Asocial Anhedoniac's Avoidant Alexithymia

Rememory N.344

“Am I supposed to think & feel anything, for others?” he scrawled into the day’s entry, “anything” underlined with a vigour. “I’m just remembering an old friend who loved fucking with people—she was hooked on it. Figuring out detailed ways to get under people’s skin. Then another, who was the polar opposite. Had a heart bigger than this shit of a society deserves—still gave patience to this other friend who was the embodiment of everything they hated. I don’t know either of them anymore. Don’t care to. But I remember them, our little spectrum of humanness.”
He went on to write about his chronic indifference: “... but spine is different from heart and mind. It emboldens the heart and ensures the mind. It holds an (me) opinionated bitch upright and hunches the back of a (me) freakish recluse. I helped that friend find pieces of shit to fuck with instead of rando’s. I still keep my promise to the other to be a kinder soul. Neither give me feeling, or anything at all. Just something to do. With... all this.” Uninterested in his own writing, the rest of the page was filled with scribbles.

Rememory N.216

Home alone. Tropical heat rivaled by aircon and tile floors. Faraway eyes boring into her closet door. Legs crossed, hands in lap, rocking back & forth. Humming some song. Replaying memories she didn’t want. Faces she’d grow to resent. But thinking of absolutely nothing; at the mercy of an emotion. Of course she couldn’t name it. Never could. Just knew they all felt like nothing at best. Utter boredom at worst.
Her retaliation to this was the predictable stash of blades, but that began to bore her. Instead, on calm impulse, it was revived by a stapler pried open and pressed into the squishy back of her hand—oh, not hard enough. Full force of an unsoothed teenager applied—oh. Now it’s in me. Let me take that out. Rinse and repeat, chasing relief. A rare and useless moment threatening that utter boredom, then retreating. No signs of it aside from a handful of teeny tiny poke holes. Not annoying, painful, pleasant. Just teeny tiny poke holes for her to clean, given reason to tend to herself. Keep the image of sterile & sweet.

Rememory N.48

Rushing out onto the field, innocent squeals & giggles approaching crickets destined to be stuffed into plastic containers as they succumb to dismemberment. Butterflies were lunged at only to be shed of their wings, tiny torsos added to plastic coffins. “It feels funny!” one child laughed, wingdust coating fragile fingertips. Another two stared into a container, amazed by how the bugs stilled, able to get close looks at non-fleshy anatomy.
She was amongst the readers, the gossipers, the run-on-all-fours, the bug killers. None of them got along but she still found a way in. Knew how it felt to pluck out wings, offering to do so if someone was hesitant. Too uncoordinated to figure out running on all fours, but learnt how to bark and growl. Archived the gossip, inserting overheard details provided by her assumed shyness. Despite this varied selection, she was never amongst the popular & sporty, quick to call her a monster. Ugly and weird. Smack her across the face in a laughing frenzy of ew, get away! The usual bluntness from children. But just like the bug wings, barks, gossip, stories—everything was play. And she grew to forget their faces.

Rememory N.864

Another chameleon who found it ironic that people warn you of liars, narcissists, cruel hearts behind irresistible charm, as if they don’t play the same irritating fucking game. Rules of pleasantries & falsehoods with a GAME OVER ensured by perceived deviance. Deviance: another ever-changing definition within said game. A game with a “norm” of injustice, (communal) indifference, and vampiric empires. “Why wouldn’t deviance be desired? Why would deviance be punished, instead?” “‘Cos it’s not easy to control,” he/she offered to a room of self-proclaimed thinkers & thought daughters, earlier that day. Thick bulge as taunting as her soft, hairy tits sat perky under a stubbled face. “And that makes it a threat a lot of people aren’t ready to be.”
Regardless of participation in this game of conformity: Days always droning, senses always unimpressed. He/she remained unreachable. Undesiring, unhuman, uncaring. A text-invite to a trendy restaurant opening broke the silence, lit up the room: “omggg and it’s close to a store that sells those cute bags !!!” So he/she dragged herself to the bathroom, getting ready to slit his wrists in the tub and leave his survival to chance.

Today began with an urge to fall from Here, plunge myself deep into water that’ll spit me out onto some tourist beach. Stumble through the crowd so haphazardly it tugs them out of their gluttonous stupor, gawking at the disturbance during their special I-deserve-this vacation. I’d find a sidewalk to piss on, hold any eye-contact given to me. Bark, maybe. Then mumble irritations as I find nowhere to go, already regretting the decision to be here—“excuse me, are you alright?” A saviour-complex would ask. “Yeah, I’m fine! Just thinking about driving a fork into my eye.”
But I didn’t do that, well-acquainted with these disappointments disguised as impulse. Some need to disturb the peace for selfish wishes to feel anything—those tourists with new Temu bikini’s and perfectly posed photos for Instagram seemed to be feeling plenty. Must be something wrong with me, then. Could it be my lack of a 10 step skincare routine? My frizzy curls? How I can’t decode half of what they said? Oh, it must be.

Instead of self-inflicting humiliation & inadequacy, I pranced through happy little flowers. Thought of disorders & illnesses AKA personal failings, and their supposed healing potions: Consumerism, marketed mindfulness, therapy that’s more like being corralled into a cage. All share the threat of ostracisation, incarceration, profit. All provide shit-fuck-all to truly relieve an ounce of anguish, discomfort, no sense of belonging. None will admit the rotten, life-sapping root cause of these personal failings; some eternal and in no need of healing—not the kind those potions intend. “Maybe I’m just like this,” I frequently don’t-actually-joke. “‘Cos, really, what’s so bad about that? Why am I expected to feel so fucked up?” (We already know the answer.)

Those Rememories share personal failings ensuring numbness both hard-wired & inevitable; shit that takes the life away from living. The bridge from crossing. Every experience didn’t happen, every interaction was hallucination. It urged those souls towards empty attempts at getting anything out of bothering to stay here:

• Self-mutilate to reach deeper, to regulate, to get off.
• Walk deep into choppy waters, ragdoll body & resisted instincts.
• Drop off the face of the Earth, change names, grow a fifth limb.
• The rest of it.

Unsurprisingly, it was useless. The chase for fleeting anything’s. Every path led back to chronic indifference–so they calmed down and collected dust. Recoiling from the confusing world and everyone in it, lurking in corners. Existing & contributing from solitary self-confinement; spine is different from heart and mind. They may have been so fucked up, but not as bad as the world we’re stuck in.

• If you can’t “fix” yourself, turn outward. Refuse the profitable kind of apathy; oversaturating mind, poisoning heart and softening spine.

An $80 keychain won’t save you. Neither will a $200 spirituality course, a $720 shopping spree, a $100 gift card, a designer bag. A “little treat.” A “self-care” package. Repeating affirmations of how valid you are despite performing, not Being. And you know that. ‘Cos you cry about how much you hate yourself. You feel so fugly and stupid compared to the beautiful, successful people on your screen(s). You don’t know a single truth about yourself and your room is full of stuff and your entire closet is replaced every Christmas and you suck your gut in for family photos and a bad hair day is the worst thing that could happen to you and maybe you are just one useless person that’ll make no difference. But yay! You’re valid! Which must mean I’m the invalid fuck up you avoid being!

The invalid fuck up says: I don’t want to be something money can buy. I don’t want my own hard-wiring to cause complacency. I don’t want to be “okay” when “okay” just means ignorance. The fuck up is a tight-ass, a party-pooper, an overthinker. The fuck up is a wrench in the machine. The fuck up should see how happy everyone else is with their stuff and bastardised spirituality and blissful ignorance around the dinner table and stop taking everything so fuuuuucking seeeeriously? Pissing on the sidewalk? Barking at people? I barked at him too. He tried not to smirk.

“Why not? Nobody’s paying attention anyway.”
“They’re ignoring you ‘cos you’re unsettling.”
“Don’t wanna be anything else-”
“Liar.”
Narrowed my eyes. Tilted my head. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
I scoffed. Disbelieving and prepared; he rarely talks back to me.
“You just wanna feel seen. But this isn’t how you go about it.”
“How should I, then? People’ve got no souls.”
“How’d you make me see you?”

Sobering, revolting questioning—his usual—snapped me back to my senses. Air different, smell’s different, scenery real-and-clear: I thought I didn’t come here. But behind him was the trail we left through those happy little flowers, no deviating path of his own. Dutifully following mine. Silently. I’m sure he found me as soon as I washed up on that beach of bullshit, now somewhere off to the left and down, tucked behind us. Then revealed himself, reminding me that he’s never going anywhere. No matter what I do. And it’s humiliating, how patient he is with me. How I drag him down and he doesn’t care, knowing how to make us fine, better. Cope.

It wasn’t too different, when he first saw me. Too much honesty, vulnerability, a bit of a cry for help. Years upon years of well-trained docility torn apart within seconds. I could barely breathe; giddy & desperate. Coming alive before an incoming storm, unsettling the waters below and urging me to my knees.
Pitiful: arguably.
Needed: undoubtedly.
I was petulant and weakened, insecurity unashamed: “Why am I so fucking alone? What the fuck is wrong with me!?” Nightfall began hours ago, and I’d spent them screaming; vocals destroyed. Still begging someone to smack me, hard, across the face. “I know a lot more people’ve really wanted to do it. Or tried to,” laughing, high off the release, “fuckin’ prey animals. Made to bare it,” curled up with deep, shaky breaths. “All those eyes and your bared fucking teeth,” snot dripping from the tip of my nose, “acting like that survival of the fittest bullshit even applies to you,” drool coating chewed lips, “make this shit get out of me—rip it out for all I fucking care,” forehead pressed into soaked dirt, “just make it stop.”

• You start to believe it. After constant, incessant whining about whatever’s horribly, disgustingly WRONG with you.
  • You start to expect & predict disrespect, humiliation, judgement, silence—the promise of hurt.
• Then you realise it's nothing. That your reality is much more simple, unimportant, utterly fucking mundane.
• A fact that could’ve made me ruthless. & maybe it did, in some ways.
• But while this body is only mimicry I attempt to animate within sensitive skin incapable of scratching it’s itches; it is mine.
• Simply, unimportantly, mundanely mine.

I still don’t know how he found me. He barely does either. Simply saw me as I was and ignored my pleas, handling me with grace. Patience. Understanding far beyond my own. An embodiment of treatment I’d wished upon stars for, quickly learning I had no clue how to stomach it. Still, I took it. Bit by bit by another sundown—too many—I was gone. His injured animal healed enough to run. Caution by nature nurtured into avoidance; he couldn’t heal that. Not much can, here.

… supposed healing potions: Consumerism, marketed mindfulness, therapy that’s more like being corralled into a cage. All share the threat of ostracisation, incarceration, profit. All provide shit-fuck-all to truly relieve an ounce of anguish, discomfort, no sense of belonging. None will admit the rotten, life-sapping root cause of these personal failings.

Those kids might’ve been right to call her a monster, if it was the plucked wings they cared about. The only reason I’m unsurprised they didn’t, most souls quick to defend fauna over humans: Once you are deemed fauna? Might as well be roadkill.
They didn’t give a shit about the bugs. They were doing the same to her. To the human quadrupeds, the bookworms with a little too much hunch in their back. You probably wouldn’t have been spared. A lot of us are closer to roadkill than not, in this game run by vampiric empires and immortalised by diligent players—regurgitators. Spreading acidic trails for others to feed off, soon accustomed to the carefully-curated taste. Forcing itself to be the only thing their guts can process, throats refusing to swallow otherwise; stop all the bad before it infiltrates such a delicate system. And now there's puke fucking everywhere.

“Is it worth being seen? In a place like this?”
(A few beats pumped by, enough to break eye contact; chewing your cheek, huh?)
“I don’t know,”
(Careful, with his animal. Found unmuzzled with a flight risk.)
“I just know I can’t be the only one who does.”
(Oh.)
(Oh-kay.)
(Yeah.)
(Shit.)

Immediately, instantly: Nothing mattered.

“Why not?” I pleaded, afraid. He gave me a look—an apology. Proved that it’s all bullshit. That morning angst, this brain in this skull in this skin, the beach-goers stuffed full of noise and memories and fucking feeling.
Blissful chatter, smacked volleyballs, raucous laughter. People everywhere. Lives everywhere. Proof of such surrounding but never reaching me; can’t romanticise it, can’t bend it into half-assed poetry. Not when it’s more mocking than familiar. Reminders—countless—of how I can never quite touch anything, talk to anyone, exist anywhere. How, no matter where I go or what I do or who I say I am: I am uncomfortable. Beyond the bone, beyond the soul, beyond anything I waste energy trying to control & understand & explain & ignore & defend—fuck. Fuck.

Not ONCE, not EVER, will I feel like I belong.
Should I not be okay with that?
Do I know if I’m okay with that?
Would it matter if I was?
Would belonging do shit for me?
Would I be okay with belonging?
Can I definitively say a single-fucking-thing—“you’re crying.”
“… oh.”

He took me away from here. Quick, while I’m useless and sniffling. Ruminating. Resenting. Staring into nothing; knowing he sees everything. I might be the most inadequate thing on Earth.

“It isn’t worth it,” I corrected, wobbly.
“No,” holding me steady, “not yet.”

Emotions allude me, expressing them is a chore, the truest ones were taught to be hidden; consequently, I feel emotions without experiencing them. Floating through and around me, never settling. Maybe there’s something near my chest, throat, limbs, doing who-knows-what to my mood. Sometimes, bubbles & sparks fill me, head-to-toe, in emotion(s) I only recognise as BIG. Usually, I’m deep in fog. Couldn’t tell you—with certainty—what expression I’m making, who I am, if I’m thinking anything. A dissociative state, apparently. Fading you in and out of the days. Which become weeks, become months, become years—happy birthday! There’s been another death and you’re an aunty again and your childhood dog is in an urn and those tremors haven't stopped and what do you mean it’s Thursday, 9:47pm? Yesterday was May.

And yet. And-fucking-yet: Despite it being so grating, so ill-fitting, so out of my reach—for now & possibly forever—I don’t give up on the world. The real one, baring the stench & weight of all that puke.

• Because the only times I’ve existed, is when saltwara carries me.
• Sun bakes me golden & warm.
• Birdsong flies over our conversations, our laughs.
• Flesh touches mine; careful, attentive, never to hurt.
• Air smells like scaled fish or manure or the crisp breeze blowing it away.
• And there’s no suburbia, main streets, city lights, all those eyes assaulting me.

Don’t need a spirituality course to tell me why that’s the case. To enlighten me. Insist that I’m another special soul ‘cos of it, destined for a grand purpose that’ll hit me when it’s meant to.

• As if our universe operates on the premise of purpose.
  • It doesn’t need or want purpose.
    • You do.

It all just is. And I just am. As are you, we, us; ‘cos I’m sick of “me.” Always something about my failings, my potential, my oddities, my sanity, my too much, my lack, my could-be-instead’s. My habits, ideas, answers, blood, brain, walk, talk, sit, run, skin, hair, posture, how I hold a goddamn fork. Monster or not, I’ll be horribly, disgustingly wrong to those who condemn all things “different.” (There’s no use in considering their judgements.)
As for the others: The uncomfortable, the prey, the hopeful, the deviants—you, Reader, Stranger? “I just wanna be left alone,” I’ve cried to him. 10:36pm, 16 minute voice message. “But I also wanna feel... real? Like I could be a person too, laughing and talking and- fuckin’- being in a memory. But it’s easier to be alone—safer. ‘Cos I’m not as brave as you. I know you’re like me, but you’re better at it. All of it. And I’m scared of everything.”

… I’m aware. That he’s right.
And he’s right to apologise for it.

The one comfort. The one thing within my reach, telling me it can’t just be us. He can’t hide me away forever, locked up in another tower. Doesn’t matter if I chose it. If I like the dragon guarding it, if the dragon doesn’t wanna be anything else. All that understanding far beyond my own whispers reason in his ear; waits for when I’m already disillusioned to let it reach mine.
It’s fine. & sensical. I’m just scared of everything. Scared of how experiencing will feel, how overwhelming it’ll be at first; “being seen” a requirement. Despite instinct to hide. Keep to the walls with your head down & body unassuming—forget how your voice sounds, nobody’s gonna hear it—but he does. So I don’t want anyone else to, right? Surely, I don’t. And do. I guess. Surely, when it’s too quiet for too long. Turns you too curious, too rusty, too plain-fucking-weird.

Too numb.

I’m not numb, Reader, Stranger. Not like this. Whatever—whoever—I am? Way down, somewhere? I wanna find him. Hear him laugh at my exhaustion, aware of what it took. I’ll tell him he could’ve just shown up. He’ll tell me I arrived right on time.

As if our universe operates on the premise of purpose.
It doesn’t need or want purpose.
You do.

It all just is. And I just am. As are you, we, us.

Life just is grotesque beauty. Nauseating hope. Ambivalence towards our own hardships. Grief, self-hatred, a full-of-shit neighbour; experiences. The evidence of our lives & the guides to ourselves.
These inner ruminations are of no concern to a garden and it’s insects, however; how we treat them is. Experiences are colliding, sharing a moment in life. When this isn’t had? When you are denied such vitality? You are stunted. Never beyond repair, but beyond common patience & ooey-gooey empathy. The trait, that supposedly makes a human.

• Empathy cannot exist without understanding.
• Understanding can exist without empathy.
• Both are conditional when humans become fauna.
• Conveniently.

Our actions & inactions become us, eventually. My own lack of existence tears me way,
way

down.

And apart.
Reduced to messy, to helpless. To fucking terrified.

He tells me I am brave, for the typical reason of “doing it scared.” Tremors rattle my limbs and digits, overwhelm blanks my mind and stumbles my speech. Humiliation threatens to be felt. Fear pretends to protect me. I try to believe him; a person so much more than I am. Giving praise. To me?
Suddenly, all that whining echoes. & I swear I try. All I do is try, reviving wisdom passed down through the some-body’s I am, their experiences as beyond my own as his. They tell me to have my pace, know I’m fine, and just be. Use this spine, expose this skin, now, now, NOW; life & death don’t wait for comfort. For right time’s or perfection. They come from a chaos far beyond our comfortable, easy “order.”

When this rumination passes through,
I get over myself.

This anger is fine, this upset is fine, this joy is fine, this lack thereof is fine. This voice, mind, posture; embodied results. This cautious hope. This entire self. Is fine. There is no retribution awaiting my submission, anymore. I’m in the present, somewhere untouchable, something fragile. And nobody’s paying attention, anyway.

So I can admit. That I hate this.

I hate those beach-goers and the type of feeling they indulge. I hate the world we’ve come up with; I hate imagining how we look to insects, stars and bones. I hate that it’s easier to be cruel; I hate the holier-than-thou, I hate self-righteous moralities. I hate being nice to the wrong people, I hate that I’d be considered the fool. I hate having to be sterile and sweet, I hate having to make sense.
I hate not going completely mad. I hate myself before you can; I hate acting like I’m exempt from egomania. I hate my own makings; I hate the time it takes, I hate assertions of wasted time. I hate reflections, I hate my own permanence, I hate having a name; I hate proof that I've ever existed.

I hate that you’re reading this.

I hate that he convinced me.
That he can’t be the only one.

That he knows, above all:
I hate
that I want
to love you.

Take care,