Self-Torture Is Your Favorite Sport | Theland E. Thomas

It’s almost 3 am, and you stare into the pitch darkness, eyelids heavy, but mind racing. It’s funny how your eyes play tricks on you in the dark. The longer you stare, the blacker it becomes. It starts from the edges and creeps into the middle until the entire room is five shades darker. Then, the edges grow darker again, blackness compounding upon blackness, darker until the sunrise.

You've been tossing and turning all night, trying to find comfort in the warmth of the sheets. Now, you roll from your side onto your back and stare up at the vacant ceiling. The darkness is malicious, and you’re afraid. It glares back at you, peering into you, or maybe just reflecting you. You shut your eyes, but the scenery is the same. And you can't escape these toxic thoughts.

Remember a few years ago when you met your best friend? It was by chance, which is pretty much how you meet all your favorite people. At first you were forced to spend time with each other, then you wanted to. You spent long afternoons and evenings sharing your passions, your secrets, your fears. You might know her better than anyone else. She definitely knows you.

Remember parking your car on that hill and talking until the sun came up? Looking back, that's probably when you started to fall for her. When you finally shared the part of yourself you hated the most, and she looked into your eyes and told you how special you were.

But fool, you couldn’t say the same to her. You tried, but your tongue twisted, and your mouth dried, and your words caught, so you just looked away and hoped she could somehow pick up what you were trying to say non-verbally.

You realized that you wanted to spend every second with her. Your days didn’t seem complete if she wasn’t involved. You found yourself volunteering to help her with things you hated, but they didn’t seem so bad with her by your side. You would spend all day and night laughing with her.

Remember when she shared with you that she couldn’t really handle romantic affection, and your blood ran cold, but you laughed and said, “Me neither, good thing we’re just friends, right?” And then you thought, damn, why did I just say that, and she was looking at you, but when you saw, she looked away.

Remember when she complained that she couldn’t find anyone who she really connected with, and you came that close to confessing your love to her, and you said her name so heavily, she snapped out of whatever she was thinking about and stared at you with wide, expectant eyes, but you just looked away and told her she’d find that special someone someday?

Remember all those times you laid awake in bed fantasizing about finally saying what had been on your mind for the longest time? It was real romantic in your head. In your fantasy, your fear dissolved, and you just dropped the bomb like, “I think I’m in love with you.” No, more nonchalant, like, “Hey, I love you, you know?” Actually, maybe you shouldn’t be so intense and you'd go with a, “Hey, I really like you.” And she would be like, “Like, like like me?” And you would be like - no wait, what is this, middle school? You would actually just say, “Hey, do you want to go on a real date with me sometime?” And you smiled when you thought of this one because you knew you wouldn’t be so suave in real life. And in your fantasy, she wouldn’t reject you. (And you thought what if she doesn’t reject me for fear of being the cause of what tips me over the edge but she doesn’t really want to go out with me, she just doesn't want to hurt my feelings? I would never want anyone to think that. [And then you thought how do you even think up these things?]). In your fantasy, she said something like, “Really?” And you said, “Yeah, I really like you.”

And then the fantasy you in your mind’s eye thought, what is this middle school, and said, “Actually, I think I’m in love with you.” Maybe she replied here. Maybe she said, “Wow, I love you too.” Maybe she said, “Well, that took long enough.” And maybe she didn’t say anything and you said,

“I’m sorry, but I can’t hold this in any longer. I love you because you’re such an amazing person. You see the world in a different way. You’re always ready for the next adventure, always looking toward the future. And you see the good in everyone. You saw the good in me when I couldn't see anything but darkness. I know you said you couldn’t really handle when guys are really in love with you, but maybe we can’t resist because you’re so radiant and we’re like moths flying in the dark without you.”

And, in the dark, you smiled so hard your face hurt. Could you get any cheesier? And then you laughed out loud because that’s how you actually felt.

(And in the back of your mind you were mad at yourself for allowing yourself to feel this way because you tried so hard not to develop these emotions because they always, always, always end in heartbreak. [And in the back of the back of your mind you remembered that by the time couples break up, they despise the very things they once loved about each other.])

Remember when you got up everyday for the next few months and still said nothing to her? And you watched with a gnawing feeling in your heart as she started to grow bored of you. And all of a sudden, she didn’t really want to hang out with you anymore. And you didn’t talk. And you missed her so bad. And you were desperate to have her back, and one day you finally asked her on that date, but it wasn’t anything like how you imagined you would say it. It was rushed, and you stumbled over your words, and she just looked really sad, and she said your name softly and said, “I really care about you, but I don’t like you like that.”

And you were kind of tearing up a little bit, but you didn’t want her to see even though you knew she knew, so you just looked away and said, “Oh, yeah, that’s fine.” And she reached out and touched your hand and asked, “Are you okay?” And even though you felt like your insides were being vacuumed into a void, and you were barely containing your tears, and the pain was plastered all over your face, you said, “Yeah, I’m fine.” You’d just ruined it. You’d ruined everything. But you still didn’t want to lose her, so you asked, “We can still be friends, right?” And she forced a smile and said, “Of course.” And then she let go of your hand and walked away.

Remember when you had to stand with your back to the wall while waiting for the train because you couldn’t escape the fantasy of jumping in front of the tracks and your body twisting and flailing between the car and the cement and your blood spraying and finally releasing years of pent-up anguish, but then you couldn’t do that because she would think it was her fault when really it was always all your fault, and you didn’t really want to die anyway, you just wanted the constant, dull, aching, pain to end?

Remember when thought you were over it, but then you saw her with her new boyfriend, and he was tall, dark, handsome, and strong - all the things you could never be - and you were so jealous, but you really just wanted her to be happy even if it was without you because you still loved her and you probably always would? You knew this would happen, but you couldn’t help yourself. Self-torture is your favorite sport.

Remember when you hung out with your friends, including her and her boyfriend, and you realized he’s actually a really cool dude, and he’s perfect for her and you made friends with him and even gave him relationship advice all the while stifling an enormous sadness?

Remember when you tried to drown your depression, and it worked for a little while, but then you realized that you could still feel the pain no matter how drunk you got, so you went to a club to dance it out, but you couldn't get out of your own head, and your feet were moving, but you were sinking in quicksand, and you somehow ended up dancing right next to her and her boyfriend (what are the odds?), and at least your usual suicide fantasy had morphed from jumping off a bridge to blowing out your brains right there and getting your guts all over his perfect outfit?

Remember when you asked her if she ever felt the same way about you, and her face fell, and she teared up a little bit and said, “Yes. But I didn’t think you did.”

You clench your teeth, open your eyes and turn to the other side. You curl up in a ball and hug yourself, but you can’t keep the tears in. Your nose stuffs, and the tears fall sideways over your face and soak into the pillow. And you gaze outside looking for a glimmer of light, but it’s still pitch black and the sun won’t rise for hours.

Beside a Lake in Winter | Alexander T. Damle

            Harv and I, it was just an ordinary Sunday, you know the kind, ordinary decent Sunday, sleepy and long, though the guts of it a little twisted, some knowledge in the back of your mind you just can’t quite tickle. Not to stop certain people from trying, of course, but people’ll do anything for a high, right? Anyway, Harv and I, ordinary Sunday. Or was it Danielle? Doesn’t matter probably. Well, either way, we were walking along by the edge of the river, watching the trash churn over and over itself, pulled in little gravitational whorls by the water as it wanders over the carcasses of bicycles and dogs just below the surface, when Jonathon walked up to us. We asked him if he got it, and he said nah, sorry guys, the market’s, like, all dried up this month, some guy down state got hit hard. Like, guns drawn, riot shields, tear gas grenades, bullet to the head (his own, on the floor of his bathroom, it turned out, when he heard knocking at his door. Turned out to be a couple mormons, proselytizing. Nevermore?) hit hard.

            But then he says he has something new, never even heard of it before. We ask him what it is, and he shrugs, pulls his jacket up his shoulders a little bit. Pretty sure he’s trying to kick something or another. Oxycontin? Hydrocodone? Just straight up heroin? Probably doesn’t matter. With Jonathon it’s always an opiate. Razor edges.

            And then he says it ain’t got a name yet, you know how this shit is. And Harv/Danielle looks at me, wary, eyebrows arched slightly, eyes a little wider than normal, mouth all twisted up. And then I turn back to Jonathon and ask him what it does, and he says it’s, like, a psychedelic. Probably. He thinks.

            And you know, we probably should have walked away there. We aren’t junkies. LSD isn’t addictive, no psychedelic is. I mean, you can get addicted to the experience, sure. I know people who are. But we aren’t. I know all this. But I still ask Jonathon how much, and he says a hundred fifty, and I think, that’s not bad for something new, I’ve spent a lot more for “something new”. So I say sure, and Harv/Danielle looks at me again.

            The sky looks like motor oil. Can taste the smog. Can’t really see across the river. That might just have been fog though. Or maybe we were by the ocean. Memory is all messed up in my head. But I know the sky looks like motor oil, and the clouds flow like satin, creeping down bare flesh, and the sun casts a weird ghostly pallor that makes the light flatten out real long and harsh, and reminds me of the look that daytime soaps get. Jonathon turns away from us to get something out of his bag, and when he does I get a glimpse of his face and I can’t tell if he’s smiling or frowning.

            He hands it to us, and it’s just two blank squares of paper in a dirty plastic bag. I look up at him as I hand him the money. He looks away. I see something get turned up in amongst the froth, and it looks like it had meant a lot to someone once. Somewhere nearby a train trundles down its track, and the sound of its horn pierces the muggy calm.

            So then Jonathon goes on his way, and so do we. Walking through the streets, everyone studies their shoes, and a taxi drives by too fast, hitting a puddle and splashing the gutter refuse, thick and inky, all over my torn jeans. Harv/Danielle looks at the jeans, then up at me, then back down at their shoes.

            We walk past a homeless woman, and she looks up at us, and she has the same eyes that a lamb gets when it’s about to get slaughtered. Her hair is thick like weeds by the edge of the river, and her skin is thick with ashen dirt, looks like the sky. She cradles something in her arms the shape of a child, but I can’t see its face, just a bundle of tattered rags.

            From somewhere a group of kids come running. Don’t know where they ever come from. More every day. Packs. Ferrel. Wild eyed. Never seem to see the rest of us, just push their way through like they’re the only beasts left on a dying earth. Anyway, the kids reach us, and one of them pushes in between me and the homeless woman and knocks over the battered old can where she’s trying to collect enough for dinner. The coins all start running and the woman runs after them. A few land with a plop the wrong tone in the gutter’s ooze, and she doesn’t even pause as she plunges her hand into them nether regions between street and sidewalk, and she puts her arm deeper and deeper and I briefly wonder about what happened to that infrastructure revitalization. She fishes around down there, and her hand comes back up the color of shit, and she looks like she’s going to break in half, so I give her a few bucks out of my wallet. Don’t like watching strangers cry.

            On the way back to my place, we stop in a little old diner, the sign half smothered, even as the walls are still chrome and the lights inside seem warm and friendly, calling to me out of some place in my past I feel very deeply but, for some reason, can’t quite lay my eyes on. Our waitress recognizes us and smiles (it must have been Danielle - I don’t think I ever went to the diner with Harv) and we both order our usual. It’s quiet. A guy in an expensive suit sits at the counter eating a hamburger and sipping a coke. A homeless man sits in a booth in the corner with his dog under the table. Illegal, of course, but the owner doesn’t really care. Decent enough sort of guy.

Outside it begins to rain, hard, and the dirt and smog choking the city begin to run in long streaks. Headlights flash past, searching, and occasionally the harsh yellow of a taxi is caught up in a splash of water and a weird miasma of street light and fog, pulling shadows like teeth. Down the block a neon advertisement warns of coming judgment and promises God in the colors of a strip club or bowling alley.

            I believed in God for a full five minutes once. But then my roommate interrupted me and I never believed in God again. Maybe I should go see what the sign is talking about. Maybe my God is neon.

            A woman walks by outside the window in a long red dress, stuck to her legs by the rain, her protracted auburn hair twisted like a rat’s tail about her face, her eyes scarlet. The chef sees this from behind the counter and she runs out with an umbrella. The woman turns to her and they exchange the briefest bursts of smiles, like flashbulbs on a bloody street, and this smallest gesture gives me this unbearable feeling of warmth somewhere deep inside me. Then the chef runs back in, and now her short blonde hair is stuck to her too, but she’s smiling a little bit. Our waitress smiles at her. I smile at Danielle. Danielle is looking at her food and didn’t see any of it.

            One afternoon in December I remember walking along the river, in a light like the whole world had collectively just dropped, air the sound of standing under a power line, light the smell of a dingy place thrown away in a back pocket of the world. And I remember watching them pull a body out of the water, and I remember looking at her face, crystalline and porous at once, socked in tight by months disappeared in amongst mud and reeds and old bicycles and human waste, a pallor of fresh fallen snow, her hands shriveled up like an old woman, balled into collapsing fists, and spiderwebs of something grown up her arms like frost on a window in the midst of a dead winter. She was beautiful once. Scared once. Alone once. In love once. High once, more than once. Always high more than once, if they pull them out of the river.

Why is it always raining in this city? And in the rain why do the streets expel big deep breaths of noxious steam that makes every woman look beautiful and every man look dangerous?

I held her, our bodies naked against each other like we were some trickling of stars out amongst the darkest edges of our universe, far enough out that time itself begins to dilate, and we were turning into one grand consciousness, and in some deeply weird and Cronenbergian way our flesh was fusing into one, the little patch of warmth and light on a dark night, and I didn’t feel alone. Then she left and I never saw her again.

But hey, so it goes, right?

As we walk out of the diner, Danielle turns her eyes up to me and I notice a little fleck of something gold in them, a raft lost at sea, storm clouds mounting on the horizon, sleepless. She tells me she doesn’t think she really wants to get high today, not with whatever we scored. I tell her sure and she says she has to go and I say okay. I watch her walk away down the street, men and women with heavy coats tied up about their shoulders and cheeks and walking in these little zagging running steps. The rain is coming down harder. I brush a drop out of my eye, as, all around me, the rain turns to tears.

But hey, so it goes, right?

In the windows of a skyscraper, I see streetlights reflect like memories out of time, pieces of a broken mirror, old cocaine, flesh occasionally casting up like spotlights, and her saying... but the windows of skyscrapers and the rain and the streetlights and an old man totters down the road, swaying like a kid coming out of a cheap nightclub (at the thought I feel something ancient welling up in me), a space forming around him, an airbag against his scent. I catch a glance of it and I stand transported, reminded of someone I once knew. The old man smiles at me toothless and upside down.

I remember playing in the surf at night, running just for the sake of it, the stars drowning in the sea, the E just kicking in, Harv taking off all his clothes and throwing them into the water, and us just looking at him and laughing. Later we will make a campfire and sit around it, Harv’s clothes long gone, the rest of us trying to dry off, huddled close, me holding her, him holding him, us all forging together, drifting into one great organism, cleaving a path into time, rushing for the future. Three of us OD’d in the next year. Then I left her on some great stretch of brilliance learned into me on shrooms. Harv’s still around, somewhere, at least until he’s the next body dredged up face crystalline.

Eventually I make it back to my apartment building, push open the front door, look down a stretched corridor, half the bulbs burned out, looking down dead over spattered concrete, freckled walls, doors of wood scarred like my first lover’s wrists. I remember kissing her scars like roses.

I wander in a daze up the stairs, pushing aside used needles with my feet, don’t like the sound they make when you step on them, blocking my nose against the smell of decay, as though the meat of the walls is coming apart slowly, some alien disease blowing out the cells all cancer like.

            When I reach my door I unlock it quickly and open it slowly, looking around for someone I forgot was crashing who is now sketching out. It’s happened far more often than I care to admit. This time rather than a half naked junkie running through the just-open door, out slips a cat like steam.. I briefly consider where it came from, but decide I don’t care. I step inside, still bracing slightly for someone left behind.

            A few years ago a friend whose name I’ve forgotten OD’d on my couch when I was out. When I got back and found him there, I dragged him out into the hallway for a neighbor to find. Ms. Bradise, I’m still very sorry you had to find Jimmy dead, nude, and rat eaten on the landing at 1am. I still also have no idea how he possibly could have gotten there.

            His veins looked like balloons three days after a party.

            His eyes claimed a rightful place on the mantlepiece of my soul, next to dead lovers and lovers best to think of as dead, my father burning alive in a car crash as all I could do was scream, and my sitting on a frozen lakeside in snow four inches thick, more coming down, my breaths showing like pubic hair, pondering the potentiality of my return to that party with the coke coming out and the girl I thought I loved about to leave with another guy and I think somehow that was my turning point in life, the last time I could have maybe been okay, if I’d just made my decisions differently, if I’d just followed the edge of the lake to the road, even as the snow grew thicker, and the road south, away from the city, find the little hamlet I remember spending Christmas in before my dad died, and maybe opening a little bookshop there with what was left of my inheritance, and going sober (just booze then, but, you know, that’s how it starts) and maybe just living. But instead I went back into the party and she indeed left with the guy and I took some E, then I snorted some coke for the first time and not long after I’d drop acid for the first time and the rest, is, as they say, history.

            My apartment is the city in synecdoche, a pastiche of the ugly and the beautiful, scar tissue worn on the face of an angel of marble. As soon as I’m through the door, I step on a used needle and swear. House guests, god knows whent. I wander about my apartment kind of floating, peering about for further signs of half life, smelling hard for urine (best way to get kicked out of my apartment - pee on my furniture). I step into the bathroom and turn on the light, which glows a dull hospital green. In the mirror I see my face. In my face I don’t see me.

Once I’m certain that the only forgotten house guest was feline, I collapse onto my couch, the stuffing oozing out like blood, mottled stains actually blood, and I feel a lump under the cushions, reach down to extricate it, and come back with a pair of clean, white, mens underwear. I throw them across the room vaguely in the direction of the trash. Then I take the plastic bag from my pocket. Then I look at the two tabs and consider the infinite potentiality of the unknown. Then I remember how scared I was the first time I took LSD. Then I briefly consider dosage, decide I don’t care, and put both tabs on my tongue at once. This is, as an English junkie once told me, entirely not cricket.

            And then I wait. And nothing happens. You never really know how these things are going to come on - sometimes the walls start crying thirty minutes after the tab hits your tongue. Sometimes two hours later you find yourself thinking it’s a bust, and you find yourself all two dimensional and you forget which way is up, or, for that matter, the entire concept of gravity. Really can’t know.

            After four hours though, with no effects, it occurs to me I might be out $150.

            And that’s when this sensation rushes through my head, tidal and bodily and just a bit squishy. Not from the drug, that’s not what I mean. Something deeper, stranger, realer, if you think that way. A desire, a burning passionate desire to escape this couch, this apartment, this city. And then the counter reaction just as strong that this place will be my tomb. So I sit here like that for a stretch, my mind in this helical spiral. I really wish I could’ve gotten acid. None of the rest of this would have happened.

            And that’s when it occurs to me, the natural point my last half decade has been building up to, that the city has me decaying down to. And that’s when I text my guy. And I am reminded of a phrase that has stuck with me for years, something out of an old TV show - “liquor before beer, don’t do heroin.” I always loved its causal efficiency. And my guy gets back to me faster than any dealer ever should and we agree on our usual spot out on a bridge near the edge of an industrial estate.

            And then I walk out my door, locking it behind me. And then I cross the stretched corridor. And then I drift out into the street.

            It has begun to snow, and the city has gone dead, shop windows shuttered, pedestrians seemingly invisible, what few left clutching to themselves like lovers, long jackets brimming up in the wind, snow drawn about in plumeing whorls. I watch a bus run a red (it turned pink with snow built up - how long was I inside?), and I watch the travellers, eyes tired and bloodshot, like ghosts, the city forgetting itself, time running through a sieve, a man in an expensive suit slipping on a patch of ice and ending up sliding on one foot, his arms up above him, a ballerina going in for a pirouette, his attache case flying open and spewing papers about the street, they lost immediately to the snows. Then the businessman reaches the edge of the sidewalk and slides off into a snow bank, where he falls and lands with a shower of sparks the colour of ivory. After a moment he stands, laughing, covered in snow.

            I get into a cab - too far to walk, and I fall asleep for a bit.

            And then on that bridge, it cushioned from the world in the snow, the river itself now frozen too, we exchange what needs to be exchanged, and my guy asks me if I’m sure, and I say, yeah, I am.

            And then the rest doesn’t really matter much. Heroin is heroin, a junkie is a junkie, we’ve all seen the movies. And then a few years down, a friend casts me out naked on his stairwell. And some old lady finds my corpse. And the cop looks at my broken body without pity, just a dull pang for someone he lost once. And the coroner says it was a shame.

            And that’s it.