Bread: “...”

Twenty years old, single, and I dropped out of high school in my third year. I’ve been loaded for as long as my frazzled memory can recall, I am ranting at a loaf of bread, and I have a loaded .357 magnum, which I am waving about in a supermarket filled with employees only.

Nick: “Game over.”

Bread: “...”

To be short, I’ve had enough, and it’s time that I take myself back the only way I know how...

Rewind:

I’m seven years old, smiling. I’m wearing the darkness as a cloak, lacing toilet paper around some upper middle class shits yard gnome. My friends are somewhere nearby, quietly giggling while they mummify this constituency’s domicile with two-ply “rim cleaner.”

(...I am everything right here. Right now. Laughing. Working. Amongst my companions, wanted...)

I’m eight years old and my leg is broken. I have to tell my friends that I fell, but the truth of the matter is that my waste shit father got piss drunk and fucked me up. He shattered my fibula in two places with a cinder block: immediate pain, and a lifetime of mutated flesh, made immortal by a deep, empty psychological wound.

(...I am my greatest rejection. To a perfect father I am the mistake that makes him drink and cry and wish he had something, someone better than me. Better than his only son...)

I’m nine years old, and I’m at a slumber party with all of my friends. After canvassing the neighborhood with our “summer snow,” we retire to one of our houses for games and such. Later, I fall asleep, happy at having been invited along by the two most popular kids in my class.

I hear something and I wake up. Something steady, something constant, although something disturbs the perpetual rhythm. Laughter...

I am being urinated on. The kids who invited me, the two most popular kids in my class, are leering above me, giggling while they piss on my stomach and my legs. They don’t know that I’m awake, and they keep going, gently shoving cheetos up my nose and in my ears after finishing their piss fest.

I pretend to sleep, but I cannot help crying all night long. Softly weeping as the brunt of a joke, the crux of another rejection...

(...My pain is a heat that starts in the depths of my stomach and slowly creeps out, molesting every appendage and portion of my body, until the simple act of communication scares me silent...)

...My nostalgic reverie is shattered pre-maturely by a screaming check out girl, who quickly runs outside and disappears amongst the staccato flash of red and blue police lights.

Nick: “She never loved me. I loved her. Why didn’t she ever love me? Why? What did I fucking screw up?”

Bread: “...”

I’m sixteen years old, and I’ve met a beautiful girl. She talks to me. I talk to her. We laugh, and unlike the entire hurricane of endless shit that has tainted the last seven years of my social career, I am actually happy. Despite my failing grades, nearly habitual drug use, and my parents having gotten divorced, I am the poster child of joy.

(...I’ve given myself over to someone else. A womb. Warmth. A parasitic dependency: a mother. It is time to grow...)

I’m seventeen years old, and I’ve dropped out of high school. I am perpetually high, but I still have my girlfriend. We are going to have sex when we feel ready enough. I am afraid of how I will perform, if I will “shotgun” my load, or if I won’t be able to get it up. I mentioned this to her, and she turned red, but quickly assured me that it didn’t matter.

That she loved me, with or without the sex. With or without an education...

I dropped out of high school. High school has nothing to do with love.

Love has nothing to do with sex.

(...Although she has all of the trappings of a loving, trusting person, she will not discipline me. She will not teach me. I am listing. Help me. Help...)

I am twenty years old and I am single. The pain that started somewhere near my core has reached its full grasp into everything that I am. With her leaving me, telling me that I’m shit, I have nothing to turn to. No education. No parents. No friends.

Just a pistol and enough pain and self-loathing to commit myself to an eternity of blank nothingness...

(...I am always wrong. Weak. Worthless. A monument to nothing, a wasted replica of my wasted father...)

I’m staring straight ahead of me, past the bread, past the shelf, past the walls, past the streets, past the confines of linear time...

(...I slide the gun into my mouth...)

I’m looking for a reason. Scanning my future and my past for a meaningful event. Some chance of blue skies within this endless tempest of hurt...

(...I cock the hammer back...)

I examine my options.

(...I put tension on the trigger...)

Limited by my experience, I am blinded by disappointment and rejection.

(...Click.)

I see nothing.

(...)