I could see was a broken person. Who is he? Who is she? Who am I? Is there a self? Fuck.

I had loved her once. I had prayed as a child for God to turn me into a girl. I wanted to be like all the other girls. I wasn’t supposed to be a boy, I thought. I remember how heartbroken I felt…being pushed away from who I wanted to be…into someone else. My relationship with her was one we had in confidence. Her and I…Us and God. We prayed every night. I didn’t want to be a boy. And it never truly felt right.

But, I moved on. I had to. I did become a boy…and I grew into a man. My desire to be a woman was eclipsed by my attraction to them. And I dated a lot of women. I only ever felt jealous of them after they were gone. Jealous I could never be the man they wanted me to be. Jealous I could never be the beautiful, amazing women I knew they were. Inside there was a conflict of interest. And I planned to keep it inside…until I hardly noticed it anymore.

I wasn’t queer…I would tell myself. But I wasn’t straight. I don’t know what I am. An ouroboros.

I couldn’t tell anyone what was going on with me. In the past, I had texted someone that I was having suicidal thoughts. Next thing I knew, the police showed up to my doorstep. They banged on the door and startled me out of a deep sleep on my couch. I opened the door to a cop, gun drawn. “What are you trying to kill me?” I asked. “We got a call someone here is considering suicide!” He yelled back. “So, what is this like a delivery service?” I was forced to go to a hospital. I no longer reached out. I’d have preferred to get black out drunk and crawl beneath the house like a dying dog.

Anaiah visited me. She brought Thee Psychick Bible with her. “What kind of name is Genesis P-Orridge?” I thought to myself. Anaiah was one of the few people that knew about my gender dysphoria. I wanted to talk to her about it. Talk about my suicidal thoughts. But I didn’t. It doesn’t matter. What’s the point? I took her to see Neutral Milk Hotel at the Lyric. Then she left. She’s always coming and going.

I remember when I visited her in Memphis while I was dating K. She was living in a half-way home. She had a ukulele. She strummed the chords to Radiohead’s “How to Disappear Completely” and sang to me in my car. She looked so beautiful that night. I kissed her. I convinced myself it wasn’t cheating. I just wanted to revisit old feelings…I guess it kind of was though.

My professor had me reading Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. I felt trapped. A being-in-a-world cursed by change to be changed…to cause change to…the only constant. “But wouldn’t you just like to lie down?” I asked myself. I was getting black out drunk. Passing out at other people’s houses. Crying uncontrollably on bathroom floors. I had lost a lot of weight. Skin and bones. I stopped taking care of myself. I looked emaciated. I looked dead. Nothing mattered. Nothing. Throw it all into the woodchipper. Fuck it.

I tried to get back at an ex by having sex with her new boyfriend’s ex. Even in the midst of madness, I could still be petty. However, I couldn’t. I actually had to push her off of me. I couldn’t breathe. I was having a panic attack.

One night, loaded on cocaine and whisky, I texted my mom from the bathroom floor of a Denny’s. “Mom, I think I’m transgender.” I knew she wouldn’t accept that. I grew up in a Southern Baptist home in one of the most conservative parts of Mississippi. But I said it anyways. “What did it matter?” I thought. “I’m going to kill myself”.

I texted K. “I think I’m transgender.” I thought maybe she would understand. She told me I wasn’t. She said I was just trying to get her attention. She told me I was the worst thing that ever happened to her and to never speak to her again. That’s the last we spoke.

I was having a public meltdown. Life had lost all meaning. I couldn’t focus on school.

Had I only deluded myself by the image I projected onto the world? Deluded myself into thinking I was anything at all? And for what? The same reason as everybody else. To love and be loved.

I bailed classes. I got in my car…and began to drive.

Was it all over…was this the end? An unraveling to nothing at all. One final disappointment.

The car began to slow down. I pulled over. I don’t know how long I sat there for or what I was waiting on. A miracle?

But the sky is indifferent to human suffering. The wind can’t hear our cries.

In the Fire Sutra, Buddha said that all life is suffering.
“Bhikkhus, all is burning. And what is the all that is burning?”

No, I didn’t attain liberation from Samsara…but I started to doubt there was any way out. Maybe one does not simply “exit life”. Or maybe, like Emil Cioran, I had decided that “suicide and death are as cumbersome and useless as meaning and life”.

I had finally dissociated so far out from my life I wasn’t sure how it would reconnect. I looked into the rearview mirror. Then I looked down the long stretch of endless highway that keeps on rolling and rolling. My eyes refocused and there she was. Not K. Not any girl I’d loved or hoped to be. Just me. Someone I loved long ago. A version of myself I never got to know. I had been too ashamed of her.

It’s been 7 years and I’m still haunted by the past and who I used to be.

I’m less cynical, although I’m still a cynic. But I’m less afraid of life and death. I’m able to let things be. And let things go.

To sink like a stone.

But the memories of everything and everyone still creep through my mind sometimes. They’re haunting…like the photograph taken in the ballroom of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. Every once in a while, I find myself caught up in the spectacle again…reimmersed in old trauma.

Who him? That’s my ex.

Sorry, babe, I don’t want to be you anymore.