today i have another episode. i wish i had my instruments, but i have this laptop, and i tell myself that it is time to write about it, though i know that it’s all i write about, really. i realize that i am not transparent. i realize this perhaps because i ask someone who has known me since i was a child to make me cry and he looks at me for a while, we are seated in his car, and he shakes his head and says, “you’re really out there, bren. as much as i know about you, i feel i don’t know you at all. so i can’t make you cry. you have a weird brain. you tell me what you do but i have no definite facts about you. you ask too many questions.”

i lean my head against the window. that makes me desirous of tears like ropes but i don’t have it in me. he tells me to get a grip. i think what he means is grow up.

we are talking about suicide. he tells me i have too much to live for. he says that it’s a potential thing. i think about hanging like the fog from a rafter.

because it is foggy and i’m pressed against a window, i draw geometric shapes with my index finger. hexagons. trapezoids. i keep getting what i want. it’s becoming a bit of a joke. i grow more impolite. i want to see where i stack up.

in this hour i think i could die sober. that would be a matter of expediency, not restraint. i start to feel apologetic for my morbid reverie, but that is not fair, because this is how it has to be on the hedonic treadmill. 

i try to let that wash over me. i learn that in science, there are rules against reality. i learn that you never really touch anything, that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. my friend explains it the way i will now. when you punch a wall, the wall will punch you back. that is why your hand hurts afterward. but the wall can absorb more force than you, which is why you break your fingers and the wall doesn’t crumble. 

it is so common to crumble. sometimes i like to blame this on capitalism. i was raised by businessmen, but i don’t like to barter.

i lose track. i will try to explain because maybe that will be helpful for me.

i learn that everything in the mind is replicated somewhere in the body. this is unsettling to hear, initially, because i worry that i don’t have a body. but that is the point of the exercise. so i start to notice my thighs tensing or my hands shaking or my stomach fluttering or most often a serrated cavity where my lungs should be. this time my body is spinning on the inside. and i don’t sleep until i exhaust my spinning self. 

i realize that i have not been transparent. this is because i have worked so hard to arm myself against these reminders that i reroute automatically. i wish i could show you the way unreality washes over and out. it begins to sound uglier, maybe because i am young and impressionable and far away. i want to go off the grid. 

sometimes i excuse myself. i say, i’m sorry, i am just sad. people understand. they are sad too. 

i tried to change a lot of things this summer. still whenever i pass a mirror i glower at my reflection suspiciously. when i watch myself exhale, there is an inordinate amount of smoke, which conceals evidence of causal determinism, which is a problem for me. maybe that is because i am indolent, which worries me. i take stock of my spinning body. this translates into the fact that i am distressed. 

epictetus wrote this: “never say about anything, ‘i have lost it,’ but only ‘i have given it back.’ is your child dead? it has been given back. is your wife dead? she has been returned.” this is a bit despicable, but i am beginning to think that it is one of my favorite passages.

what i wish i would’ve written is: i take things too seriously. i take things too lightly. there are times when i do not exist and there are times when there is nothing else. i would like to think that when i am given back, i am given to a place that will smooth over my hair and drip over my features and will convince me of myself; and i imagine that such a place will be fresh, where i cannot be lost, and it will consider me, and it will say welcome;

she has been returned. 

x bren