Voids

I think that once you realize you're alone, that's really it.

Nothing matters to me anymore. I let things slip, gradually, cumulatively, until I'm slipping into irreversible neglect of issues once paramount. Ignoring personal hygeine, like taking showers: every-night-compulsively-clean-girl becomes the every other day or morning or whenever wretch, going to beds she can't find sleep in dirty-like-the-slut-she-is. Then there is food consumption and physical activity, the former having skyrocketed pointlessly when it was her intention of otherwise-and-starting-anew health, the latter having decreased from nightly to neverly. I really don't leave the house anymore, but I never did that. Sometimes I get the mail and I'm waiting for this thing I have always thought would be coming, this sort of packaged catalyst, change of heart/of mind/of body delivered via the United States postal service, but it doesn't come. There are always those same catalogues and utility bills and credit card applications, but no personal mail, no saviours in envelopes. I'm really tired of waking up and going to sleep and sitting in the chair and taking showers and clothing myself and passing the mirror and thinking of people who've forgotten ever to remember me. I'm tired of day and night and illogical boundaries and separations, and fucking reality, which I have discovered, ironically like so many slaps in the face from a playground bully, does not even exist. Hours are all I can see, and they are endless, quagmires, traps to taunt the mad. Sound is dull and music can't save me, and words-on-the-screen acquaintances saying "hey, how are you?" can't save me, and promise-lies of futures can't save me because the especially twisted truth of it all is that only I can save "me," and I don't want to save myself. So it goes, so it goes, so it goes I say over and over again, words I repeat and ideas I've only stolen are all I hold on to, and petty desires for something more I know I'll never allow myself to have. It's really pointless, you see. And the best part of that fully sarcastic revelation is that it's not a revelation. I've known it for a long, long time. Yet all I do is state it, over and over, different audiences for the same show and the word has begun to spread, "Don't befriend Kaela, she's suicidal, she's looking for proverbial princes on white horses and becoming enraged when the only thing they want is to 'help' her and ride off into another night."

So let the word spread then. I am only perception: I am a mind, a victim of it, and a repetitive scream in it that the truth is I was born alone and will be it until I disintegrate the same way.

I remember realizing it. Realizing I was alone, for the first time, recognizing. I was in a bus station in Alabama, sitting on the edge of a row of wire seats, connected, where others sat: families, close: singles, spread anxiously as far as physically possible from one another, as I was, there, hanging on that edge. I had no money, no pennies, and I was hungry and I was dirty. The thing was that I knew I'd be fed and clean at some point and that I'd never before been hungry or dirty, but I knew then that I would be again, that it would be my life, that it was the beginning of so many ends there on the wire ledge in a crowded bus station, 1700 miles from the only people I could legally panhandle. I had to kill time until reboarding call for my bus, some number like 6539 I think, so before I'd found an empty spot on that bench I'd been walking around, my eyes searching the filthy brown tiled floor for dropped pennies, my ears perked to an idle toddler losing his spare change allowance against the ceramic I paced, my mind weighing the hunger and the chances with the store full of possibly-stuffed-in-purse food before me. I don't think I've ever hungered for anything more in my life, more wanted something I ridiculously assumed to be food, than I did at that moment. I knew I wasn't going to have anything for the next two days and I kept waiting for the toddler to just go and drop his change already, and forget two pennies here and one quarter there so I could return to the vending machine I'd stalked by and maliciously obtain some sustenance. But no clink of change. No will to stuff anything in my purse. No nothing nothing nothing, nothing but hunger. Hunger.

I paced back and forth and stood still and moved and held onto my ticket and observed and ignored, and walked into the restroom, where I washed my hands and the insect bites up and down my arms in a sink I was surprised to find dispersed hot water, and looked in the mirror and saw something so dead and pale and dirty I wanted to scream, but I didn't think to open my mouth because I was nauseated and hoping not to vomit again. When I'd exited the restroom I had made my way slowly to the far wall, where there was a sign with a glaring grammatical error on it, which I promptly photographed with the old digitial camera in my purse, thinking as I always do that at some point in time I'd have someone to show it to, like everything I've always been saving and storing and processing for my entire life, like everything I think declares "THIS HAS A POINT. THIS HAS MEANING. THIS IS KAELA." that I think I'll sometime show someone I find to care, only no one ever will care and I know it. It was after that when I had somehow located my present vacant partition of the bench, where I was then sitting, where I sat when it happened.

I remember there were so many people, lining up, dirty like I was, pushing to get ahead and be first and bumping into one another with haphazard mismatched luggage and grocery bags of snacks, and parading before me like a dysfunctional circus I didn't want to see but couldn't close my eyes to. I was so hungry, so damned hungry, I was starving, I wanted to scream and shut up and tell myself it was and wasn't alright, but I knew better so I just sat there, rocking back and forth, observing and noting any food I saw that could possibly be ransacked on the sly, waiting and watching. There were other people alone, but not any stupid 16-year-old girls like me, not any something-hungry fools with empty stomachs and empty futures hanging nervously over wire benches. I must have been begging with my vision, because sometimes this nice looking elderly black woman, whom I'd hoped would offer me something to eat but never had, glanced at me with this, to me, unclassifiable warmth of spirit or of understanding that made me snap my head away sharply in shame. Hordes of people, I, alone. Dirt, hunger, empty wallets and days remaining.

I remember I was looking down at my feet, and I was wearing these black shoes that had become quite stained, and this black skirt which draped around them, hanging that specific way dirty clothes hang. Below my feet and my skirt, all I could see, there was that brown tile, lined with thick sections of black grout. And then I saw what I'd been looking at all this time, saw it for what it really was: what I'd been looking at was my black skirt and black shoes draped over this tile with this black grout, and my skirt dissolved into that grout and my shoes were a part of a picture that stretched the length of the tiled bus station, and people were walking over it, and I existed in that grout, I was that black nothingness, endless, and I could have disappeared into it and never been seen, because I WAS it, I was the black grout between that dirty tile.

And everything sounded detached, and noisy children's wailing resonated in a place I wasn't, and people's voices surrounded me ricocheting off cliffs in the Grand Canyon, so far away. And there I was, without money, far from my "home," alone, with thousands and hundreds of miles before me, staring into the black lines I was, the black lines I could have crawled into and been absorbed as. People walking, walking over me, the hungry the dirty the thing you don't want to see. And finally the toddler dropped his spare change, and it fell in front of me and shattered my reflection. "Don't pick it up...don't pick it up...don't pick it up." But he bent down and stuffed it, in the robotic way children will, back into his pockets and was dragged off by the mother he was with. With. Mother. Something, someone, money, food, nothing. I am in tile floors, grout between, black spaces: I am voids. Right at the moment the voice in my head that isn't really a voice began the chant. The rising rhythmic repitition I know too well.

"KILL YOURSELF. KILL YOURSELF. KILL YOURSELF. KILL YOURSELF."

Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. I am dead already, voids, black..."KILL YOURSELF KILL YOURSELF KILL YOURSELF"...shut up...restrooms I could hang myself in, a door facing a hazy sunset, know-nothing faces flanking the corridor leading to a street in a town I don't know, walk into nothingness that I am and don't return...throw yourself under 18 wheelers, run in front of cars on unfamiliar roads, roam and suffocate on your starvation....I am somewhere I have never been, and I am just there, and I have nothing, and am nothing, and what am I doing but sitting there as I am just there having nothing with that voice that always always always there voice repeating it...kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself.

And it was all one, then. All the people. The grout. The noise. The suicide command. All of it screamed at me together and screamed and dulled, and I was numb. And I looked at people, and they looked through me. I looked at people and they didn't see me. And I was grout between dirty tiles. And I was hungry, and I was dirty, and I would be again. And a girl alongside her mother passed before me. She held food. She held her mother's hand. And I remembered my mother and knew she couldn't save me. And I was grout between dirty tiles. And I was hungry, and I was dirty, and I would be again. Screams...repeat, repeat...nothing...I am...all of it...together it was the revelation, together as they looked through me, together as I sat fading into tile in a strange place, I realized for the first time what I had said so many times before, what I had partially accepted for so many years, what had been such a source of my unwilling frustration: I realized, there, in that moment, with that cacophony of kill yourselfs, with that tile I was, with those look-through-you people looking through me in parades...I realized that I was alone.

I got back onto the bus at some point, my same window seat. And I don't want to say that I remember, but I know that my ugly face was wet with tears, and my body was convulsing in a seat alongside a stranger. And I was alone. And I would be alone. And I am alone. And I will die alone, as I was born alone and have lived alone.

And there isn't any escaping that realization.
It's going to eat at me until I'm dead.

So that's all I wanted to say, and I hope now I can sleep. I suppose this should have been a letter but the thing is I don't have anyone to address it to, because everyone leaves you when you admit to them that you're alone in their company. But I don't care anymore. I don't care about anything.

I think that once you realize you're alone, that's really it.