November in grey sludge shitbag poison city.

It is my belief the child's wish for wonder is sublimated within everyone into a variety of coping mechanisms not designed to fend off the horrors of the world from a neutral, survivalist point of view, but from the view of the disillusioned child which ever-seeks this sense of fantasy that simply is not there in our world. A world in which the revolutionary seeks to make some facet of the dream a reality, conceiving of and fighting for a world in which the world is different and new and now on in which the child can survive in for even a little bit longer. What about the escapist, the one who seeks the childlike amazement for which they yearn by finding it not out in the world, but from the comfort of their own home? Surely anyone who makes violence a central point of their life's function will be low-hanging fruit for the theory, crawling backwards to a yet further and more primitive time in youth where joy which was not satisfaction of primal need was catharsis. There is denial as a function of inner-child appeasement as well, but the question of honesty remains unanswered: is one who subscribes to or shuns the status quo the liar? Is one who formerly rejected the way of things before buying in more honest than one who acts in accordance from the beginning?

They won. The forces of evil have infiltrated our ranks and breached our walls and infested our water supplies and now there's nothing left to fight for. The hope of the world is dead and there is only blackness now. A blood red sky births a blazing ball of fire in our new morning, the dawn of a new dark age. What would the ones who came before us think? How could anyone be satisfied with the state of things in our time? Maybe change is impossible. Maybe revolutionaries of years past will look upon the world today and weep, or maybe they will say we have reason to be proud, for our breadcrumbs and our pennies and our grains of sand scraped together into the meagerest of anthills that we call skyscrapers. We all swallowed the pill. The whole world did. We took evil in our arms and embraced it. We let it into our homes and hearts and let it stay out after dark and sleep in late. Evil has ransacked our cities and murdered our friends and raped our children. And we smile. Smile, smile, smile.

How can patience be a hallmark of the righteous, when to be patient is to tolerate things as they are now? Is the point merely to suffer? Are we to suffer and pretend we are at the heights of joy to be deemed virtuous? Who is convinced?

Today I have filled my decaying meatsack with shit and as I lay on my bed and sit on my couch I know there is no rationality in my actions nor philosophy by which I live. Truly I am among everyone else in my apelike hedonism. With each day I descend further into a sedentary and disgusting nature, drowning whatever inner drive I have with trash piling into my eyes and ears and mouth and burning my synapses with ash and puke and motor oil. It is easy to live like this when you dream and do not believe in dreaming. When you believe you are not that which you say you are and want to be.

I take medication. Like most people nowadays, I take medication. Prescription medication. I just got my prescriptions renewed this week. I take medicine because I am a depressive. Because my nerves are tied together in knots characteristic of those clumps of steel wool you scrape char off cooking trays with. I take weekly injections for my chronic sense of incongruence. A lack of solidity that has followed me in different forms throughout my life. My essence drips out between cracks in my vessel, leaks out of my joints - like a spider that can't molt. I am a cicada smothered by a steel shell, and my bones have broken long ago, contorted now into impossible positions which will remain the same likely forever. Have you been buried alive before? It can feel that way sometimes. Or when you've gotten your name wrong. Or when you've had each person you've ever met line up single-file, each taking turns to crack a whip along your spine for your audacity to be. Sometimes it's only a crooked picture on the wall, a shoelace untied. But it never leaves, and it certainly never sleeps.

I've been sleeping terrible lately. Dreams of rewinding to a time where I regretted leaving just as much as I sometimes still do returning. I feel often that my chance to achieve has passed me by. Or rather, that I have passed by it. My days are a slow-moving blur of reflections in murky water. They pace back and forth in fast-forward as my months pass and I go with them in shoes and clothes and skin I was never meant to wear. But my warranty expired years ago, no refunds and no exchanges. I don't have energy these days. I don't talk to people all that much. I am now condemned to the place where nothing ever changes and my sentence is only to continue living on in a world with no light and no taste and no smell or texture or sound.

I write to you today from the place which only has grey sludge. If you visit, you will find it washes over you in slow, undulating waves. Feel the way it slakes down your throat, soft and sticky and yet slick as oil, making a home in your throat and crawling further down into your chest. It will eat for you. It will drink for you and it will push you forward when it settles in your bones. And when it muffles the signals stacking up your spinal cord, you won't even notice. You won't even care when it enters your cerebrum and pays no mind to what it finds there. This is my kingdom and it is so much fun and I love it so very much. You should come stay with me here, where I can love you too. It is soft and it is warm and I am so very alone. Won't you join me?

Dreams of hell have been a hot commodity for me recently. For several years now (though I've had them since youth), I've had regular nightmares at-least once a month. Recently it has grown into a nightly occurrence. I love being trapped in hell every night. I make my visits, so blissfully unaware in my frantic, terrified state of my existence in a dream as I negotiate my status as a slave, forever in a torturous prison entirely divorced from the waking world. When I wake up, sometimes it is one in the morning. Other times, it is one in the afternoon. Do you expect me to write now right now about how the waking world is a worse hell than the one I inhabit in nightmares? Come on, say something. You're always so quiet.

Who do you think I am? Really, what kind of person do you think is writing this? Do you think a person really wrote this? I can only hope AI isn't able to create passages of this kind. Do I have black or blonde hair? Am I kind or cruel? Do you think I have many friends, or am I a loner? Does the place I live see snow? Am I attractive? Am I an attractive woman? Do you make love to the idea of me in your mind over and over again or only once before leaving in the night? In the same fashion as the prophet of legend, I create an image of myself in your thoughts when I write this and you inevitably read it, as you were always meant to. This is our immaculate conception. Smile upon our child as you hold her in your arms. I reach out, planting a small kiss on your cheek. We will be the most loving parents. We won't carve our child into funny shapes or squeeze it out for juice. We won't scrap it for copper or sell it out to sex pests. We will care for it and feed it and water it and not even hurt it every day of our lives until we both pass away at the same second, side by side. I cannot wait to spend my life with you, darling. Now do it. Peel off my clothes and my skin and rip out my guts and sculpt me back into the person you always wanted me to be.

They're doing it. They're changing me. I don't want to be that other person. I don't want to be me now but the me I don't know scares me too. I don't want to go on. I know I'll stand by and watch helplessly as I shift and change and sell out into shitbag poison city and I'll move in and make friends with the other yuppie high-class lowlives. I don't want that. I don't want that for me. And when I change, you will too. We will. The nature of "us" will be different. What will our collective color be when I go from red to grey?

Don't let them do this to me. Don't let them change me. Hold me in your heart and in your hands and squeeze me until my head explodes and my brain matter paints your face in all the colors of every rose garden you've ever known. That's how I want it to end. A bloody mess. An indelible imprint. Is that selfish of me? I don't want to go quiet. Who does? Me, no I want to explode and leave signs that say, "look upon my works ye mighty and despair." I'll leave claw marks and I'll leave hickeys and I'll kill you, I swear to God I'll fucking kill you I'll do it, I've gotta do something to stop growing old I've gotta die before it's too late, I don't wanna see the future and it's coming for me down the hall and I can feel it's breath on my neck and I'm scared, I'm so very scared. Please lock the doors and windows and tell me I'll be safe from him and slide the knife down my neck when I'm nestled in your arms and hold me down when I try to fight. Whisper in my ear that it's safe now and tomorrow will never come for me, there will be no baleful wake-up call, no evacuation sirens or second comings. Tell me I am the greatest woman you have ever known and rip my eyes out and crush them hard and fast between your teeth so I cannot argue. I need to hear these things from you not because I am broken, but because this is the only way I know of repairing myself.