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Cheese Pizza
cloud of death, cloud of flies has been stripping away my layers of protective skin. i have known it. i have grown it. it falls away in gnawed husks around me. there is nothing now, between the wet world and me. everything has fallen away. a bare man. a bad boy. never punished while he masturbated fitfully behind a closed door. it was closed to life. i didn't understand. i thought i was hiding but i was exposed. there is no hiding. the world seeps through the shadowy cracks we make for it. just a little thing. one time. left alone. it grew. it consumed me. it became me. it made me. and this life, largely passed. i didn't know. i thought as i aged i would grow wiser. i just grew more terrified, more lost inside the layers of skin. so thick it grew. so quick it fell away when that young self-abuser was exposed to the light of day.
sometimes from the hidden parts he would call to me in my pain and confusion, "you've got to tell someone about me. tell her that i'm lost in here and can't find my way out." i ignore that boy the way i always have. everyone handles his own shit in this family. to speak it is a crime. to speak it makes the crime. layers upon layers of silence, separating me from my self and both of those things from the outside. but the wet world seeps in. moisture and dirt. foul.
i don't feel any fear now, as each passing day brings a new calamity, as it carries me toward my reckoning. i am shorn of feeling. i am waiting for sleep. for peace. for an end. nothing surprises me. i am jaded to the misery of it. i expect nothing. i want nothing. but it seems like there is always something...
in the hospital. my father's flesh rotting off his body. the smell is unlike anything i've ever known. it's yellow. the room is yellow and wet. viruses hang off air molecules and bacteria swim in the poison light. yes, it smells like death but death is unexpectedly sweet. shit is not. my father shits himself. his urine soaks through everything and touches everything. i have brought him here. i have brought him here instead of leaving him to die as he seemingly wanted. struggling against naseua. struggling against tears. struggling to stay upright in a toxic ether of total system collapse. and i'm going back. i'm stinking. i'm sinking in pus and excrement. man is an animal in his sickness. and i used to fear my father for reasons other than this.
walking out of the hospital i see two people dying of their addictions. a young old woman of emphysema. her breaths are shredded and she emits constant tiny coughs. further down the hill by the bus station a young man of an overdose. his skin is gray blue. he emits a bubble of vomit from his nostrils. someone more present than i is furiously pumping his chest. but he is dead. a woman stares vacantly at nothing in particular while the ambulance arrives and i walk on.
waiting in a room surrounded by glass. on a hard bench while people come and go. mostly brown and confused. i don't know how quickly time is passing but it feels slow. it feels like half my life has been spent here. somehow i know it's no good to ask. so i wait. feeling the bite of metal as she says, "you're under arrest for possession of Cheese Pizza." i felt so much it felt like nothing at all. it felt like the inevitable tide washing over my body and carrying it out to sea. it felt like me. it felt like my whole life had led up to this moment. naked and embarassed before the cold face of authority. stitches unravelling. skin falling away rapidly in strips. feeling cold in a hard room. again it's yellow light. my life drains of colour. excuses and disguises fall away under the law's tightened tendrils. they prepare to tear me apart if i give them an excuse. i give none.
the police have now smashed in my door now. but there's a bigger hole in me.
