It doesn’t matter because it’s already happened. It’s already over. All of this is just more of the end. The final moment. Just one moment but this one’s a doozy. Lasts forever. A single point and also infinite. Really small circle. Limit case.
Now my temples are greyed out and I wake up every morning with a bit more face missing, spend a bit longer pencilling it back in. Never been that great at pencil work. But it’s tricky because there’s this picture covering the mirror in my room, a snake or something. Badly drawn snake. I didn’t draw it. Actually I don’t know how it got there. I wonder if we’re just nuts, if it’s just us. Just one really unfortunate lineage from some primordially fucked Eve, who would never have made it past twenty-five anyway but she’d already had eight kids by that point which means it’s no big deal that they all carried the same crazy gene. Self-destruct button. Philosophers’ egg. Who cares, right, as long as we’ve all shat out one or two of our own before the Big Crunch? Turns out normal service has been in operation this entire time. Do not adjust your fucking DNA.
I’m old enough to remember the sound of a skipping record. I had this terrible 78 of the Marseillaise, I was told it was my grandmother’s favourite: Allons enfants de la Patr— Allons enfants de la Patr— Allons enfants de la Patr—…That dislocated rhythm never dying, never progressing. It’s enough to drive you nuts. Of course her jour de gloire never arrived. And I sometimes picture that my mother had the exact same childhood I had, just without computer games, and with the milk delivered by a horse and cart or some shit like that. Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis, right? Yes I still have my Latin. Why, did you think I was stupid? It’s fine, they all do. I mean, it’s not fine, obviously. My Latin and my French. That’s right bitches, I have three languages to not talk in. All those blank stories crowding into this room. Ghosts. Round this pile of bones. The room is full of it. Full of white space. Only fragments I can still find in here and I can’t put them in the right order anymore. All the pieces that were supposed to go in between I can’t go on and I’ll go on.
And I bet my mother used to go to the asylum and tell her mother things too, and I bet it was half bullshit, and then when she got older herself, she wasn’t sure what had really happened, what she’d made up, and what she’d seen on TV. Because she wasn’t used to TV, you know, she didn’t grow up with it, and I mean she sort of conflated some characters with real people and couldn’t always tell the difference. Still, it was true in a way, that was her life. I mean, by the end, that’s what it had been. Some things are just fucking important, whether or not they happened. Why would it matter? Who would it matter to? Those are the questions. We all have good days and bad days. I’m not saying she wasn’t crazy, I’m saying it’s irrelevant. It all washes out with the night anyway. With the real night, the real dark. Every nighte and alle. Jesus, maybe there’s really just one of us going around in circles forever. To Sherlock Holmes you know she is always the woman. Maybe the universe isn’t big enough for two. One of us had to go.
It doesn’t matter. It’s just repetition. Repetition turns any sound into a rhythm, into music. It’s coming round again. I’m not the only one who sees it, am I? Maybe not, but you have to do it alone, completely alone or the experiment fails. All alone on the shore / Of the wide world. Of course, everywhere is the shore. Every point is the edge. You just can’t see of what. I mean in what. Until you have nothing, you are nothing, standing completely still, weightless and unfastened.
Then you see it.
Part Five Tears
A great while ago the world begun
Chapter Seventeen
I kept seeing Jeff the therapist every week, and so I suppose it was inevitable that I would start talking to him about Deb eventually.
I didn’t exactly decide to tell him about her, but I had fallen into the habit of providing a running commentary on my life again, and Deb was just part of the story. But I could see he didn’t know what to think about it. There was something in his eyes, in his frown.
After a couple more sessions, in which Deb seemed to be his main focus, he told me he thought it would be best for me to start seeing a psychiatrist as well. So I did. I didn’t tell her as much as I told Jeff, but I repeated the things he told me I should say to her. I saw her once every two months, and from then on she was in charge of medicating me.
I already took escitalopram every night, and she gave me diazepam for when things were bad. After a couple of months she shifted me over to clonazepam, which was supposed to stay in my system longer. Then she started me on antipsychotics, which she carefully never described as such. Quetiapine just to help you sleep. Brexpiprazole just so it doesn’t make you so sleepy.
Whenever I saw Jeff, he
