Clutching The Darkness

Chapter 17: River Styx

When I lived back in San Francisco, I rarely saw my dad. He was often at work. He was almost like an assistant, a subordinate to one of the wastewater engineers that worked for our district's sewer management plants. He didn't make an extraordinary amount of money, but it was just enough to maintain us and our apartment. The few times I did see him, he always told me to have strength. To have strength for school. To have strength when moving. To have strength...

I had completely forgotten those words. They seemed like a dull echo in my head over these past few months. A sort of laziness in my mind, like hearing a door knock but be so unwilling to actually go open it. You know nothing will change if you wait longer, eventually you have to open it. Or sometimes you sacrifice the other person's time and decide that your self-preservation is more important.

But there was no one on the other side of the door now. My parents had done their job. My mom used to only work as a waitress just to get some extra cash for food. A lot of her salary used to go to Billy, his maintenance. But after his death, she lost the will to work. It was extra money, so not much was lost when she was fired.

More pressure was put on my dad. I wonder if he ever felt like his world would cave in when he felt surrounded by the oppressive sewer walls. Or on his way back, did he ever feel like he'd be crushed by the pressuring urban environment? Or that his expectations and duty as a breadwinner would crunch him up like a bear trap?

Regardless, it was useless thinking of something like that. I was on my own. My parents had done everything. I was completely on my own. It rested on me to take care of myself during my college years. It's pathetic to see how terribly I failed my one and only mission. No, that's wrong. I've messed up another mission before. A mission to a lover.

I was nearing out of the parking lot, when a sudden thought wandered into my head. 'It is better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.' My professor, my economics teacher....had said this to me. What was his name again? I had forgotten. How could I forget? The mental fog in my head was thickening not thinning, and the confusions that arose out of it continued to be impregnable.

To be dissatisfied though. I guess that was one way of putting my emotional state into the descriptive spotlight. Dissatisfied. How long have I been dissatisfied? And when did it all begin? Is dissatisfied even the correct word to use, or is there something more accurate? My brain clunked a bit messily, not rigidly enough to give myself a mental headache, but sluggishly like that of a gear in a clock tower, grinding away at dust and cobwebs after not being in use for much time. A word that would fit it better...ah.

Misery. I've been miserable. My body shuddered at the word. I shakily let out a sigh, and my breath condensed into the air like the visage of a ghostly apparition. Into the air of the abhorred suburbs it went, its phantom appearance looking more dejected than spooky. More depressed than haunting. At most, it looked more like a danger to itself, than the things it could possibly fright. What a miserable ghost.

I'm tired. I really am. I want to go home, and sleep everything off, but I know that's not much of an option yet. Trials stand before me. People. Targets. And I don't really want to- OH YES I FUCKING DO. I'm going to KILL every last one of them! Every little thing that comes in my way!

He had won. The desperation to find a means for peace. The aggressor who brutishly charges in without a second thought. And I allowed it to happen. Because, when your mind is so torn and ravaged by suffering, by physical pain, by mental anguish. You try to superglue everything you have. Even if you make a destroyed, malformed, lopsided whole.

Superglue my childhood sanity. Superglue my teenage angst. Superglue my adolescent spirits. Superglue my adult aspirations. And now, I pitifully scoop up my soul— what remains of it, and try to duct tape it, superglue it, and compress it together. And let's say that the only glue I have, is bloodlust. The only thing that can make everything feel semi compact. A dull and cheap filling used to put something dense between the cracks of my sepulchered mental state.