Drop the keyboard. Drop your phone. Drop the gun. Take a step back in time to where you were a minute ago and recollect yourself. Then, pick up your weapon and step forward in time again.
You’re holding a knife up to someone’s throat now, and, at this point, you can’t back out. The four word text already has created a crater in your path – we need to talk. That’s never a good sign, is it? Things tend to slip out of your grasp and spiral down and down into this seemingly infinite void. Darkness follows, of course.
It’s hard to breathe down there. It’s almost like you’re suffocating but your body is still present and quite still, except for the shaking of hands and the rapidly beating heart. But it’s not moving much more than that.
You blink and your sense of reality returns. The headlights of the car parked in front of you have momentarily blinded you but you notice out of the corner of your eyes that someone is staring at you. It’s always that one person who is staring at you once your body loses its awareness of the present world. It is that one person waiting to pounce, to question your lack of being there, to make matters worse.
You avoid that person’s gaze, hoping that if you ignore it for long enough, it will go away, just like your problems. And you know that never works. The person’s gaze doesn’t break and you finally turn around. It is a friend, apparently.
“What?” the person says, before your mind registers that maybe he should react in another way.
“Nothing, I just…,” you begin to think of words to express the feeling you just went through but he won’t get it. No one does, really. Maybe everyone goes through their own trip that’s just inexplicable to everyone else. Or maybe there are different types of people who go through different types of trips and could be categorised accordingly. There’s always an answer to how you feel, or to how I feel, on those online forums that question every emotion and explain which psychological traumas make up who you are.
Because really, that is what we are.
A result of our psychological traumas (or the opposite of trauma: trophies?) you experienced in your childhood. Psychological traumas include being the first child, losing a parent, being bullied in school, being the bully in school, having really ugly teeth, being forced to do really dirty chores, being the middle child, losing a friend, losing a pet, etc.
“I…”your voice trails off, trying to get a hold of any of the thoughts spinning wildly through your head. You lose focus as the person’s clownish grin gets bigger and bigger, taunting you and paralysing you. “Have you ever seen that movie, Enter the Void?”
The person’s grin fades a little as they begin to already lose interest in the conversation.
“Nah,” he says, his eyes already drifting somewhere else. “What’s it about?”
“It’s a pretty cool movie, it’s about this guy who gets caught with drugs in Japan and then gets shot to death by the police. He then goes through this DMT trip – he was on a DMT trip in the beginning of the movie too but through actually taking DMT; here he’s just dying. And he goes through this adventure and does all these fucked up things.”
“Hmm…,” the person says. You already regret feigning this stream of thought and begin to dread the succeeding five minute conversation which will be forced out of both your mouths as a mere form of politeness, or pity. You can’t tell but you’re already feeling disappointed with this flavourless conversation; a stream of forced words with no rhythm and no flow.
“It’s a pretty cool movie. Check it out.”
Go back into the shell. Go back into the void. Just hide there for a while until the people disperse. Feels like a zoo in here and you’re the monkey with the funky teeth and the ugly tail. But it’s not cute being that monkey at all, because inside the cage the other monkeys prance around with you—a mass of structured bodies.
It’s kind of pointless, bidding all this time waiting inside your shell.
You’re ready to pick up your weapon again, any makeshift weapon really, but then you stop. Move time a minute backward and the person is staring at you again.
“What?” your alternate self says, not turning around to look at the person.
“Hm? What?”
“You’re staring. What do you want?”
“Calm down buddy, no need to be such a bitch.”
At that point, just pick your weapon up again and kill that motherfucker.
(It’s them, not you)
