Bronson Gao

May 27 20XX

どこ

心配しないで

I think I died one time. I can’t remember anymore, though, specificities about any of it. There wasn’t any clear perspective I could save except for an image of mass quantity, super-size consumerism, the late-night media, etc. That’s no way to live, but if this doesn’t seem like living, I don’t know what it seems like.

On my night stand are CDs from my first car. I’d stolen them from my brother’s stereo. I sit here listening to one, and I say nothing. I could spit. I could kill myself I feel so good. 私は嬉しすぎて、死にたいんだなあ。And nothing really hurts. 何もあまり痛くない。Here’s my disintegrating face in this bed of cemetery candy, drifting awake thinking about AMV Hell and My Favorite Martian. And nothing really hurts, you said.

Silent in a dark room—and inside this screen—My appendages numbed out and I began disintegrating into the sofa, my forehead blunted by a plate of steel. I’d bitten the sensation out until my teeth tore apart, almost at least. Until it was done it would be my life and all I had. Now listening, this shit is massive and a snapshot of something like deja vu. I can’t think like this. I’ve inherited some expired cyanide here. I’ve xeroxed this けち auto-death penalty. I can’t think I like this.

The most I have to offer you is me bailing out. Like a performance, the perspiration is profuse as my skinned knees reach out on Saturday night, and I bleed like its American medicine, man. I must’ve cracked my head out of no better decision so many times, no other decision to make, unless I kill myself with pharmaceuticals quickly in a high quantity, or alternatively, slowly until I’m null, afraid and old.

And I remember having crushes in high school, which weren’t even really crushes, but I just wanted to feel something while jacking off in the shower. 体だけ欲しかったんです。I just wanted the body.

And I can’t not exist, man, because there’s fuckin’ nothing else out there, not even death. But it’s a violent, dangerous thing feeling something for yourself. Having a biographical history feels like being crucified. I try to feel like there’s nothing going on inside, absorbing external vibrations like a sponge. I’ll sell you nothing but a burning in my limbs, and that’s it.

It’s only bruises. 大丈夫ですから。I think through the actions of my consequences, all the bruises like tree rings and calluses like twisted knots. Every thought I can access is initiated by the deviation at my lips’ curve, their form into an inverted frown. Sometimes, I crouch to look at small dead things in the grass, extinguishing an unremarkable mystery; there was a dead bird against an overpass wall; I ran over a squirrel once.

The sleeve of my jacket has a bloodstain on the joint. The front of my forearm has a patty of brown roses beaten into the distressed nylon, draining to my wrist and shyly grasping my hand. My hand has warmth on top of warmth in the form of blood, my fingers working against each other, drawing the scum from the pores like buffalo sauce. I don’t think it really matters if it’s mine or not.

I took a panorama photo with a dead dog in the center of the frame on the side of the road. It smelled like the compounded sweat of bodies too big to bathe, dressed in moldered mange and warmed by the sun. Its nondescript eyes did not shine and the fur was caked and stiff. Nothing moved about it but the flies.

It reminded me that the life I wanted doesn’t exist: 私に住みたい所がどこにもないんです。It’s okay I’m not dead, and I’m not other people either. I’m not anything special, and I generally just don’t worry about it. しんぱいしないで。私は特別じゃないんです。私たちは別にどこへも行きません。We’re not really goin’ anywhere. 行けないんです。

私は死ねないから、どこにもいないんです。