Perpetual Cripple: a Short story.

 

"till you spend half your life just to cover it up."

·    Bruce Springsteen.

 

What is the magic bullet made of? Is it by that wizard of weapons, packed with sanity and tattered, torn, crippled, and waiting for some point where there is enough clarity to say a proper goodbye, those old dreams? My father gave me a bullet on my eighteenth birthday and told me, "this is your escape plan. When things get too heavy, this is your parachute".

 

I wear it on a necklace stare at it, unsure if the thing is real, hoping that baking out in a parked car with no air conditioner, it will go off and take an artery with it. It looks like it is made of gold. Maybe my old man wasn't a shit; perhaps it is gold. Maybe he meant if I ever went on hard times, I could sell it for some quick cash. Yeah, perhaps that is it, but more than likely, he hated me as much as I hate myself.

 

I wrote a short story called red as riding hood; I knew it was terrible, in the same prehistoric way I feel in my gut that this is bad. It was about my Therapist biting my dick off. In hindsight, I think it was a subconscious crying out from the abyss that my life has become, to say, "you're losing the only thing you had. You were an interesting failure, but now, you're too sane—your Nothing but an old-fashioned regular failure, the dull, kind. the kind that wastes people's time with sentences like this."

 

"Yeah, I know." I want to tell that inner voice feeling myself cower in his presence. "but it had to happen. If I never wrote something that bad, I would never have been able to say what I needed to."

 

I know I was never good enough; I never was going to be great. There was a blurring between craft and chaos inside my impotent creative mind between my failure and acceptance of it. My Therapist helps me, but she doesn't care about me. At least not in the same way. I am not even sure If I care about her the way I thought I used to. Here I am with my hand is about as intimate as that relationship will ever be. Sanity is acceptance, about being able to deal with reality. Madness is ambition from the impotent. The incongruent who feel like they can become more than what was allotted to them.

 

My little brother said, "I'm mom and dad's second most successful child after our older sister." I looked at him in a way that may have suggested, "what does that make me." His eyes told a better story, a story of "if you think I gave a shit, then why would I have said what I did."

 

I can accept that I can accept psychological violence is the foundation of just about every meaningful relationship I have. It might just be the reason I have been avoiding adding more to the list (meaningful relationships, that is.), but still, How can you engage with a world that leaves you unfathomably wounded and ill-equipped to heal.

 

One of the professionals I work with says things, "Like I have never put myself in that kind of situation." and I think to myself, "well fuck me for deciding to have him as a brother."

 

It is all becoming a little more fragmented. I am caring less and want to be done. I don't get birthday presents anymore, and that is the way I like it.

 

When I am dead, flush my ashes down the toilet, Factual statement or symbolic gesture, ether way it solves a problem.