Sitting on a futon in the basement, I lay feeling fuzz. It feels like I’m riding a wave of static. See this,

The feeling of a leg that’s long since fallen asleep without you knowing.

It’s that, but you feel it coursing through you.

Not limited to your veins.

Not limited to your body.

It’s your life, rather.

It’s in everything you feel, an aftertaste that makes your teeth melt.

So I lay there with one ear down in a soft blanket and one listening to the cartoons playing upstairs above the floorboards. My eyes are open but I don’t want much, my sideways view of the T.V. starts looking like cooks in a kitchen on the other side of a doorway covered by clouded strips of plastic.

I hear footsteps going towards the basement door upstairs. I sit up as the door opens, the fuzz is gone by the time the footsteps come down the stairs. I bring my hands to my face to feel tears rolling down my cheek and dripping from my nose. I turn my head to hide my face, my heart beat pounds in my ears.

She had red hair, textbook red head. She made me want to burn at the stake. She didn’t say anything as she walked up behind me, my back still turned and my hands scrambling to hide the mess of my face. A pale and pasty hand eased its way onto my shoulder. I felt the futon sink a little deeper to my right.

I didn’t want to turn my head, not at all, but I did it anyways. I wanted to show her, like someone shows a dog the puddle of piss on the floor that it was responsible for. I started crying again without a sound. I told her I was done with her, she was always one to speak physically.

I didn’t try and hide the tears or the blood on my face when I walked up from that futon. I wanted her father to know who he kept in that basement. I sat on a rock in the front yard and called my mother to have her pick me up. I picked up a half smoked cigarette and looked behind me with it hanging out of my mouth. In the front window of the house, a man with a great big red beard scratched his head and walked to the door next to him. He came outside in a robe and slippers and sat next to me.
He took the cigarette from my lips and said, “I started smoking when I was thirteen too,” now fumbling through his pockets, “better quit now.”

He pulled out a half full pack of cigarettes and slowly placed one in his mouth, then holding the pack out to me. I fingered one out and put it in my mouth, holding it like a drumstick.
He handed me his lighter, and while I was taking my first drag off of my tenth cigarette, he said, “Stat out of trouble, I like you.”

—

The air in my car was stale, the heat blowing in my face made my throat sore. This girl next to me was crying behind a curtain of blonde hair. I looked forward, off at her house, an off-white tower sticking out of a dirt yard. She kept giving me reasons why I was different, reasons I already knew. I let the fuse burn.

Wes.

Please.

I’m sorry.

I said I’m sorry.

Didn’t you hear.

You make me feel.

There’s no one like you.

I started to cry and pounded my leg with a closed fist. Everything was trying to squeeze out me not like toothpaste, but a ballon being blown up by a young kid, too young to know when to stop.

I dug my nails into my leg and said, “get the fuck out of my car.”

Three weeks before this day, after I had to explain my humanity, I was told by her that she was sociopathic. A week after that, we split. Three days after that, she forced herself onto me while I was driving her home from work. So now we’re here. In the previous months, I had been torn away from friends, my family, my job. Again, I was stripped of skin and left bare on the rocks.

I drove away after she got out of the car thinking I would chase after her. I left a perfect semi circle in the mud and sped off on the road. It was then that I started crying. Slamming the steering wheel over and over, I kept yelling that I did it, that I was free.

I know what I know. I know the shit I dealt with. That’s all that matters to me. The shit. I can smell it and I’m sorry if you can too.

I was a kid only when I was six. My family owned a glass shop at the time next to a prominent waterfront restaurant. I would stumble over the massive curb, some times falling but mostly jumping, and head to their back door across the alleyway. I knocked and brought out the big man that would open the door; everything was round about him other than the grease stains on his apron and the brown paper bag he held in his hand.

”Two?” I said, holding up my thumb and pointer finger in front of a shit eating grin.

He gave a quick exhale through his nose, smiled, and reached somewhere I could not see. In my mind, I was hoping that it was going to be a white rabbit that he pulled from thin air. Or a dove. Even then I knew he couldn’t fit into a suit, though.

He pulled out another paper bag and held them steady as I tugged.

He bent down to me and said, “Tell Ernie that Pop needs to talk to him.”

I agreed without wincing at the smell cigarettes coming through his smiling teeth. He smiled like dad, and smelled like him too.

He let go of the bags, grabbed the top of my oversized head, and then twisted me. He pretended to kick me off like a horse in one of those westerners my grandmother keeps on in the waiting room. We both laughed as I barreled recklessly through parked cars towards the sound of blasting six shooters and screaming horses.

I stepped inside to see Zelda, Ernie’s daughter. She was younger than me, too young to hate her name. I’d spent a lot of time sitting on damp carpets in front of T.V. screens so I know the trick that was played on her. I wished I had a name like that.

”Where’s your dad,” I asked her.

She responded with a finger that was pointing out back to the shop where the old men hock and spit smoke. I was too excited to be Pop’s messenger to say thank you and ran through the clear plastic tentacles that constituted the door to the shop. I stood on the stairs and scoped the place out to no avail.

I then headed upstairs to the apartment above the office and slowly opened the door. I heard sniffling like I had when I got the cold going around a few weeks before, or like the times pop would open the door and let the smell get to me.
I saw my dad snapping pens while Ernie looked like he was chopping up onions with no smell to them. He was crying.

I walked in and they both jumped and covered the plate like I would when I was caught doing something bad. I gave them the bags and said what Pop told me to.

Ernie put something together from the back of his pants and his pocket.

He said a naughty word.

When I was eleven years old, my parents divorced. This came as a shock to me, and understandably so, given the fact that I don’t have a single memory of my mother and my father fighting to this day. But I do remember the totaled cars, and my missing wallets. Silverware that has been in the family for generations goes missing while broken pens and straws take it’s place. This all went on under my nose for years. But I didn’t know what it was or what it meant.  When my mother came home one day in June of 2013 and told me that my father wasn’t going to be in my life, I somehow knew. I knew that he was an addict, and I don’t know how I knew, but my mother told me that my father wasn’t coming home, I asked her if it was the pills. And she cried more.

That was the day that I recognized that I could not have a childhood like my peers. I immediately couldn’t relate to them, and not in a ignorant or prudish way, because I wanted to relate to them, but the bag was pulled over my head and I was taken off somewhere deep behind my eyes. From that day on, I lost friends, gained an incredible amount of weight, isolated myself from everyone around me, and suffered in a general sense. I had therapists that would send me outside for the session to talk to my mother instead of me, and one that would fall asleep every minute like clockwork. And then, after all of that for five years, my father relapsed after being clean for nine months and passed away twenty days before my sixteenth birthday.

Fast forward a year or two and one short stint in a mental hospital, my best friend showed me a book, saying it would help me. I went to a run down bookstore in Portland and found it. The Stranger by Albert Camus. I had just started to read philosophy as a coping mechanism which I regret to this day for the misconceptions it led me to, and I had a sense of this back then that I ignored, but my friend assured me that this was not one of those books.

I read existentialist writers for a long time and learned a lot from what I read, but I used the “nothing matters” part of their idea’s and not the “so have fun with it” part that is a necessity when taking things like that in. Soon after reading the stranger, though, I realized a lot of the ways I was suppressing myself and it gave me a good perspective on how miserable it would be if I let myself believe the notion that nothing matters and nothing else. Now this is where I believe society could benefit. Personally, I think that the largest obstacle todays generation has to overcome is the paralyzing anxiety – paralyzing in the most general way possible – that keeps everyone isolated in their own heads. I see so many people walking around that are prisoners to themselves. Some people make it out, and some people don’t, but I really want to believe that if there was a solid and coherent attempt at having the teachings of many great existentialists brought to the people, a large majority of people would be able to move on from the one thing that truly keeps us from moving forward.