Crossed

Chapter 1, Part 3

The coat was on, shoes were tied, hood up, bandana strapped. It wasn't numb or cold, it was a mixture of both, but the silence of the squeezing apartment was too enveloping for him, the seal being licked and airtight. And him, a letter inside, flattened.

There's value in submission. Seeing the world as your mentor is associating everything you see with educational value. Experiencing art is a learning process where you submit to the artist. You learn to think. You learn to empathize. You learn to be human.

There is a kind of pleasure that can be associated with any form of submission. It makes you feel like a kid again, with idols instead of Gods, parents instead of philosophy, influenceable by every single event that goes on in their merry little lives.

You can submit to anything: a thought, an idea, a way of life, a drug. All these things have minor, sometimes arbitrarily founded control over your behavior, thus them having the definition of dominating "you."

There is also comfort in submitting. A kind of realization of a higher power, but one you can articulate and explain how it's affecting you. This gives one a sense of universal understanding. Whether it's your mob boss determining whether you live or die, or whether you work a 9-5 sales job that bores you to death. We as humans value the comfort of submission so much that the majority of people alive consent to it.

He was submitting to his impulses by going outside. His thoughts were suggesting that he needed sunlight and fresh air. He listened and went. This was against his will that was informing him he should stay in the claustrophobic state of panicking relaxation cooped up in the apartment all day. He could consciously separate his impulses with his will, he had quite the experience being aware of both controlling his decision making. The impulse was more of an animalistic, intuitive drive. The will was more logically based, informed decisions that improved his well-being and the well-being of others.

Walking out of the apartment his shoulders hung. The smog of tiredness was pulling at the back of his mind. He knew it was to no avail however, he knew what the tiredness really wanted. His unconscious had been out of service since Friday afternoon. Weed kills your REM cycle, it makes you not dream. He knew that the pulling at the back of his mind was that unconscious volcano building up, but he also knew that it wouldn't be appeased until monday night, after an entire day of not smoking.

It was like he was missing a best friend who he hadn't seen in a week. It was like he was just off to college and was homesick. He missed his unconscious. The only real surprises in his life were the ones his own mind created during those precious hours of REM. Flamboyant dramatizations of relationships, hyper-clairvoyant expressions of sexuality, suspense-driven monolithic adventures. Completely cut off by a desire to numb the day's senses. At least he was responsible enough to stop during the week. At least he understood what he was missing out on and was making a willful decision about it. Like we said, willful was the rationale, the reason, the sense.

He steered his way down the stairs and on the path down toward the lake near the apartment complex. The pavement slapped underneath his tennis shoes as he dodged several ants and other critters that were lingering in their natural habitat. There wasn't a hint of a want to kill in him. He was first of all too high, and second of all, he was terrified of how karma travels through the death of animals.

One time, when he was a child, he decided it would be a clever thing to do to stomp on an ant pile. Ever since that day he remembered the thrill of the murder, the pure masochistic rage that was let out through the action. He remembered how evil it was, and always had expected a karmic response from it. Just like every time he went outside, he was reminded of this flagrantly foul action when dodging the insects. 

There were cement walls on the side of the hilly pasture. Easy to climb, wedges wedging out as footholds. The same grated and poky bricks of gray that he had back at home. Running straight into them full force would probably give him a concussion, if not immediately kill him along with leaving a meteor shower of cuts all over his body from the sharp edges. The gif of him getting into a crouching starting stance and bouncing with full force into a sprint like a track race shone bright in his mind. A sharp stinging poached his skull and in shockwaves billowed the circumference of his brain tissue, a self-inflicted and uncontrollable pain. A direct effect of the delusion, incising his mind like a steak knife. He fell to his knees and gripped his temples like it was a spontaneous super-migraine that was crippling him like a police-cop's taser. Vicious earthquakes in his mind, a violent rigamarole thump. Seething through his teeth, he watched with wide open eyes as his saliva dripped from his paralyzed lips to the grass, slipping down a blade like blood down a sword. He threw up.