just in case you thought I was lying...

[sometimes it takes a fire to change it all.]

Suicide is what Murder does.

I can't trust my eyes. I definitely can't trust a text message anymore.
“I can't wait 2 c u”, she texts me.
I am drinking at a bar for the first time in 6 months. A bar handpicked for the dysfunctional quality of its patrons. I walked in here quickly scanning the people inside, and seeing no one I knew sat down. It has been years since I walked into this bar, but the skinny crack-whore bartender still remembers my drink order. She leans into a beer cooler and bends her tiny frame revealing a whole set of bad tattoos. Chinese symbols, black ink flowers, ass crack tattoo, low budget Celtic/tribal shit. No fucking class or ingenuity, just a bunch of tats chosen from the local ink shop's display wall.
She places a cold Miller and a shot of Yukon down in front of me, and I drop a single, low-denomination bill to cover two drinks. I won't need what's left in my wallet. I spent most of what I had left paying back those final bills, and making sure I overspent on the last Christmas gifts I would buy for these people who claimed to love me.
I feel the burn of the shot as it goes down and wash it away with a pull from my beer bottle. It has been so long, but it still goes down easily and smooth. But, I really don't know why I am here. This was an unnecessary stop in my night. I don't need to be numbed further, because there is nothing left that can hurt me. All I can remember is my mistakes, but I'll blame it on her.
Last night I finally cried my final tears for her. It took so much to realize how I have tried to control her, and I can only try to make excuses as to why. In my past I spent many nights in a barstool trying to numb some distant, but exaggerated pain that I let consume my being until it was my life. I have only ever known how to be selfish and ridiculously self-absorbed. I have made my pain to be the only pain that matters, and I force it to matter more than any love or faith a well-adjusted, good-natured person can have for me. I am unloved because I haven't cared enough to let another person matter to me. I have contemplated suicide over and over because of that same selfishness, but my foolhardy belief in self-preservation has never let me hold a loaded weapon to my own head. Instead, I just drink, my failing liver and poor mentality blacking out and drowning until I come up breathing again in the morning. I understand now that I won't feel the tomorrow’s morning.
She helped bring me out of that insanity. I had found a girl that was special enough to lay myself down for, and to try and be a better person. In the beginning it was easy to say to her, “You make me want to be a better man”, and really mean it. I stopped drinking, but then wondered if the insanity of my life past had some how caught up to me. Maybe I was cursed to hurt her, and I wasn't sure exactly how, but I felt some pain inflicted by me would surely come. That pain came and went, but soon I won't have to live with the remembrance.
I started to wonder if I had contracted some STD, and while getting to know her I found out she had lost an aunt to the big one, HIV. I have had a few nights out fucking with the wrong kinds of women. The types that would do anything for a little blow or a few free drinks. I knew I wasn't the only person in the world trying to get fucked up enough to fuck anything available, and I took advantage of any woman who showed weakness and the slight interest in a good fuck. I'd fuck friend's ex-girlfriends, ex-friend's current girlfriends, and anything in-between. Now deep inside I wondered if it was the disease's turn to fuck me for the rest of my life, and when I watched her while she slept I could only dread the silent killer sent for me would take her down in the crossfire. I lost much more than sleep while trying to attain my sobriety.
Now I am back in the Devil's playground. Any watering hole in the world is designed for one thing: getting people disoriented enough to fuck. As I finish off my first drink another beer and shot hit the bar to replace it. This place has its claws dug into me again. It seems I can't find a lover without being in these places first. I'm one-dimensional when it comes to love, though my few friends claim I am one of the smartest people they know, and I cannot understand it. Love has nothing to do with logic, but it is probably the greatest political battle being fought. In so many ways love is demonstrated in a violent dictatorship, or a subversive communism, or maybe some self-deprecating, selfless socialism. I don't believe any system is right, wrong, or complete, but I give in to it for no reason at all other than a promise I have heard that love is the most amazing thing in the world... to live without it is not to live. So I submitted, but love let me go.
The strings of one-night stands and submitting to “friends with benefits” situations are part of the reason I'm here. I've gone out with four different women in the past two months, but all the while I was only thinking of her. Sure, you could say they were more “my type”, and no one can deny that they were all hot for a fuck, but those things didn't matter. They didn't matter while we were together either, but I couldn't do enough to make her trust me. I had too much in my past. Now I cannot hold a conversation with pure intentions with any woman. They smell the piece of shit I am from the start, and unless they are as fucked up in the head as I am, there is no connection that will ever be made. But I can't even find a socially and sexually distorted freak to hear me out anymore. I am purely alone, but that loneliness ends tonight.
No woman will touch me now. I still have the same past with its regrets, and I understand that I am absolutely poor at romancing a woman. I can't even look at an interested woman without being focused on my shame and probably the million reasons she has to leave me before she's even met me. My past loves would somehow find me and happen so naturally, or better yet accidentally... going back, I don't think I ever deserved one woman, but she was the one.
You could meet her once and know how I fell in love with her. She was so pretty it now hurts me to look at her. She had an amazing laugh, one that instantly made you feel like you had known her your whole life. She could put you at ease and make you feel better no matter how tough your day was with just a smile, and the way she wrapped herself around you when you held her in your arms made you feel like you were the one that would complete her life, always and forever.
That time is gone now. I haven't felt complete in a while. Before her I had lived a life of indignant solitude, but I was rabidly happy in it. I was a much more than dysfunctional in the way that serial rapist is more than a pervert. I drank seven nights a week if my wallet could afford it. I jumped from one person's spare bedroom to another person's living room couch until I had nowhere else to go but home to parents who just wouldn't let me sleep on the street. Even then I spent my nights doing coke in dirty bar bathrooms, swerving through ten blocks of traffic to get home from a bar, outrunning SEPTA trains at railroad crossings, and blocking my phone number to harass the few unfortunate women who gave me their phone numbers while piss drunk in the middle of the night.
I don't know what to think as I reflect back on those days, but I'll sit here and take another pull off a cold Miller and fumble around for my smokes. I stick a butt in my mouth and attempt several times to spark up a lighter, but I catch my own eyes looking at me in the mirror across the back wall of the bar. My face looks so different than I remember it. I can't remember how long it has been since I smiled or cried or anything. My face has transformed into a ghost of myself. I look like someone who has lost everything, including the will to die. I am the logical explanation to the product of a man that has gone through this particular set of mistakes, all the while going through counseling and being psycho-medicated.
And now, I'm actually looking for someone to fuck while I float my misery in a bottle. I scan the bar again for easy targets, but my selection ranges from train station, skanky d'ebutantes to fall down drunk, divorced, upper class MILFs. There are at least 3 women in here that I could take home tonight, though a sober version of me would never want to, but looking back in the mirror I see a person I never wanted to be. I feel absolutely disgusted with myself, and even more so as I realize that I am giving the blankest expression at myself despite my anger. I see a few people reflections apparently looking right at me and giving me awful smiles with black eyes peering from within their skulls. I look around the room and no one seems to see me. A person only two seats to my right turns towards me but apparently peers straight through me. I gesture my hands in front of their face, but no emotion or any other distinct reaction comes of it. This is not a paradise, but a personal Hell Satan handpicked for me. I can't get away from what seems to be my destined eternity of Hell, but I can get out of this stool and leave. I have plans to fulfill, and tonight is my date with destiny…
…Opening the car door and placing the keys in the ignition I slump back into my seat. I close my eyes with my hand on the keys not turning the engine over. Instead I'm leaning my head on my forearm that is across the top of the wheel. When I parked I made sure I was within perfect sight of the stations schedule clock. Looking up to the clock I read, “10:13 - ON TIME”, and I have 5 minutes to go.
I fire up the engine on my old Chevy truck. No usual hesitation from the starter this time, and I pull out on to the street and prepare to spin the block. I turn off the radio in my truck, but I can still hear her laughing at me. That same laugh that I could hear from rooms away, the laughter that made me feel eternally part of her club, now churned up anger and bile from the pit of my stomach. Those eyes that used to shine peace into my life now glared at me without hope, and I cannot bear to be seen with those eyes, but it is better than not being seen at all. There is no faith or love stored up for me anywhere within the eyes of the people around me. After tonight I will never see hateful, unloving eyes look on me again. Oh they'll be looking down on me in a new way all right, but hopefully they can turn then their view on themselves. No one heard my screams in the past, but maybe they'll fully understand my silence.
I come to the stoplight at Broad and Main. I have one more turn still, but this terrible light is always red. I look around into all the cars stopped with me, but not one face turns to see me. People on cell phones talking with overly animated faces. There is a small Mexican child sleeping with her face pressed into the window. Some angry man listens to metal music while staring down the light to change, and revs his Dodge's engine. This light has never felt so long, and I have never had so much time to think here. I pull a cigarette out of the pack with my teeth, and just as I spark the flame red the signal changes. GREEN.
Taking a drag I shift and turn one last time. There's no traffic coming up behind, and surprisingly there's not an oncoming car in sight. Casualties could actually be low at this time, but this is the middle of town. As I pull down my final stretch they light up in front of me: two candy cane-striped bars flash and lower across my path. Now, there comes two alternating lights from the steel mass just coming into sight. I can faintly hear the groaning horn warn of it's advancing. I lock both doors and take a drag. I want to scream out to the loneliness that has put me here, but it is loneliness that will let me go without a whisper.
I push the gas go between the barriers. I feel two thuds beneath me, and stop. I kick the e-brake into the floor. The release lever broke almost a year ago, but I’d always just park in gear. I shift into neutral and the engine bogs nearly shutting off, but it saves itself. Leaving the vehicle on will surely bring a bigger blast, or at least I think so. The lights are approaching quickly.
A man in a station tower starts yelling out his window. He's looking down on me while screaming something over a walkie-talkie microphone. He looks me directly in my eyes and knows. His facial expressions acknowledge my intent, and I can see him mouth the words, “He's not moving, and I don’t think he will”. Running down the stairs to his outpost, he looks at the oncoming train. He scans the distance between the train, my truck, and himself while strafing away, increasing speed into a full sprint.
I can’t recall what happened inside my head at this point. Fear caused mental blackout, but it is sure that there was expression of solidarity on my face. Suicide never feels real until it’s being carried out. It is so strange how fast the idea of the process changes inside the instance of the process. Most of those who attempt suicide have never killed anyone, but instead feel dead to them self. Unknowingly, unless you have already killed someone else in cold blood, you’re going to get scared when you try to murder yourself. This grim realization never shows its face until it is eternally too late.
Instead, the supremacy of fear and self-destruction, suicide becomes a beautiful expression: the wildest statement of passion, the highly esteemed championing of death. But, being crushed by many tons of metal does not bring honor. The fact was I quit. The only decision I held strength to make was to destroy myself, and shatter the lives of so many people who would forever question the true meaning of my death. I wanted to hatefully destroy the peace in my small sphere of existence. I wanted to damage the people who had let me down and let me go. Molesting my remembrance into a scarred version of what I wanted it to be, I would perform my last rite. I would complete the cycle of misery and defeat. This felt like the only choice that I had left.

[reality sets in.]

This night never finished the way it started, and I came back to this story fantasizing that it would become a starting chapter to a novel about a lost man deciding to re-embark on the woeful journey of life, but fate has dealt me a greater story to tell. The background has to be mentioned first.
I had originally planned my own murder for the Eve of the New Year 2008. I had originally written this suicide story a few days after Turkey Day right about when my seasonal affective disorder chronically jumps into high gear. This snowballs various side-affects with being diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder (mixed-type), substance abuse, and alcoholism. My life cycle had repeated itself once again, leaving me jobless, girlfriendless, and with a very low estimation of my entire being. But this would be the year to end it all. My father died 13 years ago from a heart aneurysm on New Year’s Eve. We also shared the same birthday of January 27th. I had some base form of numerology dementia. I was now crazy enough to end it all. 13, 27, 31… part of my lottery number picks almost every week.
December 23rd, 2007. I realized I had had enough, but I was more afraid of, than prepared, for death. I admitted myself into a psychiatric hospital for the second time in my life. I didn’t know exactly what irked me most about the life I led, but I was definitely sick of living it in its current form. I needed a faster track to solve my psychiatric state with its medication woes. The current drug regimen just wasn’t working anymore, and I had abandoned or lost all real-world support that was getting me through. I needed counseling, and I needed lots of help; the help I didn’t even know how to ask for.
Unfortunately, in this period of healing, I let my ex snake her way back in as some miracle cure to my problems. Her care sustained me for the next couple of weeks, and it helped speed my hospital recovery to a mere six days, and still free to kill myself on the Eve of the New Year 2008. But suicide was no longer on my mind. What I needed was sex, and lots of it. I made sure she knew how much I appreciated her love (mainly the use of her body), and each night in the shadow of lust, I found solace in using a woman for base, primal sex.
Anyways, a few days after release from the hospital, I was headed with her to some cushy family plans for New Years Eve –something of the no-alcoholic, no suicidal risk blend. We were driving south on Walnut Street in Lansdale, PA. We were going straight past the scene of the imagined crime. Junction House Pub, on the corner of Main and Walnut Streets, a stone’s throw from Lansdale Train Station on the R5 line.
This is where my entire story was derailed. The very pub, the one who’s neon lights illuminated the dirty streets of this miserable town 24-7, 365, were off for the first time I can remember in my natural life. Just one day after I checked myself into my favorite loony bin, a fire ravage an apartment above Junction House, and crept its way down into the grimy watering hole below.
I cannot express the feelings that coerced on the drugged-up neural pathways of my mind. Even now, months later, I do not know how to explain the loss of ability to extinguish my shattered life.

Johnathan K. Johnson
c/o Helen Johnson
1060 Mearns Road
Warminster, Pa 18974

267-640-1815
267-980-2289


lyricalgraffiti@gmail.com
http://www.myspace.com/lyricalgraffiti

I would ask that my pen name be Johnny Darko or even more preferably JHNY_DRKO to grant me some anonymity due to my divulging medical history. I am a novice creative writing student. Please edit caringly to suit your needs.

Res Ipsa Loquitor

"Reality means you live until you die, the agent says. The real truth is nobody wants reality." -from SURVIVOR, by Chuck Palahniuk

It would seem more than a little obvious to most, that getting it all out there on the table in the beginning would be the most obvious way to get to know someone... but aside from the blatant truth of blatant honesty, relationships, at least for me, don't ever start out that way. Mentally, verbally, or even lyrically I am guarded and cold... and maybe the people I find attractive or find attraction to me are too much of the same, or too accepting of those traits in me. It is who I am and have been for far too long. This frustrates me to speechlessness, but maybe I'm too old to learn new tricks, and maybe it is time to accept who I am.

I may just be a bastard born from broken dreams, but I can't help but feel fine through the lies of the dying fantasies I live through each day. I cherish simple things. I treasure the few moments of uncontrollable honesty I find scattered about as time unmercifully passes by. Today, I'm sitting in the apartment of one incredible girl sipping my morning coffee while feeling amazing and refreshed, but I can't deny how much of all this is luck... I just don't deserve to be so happy.

Tomorrow is a different plague, a different self-examination. Schoolwork has its own set of demands for me, and passing a mid-term is paramount to my future and life. Seems everything is questioning me lately. The scariest thing about that is each day that passes I have less and less answers. Of all my perfervid posturing, of all my fancy words... these answers are seemingly growing more empty.

So as I sit here and type, fighting off the effects of a handful of sleeping pills taken down in a blinking LED Cuervo shotglass; drowning out the noises of screaming roommates, and letting Ray LaMontagne prophesy that "love is a poor man's food..."; all while chain-smoking my Marlboro Menthol Lights, I am comforted by only one thing... There isn't a single person alive that isn't trying to make up for lost time in some way, shape, or form.

///begin tangent.///

[woman:] Excuse me.
[man:] Excuse me.
[woman:]
Hey. Could we do that again? I know we haven't met, but I don't want to be an ant, you know? I mean, it's like we go through life with our antennas bouncing off one another, continuously on ant auto-pilot with nothing really human required of us. Stop. Go. Walk here. Drive there. All action basically for survival. All communication simply to keep this ant colony buzzing along in an efficient polite manner. "Here's your change." "Paper or plastic?" "Credit or debit?" "You want ketchup with that?" I don't want a straw, I want real human moments. I want to see you. I want you to see me. I don't want to give that up. I don't want to be an ant, you know?
[man:]
Yeah. Yeah, no. I don't want to be an ant either. Heh. Yeah, thanks for kind of jostling me there. I've been kind of on zombie auto-pilot lately, I don't feel like an ant in my head, but I guess I probably look like one. It's kind of like D.H. Lawrence had this idea of two people meeting on a road. And instead of just passing and glancing away, they decide to accept what he calls "the confrontation between their souls." It's like, um, freeing the brave reckless gods within us all.
[woman:]
Then it's like we have met.

///from Chapter 14 of the movie "Waking Life"///

So I am in a ranting mood. I've been living like a ghost lost in a fog, but some amazing stuff has happened to me. Met a wonderful girl, and I haven't been so content in so long a time. I was randomly violated with an anonymous gift of $100 sent via snail mail in an unmarked envelope [don't worry, it was clear of anthrax, or atleast contained an amount so trace that I haven't died from it just yet]. I have come to the knowledge that I could be going to a college to nurture my god-given talent to be a writer for less than half the price of the school I am attending, and yet graduate in the same timeline I care to spend here at DeVry. I've become aware of the level of love people have for me. I've acquired a few dedicated readers and a re-kindled spirit to quench their appetites. But... I've been comatose, confused, and quelled. I'm more unsure of my desire to succeed as a writer, but finally ready to face some impending possibility of failing as a writer.

I am tired. I have tried too long to fight these sleeping pills... but tell me what you feel about disconnected love and the distraction that life is placing in your lives. What in your life are you trying to catch up to? One more cig and it's curtains for me.

Carpe Noctum,
-J.

a night with prescription pills

I'm sitting in a worn & restless twin bed trying to filter through the echoing sounds in this terrifying hospital. It's enough that I'm freezing underneath 3 blankets, but all day, and all night, horrid sounds bounce off the four empty walls of my foreign and empty room. The attempt to discern where, or how far, the sounds come from is almost impossible.
Two voices blather incessantly interjecting gurgled monotone chuckles into the dry hospital air. Shrilly laughter & shrieking cackles are coming from within the nurses' station. Squishy rubber sole wrapped feet squish squash their pathway down linoleum floors and seem to meander between the sound of pay phones ringing and the electrical hum reverberating in these halls. And if you listen just right, you can hear the tick of the hallway clock, and like a metronome it keeps time & pace of this psychotic symphony.