At 3am...

I splash cold water onto my face, breathing deeply, and stare at myself in the mirror, taking three long breaths to get myself back under control.

I am alone in the house, I am not having a panic attack.

I’m not.

I do not have to worry, I’m just naturally panicked, I’m a little brittle and that’s okay. Lots of people are brittle some of the time, and with the year I’ve had it’s natural I’d have a weak moment now and again.

It’s okay to be a little brittle, so long as you don’t let it control you, so long as you don’t give in to panic. I splash more water and grip the sink with both hands, to steady my nerves.

I am in control of my nerves, you see, and brittle isn’t broken. I know there is no need to be afraid.

“I am alone in the house.” I tell myself in a whisper, staring at myself in the mirror, alone in the reflection I find.

“Yes,” comes a voice from behind me, “You are.”

The Me I've Made My Peace With

I am nothing.

A cipher.

An empty suit.

A thing of sound and fury, carefully calculated to signify nothing, calibrated to allow the viewer to read whatever he or she may want into me, without ever staking out any meaningful position of my own.

In this way I’m never held accountable.

In this way, I’m utterly forgotten the moment I step out of the room.

I try so desperately hard to be liked by everyone I might meet that I never manage to matter to anyone I might meet.

However much they might like me while I’m there.

And whilst this fact does kill me, I understand that it’s nobody’s fault but my own.

Because I am the captain of my ship, the master of my destiny, and if I’m too fucking cowardly to stand up and say “I’m real, I’m a real fucking person, and I matter too!” then who am I to complain when nobody knows it.

They never feel they need to know it, because I never bother to explain it properly to them.

I shouldn’t need to, if I’m a real person with real feelings to which attention must be paid, people should be able to figure it out on their own.

However, it’s nobody’s fault but mine that I deliberately cultivate an image wherein I’m no such person.

Because if every moment of my life, every action, every word, is an artfully designed construct, and every emotional beat I send out into the world, every feeling that I feel when I know that eyes are upon me, every joke and laugh, every moment of rage, yes, even my naked, hopeless, impotently furious moments of self-loathing, here upon the stage, are a put on, designed for the benefit of those who I know are watching, then it’s natural that they might think there’s nothing more to me than that.

An artful fiction, to be enjoyed and then safely forgotten.

Nothing more than a collection of witticisms and mannerisms, all gloss on the surface, surrounding a core that, at the end of the day, is found to be ultimately, inarguably empty.

But in spite of this, don’t worry. You’ll like me.

Because my greatest weakness is also my greatest strength.

And the fact that I am, on a fundamental level, incapable of connecting meaningfully with another human being means that, on the shallowest of levels, I connect with literally everyone.

And my desperate, pathetic need to be liked means that, in the short enough term, I am very likable.

And, at the end of the day, I’m so fucking fun at a bar that it would make you cry…

No Need to Worry

There’s nothing in my closet.

Nothing under the bed.

Nothing outside my window.

In fact, there is no window.

Everything outside of my most immediate frame of reference, that which extends beyond the nearest reach of my senses, has at some point vanished, and all that’s left is me, in my bed, covers pulled over my head.

On the other side of this quilt gapes empty void.

And when I close my eyes, I have no doubt the quilt will vanish too.

All my life I was afraid of what might be out there.

Now: There is nothing.

So… good?

You Can't Go Home Again

Everyone uses the expression, but nobody remembers where it came from. It passes between generations with nary a thought to its origin.

Nobody remembers those initial trading ships, returning to port only to find no port left to return to. Where once had been a mighty island city-state was nothing but endless ocean.

Nobody remembers their sorrow upon realizing their home was, somehow, gone from this earth, miles beneath the sea, or remembers their resolve not to let this break them as they set out to build new lives.

Nobody remembers, or everyone does.

After all, everyone uses their expression.

Weekly Prompt Story: Isolation

http://podcasting.isfullofcrap.com/2012/04/29/weekly-challenge-314-hotel/

Isolation

By Chris Munroe

Well since my baby left me, I found a new place to dwell.

I had to. She kept the house.

And the kids.

I see them every other weekend, but in between it’s just me, alone in the hotel I’m staying in until I find an apartment.

I should be looking for an apartment, but I feel like doing that makes it somehow more permanent.

This is permanent.

It’s my own fault, I know. One lapse in judgment and my life came tumbling down. I have nobody to blame but myself, but sometimes…

…I get so lonely I could die.

Early Riser

150 years into our journey, my hibernation pod malfunctioned, and I woke.

I attempted repairs, but didn‘t have the parts. So now I wander, I wait.

The view of the stars is magnificent, what I see no other human ever will, but what I watch most is you. Safe in your pod, asleep.

Who are you?

When you arrive I’ll be dead, there’s no food on this ship and even if there were, it’s a thousand years until you arrive at your destination.

I’m sad not to be joining you, but I wish you the best on your new world.

Creating the World

After years suspended in formless limbo, I feared I’d go mad. Some solitudes can’t be withstood.

So I created a world in my mind.

Fantasies of people, work, routine. I filled every moment with life, imagining each second as though I were living it. Moments of wonder, moments mundane, I created them all.

In time, I even forgot it was a game. Fantasy became reality, and solitude was forgotten. I was truly living in the world I’d created.

None of this is true, of course, it’s just a story I’ll post on the internet.

To the best of my knowledge.

Experiment 932

The isolation chamber was activated and the outside world began to vanish.

At the flip of a switch the lights went out and the whole world receded, leaving me floating, like a fly in amber, alone in the perfect silence.

The doctor’s at the project had had no idea when I began the treatments two years ago that my genetic predisposition toward psionics would become so overdeveloped. Every mind on earth is open to me now, and I know of no way to close myself from them.

They told me, when we began, that I would be a soldier, that through their enhancements my talents would allow me to serve my country. After all, with a mind reader on your side, no one in the world could keep secrets, we’d know all, and through that knowledge have an insurmountable advantage against our rivals. Tactics in battle, lies told at the negotiating table, locations of troop reserves, nothing could be hidden, I’d know the thoughts of the world.

The thoughts of a world are, however, useless to me. I don’t have any idea what a given person is thinking, it’s all lost in the cacophony. Close to seven billion voices all screaming at once, and I can’t make out the words to any specific one. And the over stimulation leaves me incapable of thought of my own.

So the project was suspended. Not only was my ability to read minds useless for the project’s purposes, but my life was constant, thoughtless agony. So they closed down the lab and transferred me to a private facility where I’d be “boxed” in a total sensory immersion isolation chamber, a prisoner in a coffin sized cell, unable to see another human face, or hear a voice, or sense a thought again for the rest of my, God willing, short life.

There in the darkness, I closed my eyes, at last free from the barrage of thoughts, and allowed myself to drift into the first peaceful sleep I’d had in months.