He was fed up to the point of nausea with his own inability to stop wreaking havoc on his root chakra with a tight grip every morning. With his need to flood his synaptic gaps with neurotransmitters just to be able to peel himself up off his yellowing sheets and into the workday.
What was really gnawing at him, though, was that he knew exactly what steps he needed to take to remedy the situation and get his miserable life back on a minimally viable track but he just fucking couldn’t. He didn’t belong to himself.
After suffering through a self-imposed cold shower he ate a breakfast that was too sweet too fast while doomscrolling on Reddit and then in another impulse of self-destruction chased it all down with a regular coffee instead of a decaf knowing full well what effect it would have on his system.
His thoughts and attention were now a wild spinning clusterfuck. Normalcy and productivity were way out of reach. He knew then from experience to lean back in his chair, sit still, and watch in a state of helpless existential urgency the ocean-black ingress of depression soundlessly wrap around and suffocate every thing he so many times tried to convince himself he really loved. He watched each get choked in front of his eyes, the right one still bloodshot and burning from store-brand shampoo.
The upstairs neighbors’ teenage daughter singing along to a pop song in a gratingly naive way. The whizz of power tools revving up and slicing uncleanly into concrete walls or skulls. A pack of stale cigarettes in a kitchen drawer amidst spare keys and a never-used spaghetti spoon, maybe four-five cigs remaining, one of them a lucky. Vans skate shoes that lately look inappropriate on a person over thirty. Clammy hands. A couple heard fucking loudly after breakfast in a cheap hotel in Zakynthos in August in the receding wake of COVID-19. An old woman slowly dying alone in a cluttered apartment on the seventh floor of a building that stands leaning imperceptibly in a violet cloud of early-evening exhaust in Moscow. Mickey Rourke crossing himself one last time in Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. The right eye throbbing. An overwhelming vagueness with regard to how to get started on the million things that need to get done. An incessant internal monologue that churns mental guts into hesitant submission. A deeply set resentment at the world for being so brutal and difficult to find a footing in. A smartphone screen comes aglow in the dim room—mother calling. A dog vomiting up pellets of industrial dog food and bile. The call let ring out. A breath in. He hates that he has nipple hair and nasal hair and that his breath smells like yesterday. And he hates that he chooses to reject everything because everything keeps rejecting him no matter how hard he tries. He hates knowing that women despise depressed men and mothers despise weak sons. He hates knowing that the dots don’t connect. And that his life has been on a downward trend that seems permanent. And that he is past his prime, he missed it all.
And, worse yet, that in the end none of it matters.