Flaw Salad

I used to write every day. Little vignettes. I saw dappled sunlight dance across an unusually reflective surface, and I might type into a text box how my eyes were surprised to trace the line from leafy shadows to metallic umbrella to the rather stupid-looking fellow sporting a close-cropped haircut and athletic shorts underneath, how his visage looked too ordinary to be wielding such an unserious accessory, acknowledging perhaps the unfair demands of masculinity before ruminating further on the afternoon. I would send these missives to a haphazard collection of family, friends, and random acquaintances—that stranger who followed me into the museum in Johannesburg, for instance, which would have been a great story to tell because I would get to mention how white people don’t walk in “Joburg,” but I did, and bragging about that kind of thing is one of the pleasures of writing, as you can see. Comments and accolades would keep me going. A heart reaction from Mom. Praise from an aunt in another state. A like from a crush. Supportive comments from life’s cheerleaders. A happy world where words mattered, and I thought the threads in my head needed pulling and purging. People did listen. They did read. I had something to say before the thick shadow of shame wrapped its fat fingers around me and pulled me into its lair. I tumbled there, dying and being reborn, for years. I thought my ego died there. Maybe, in some ways, it did. Something survives, though, for these endless thoughts and worries and streams of useless notions to keep pouring forth. Whence? I could not say. Some cosmic river of consciousness, perhaps. I plug my little mind into Humanity and let it flow through me. I do not know what it is worth, the soup inside my head. I spoon it onto blank pages. I let it leak through my ears, out my eyes, into the speech I desperately hurl at my partner as she hurls her own back to me. We gulp and spew and gulp and spew. What is this wretched concoction, this mash of her history and mine pooled between us on the sofa, in that spot where the dog sometimes lies, this mountain of misunderstandings and common interests, the memories described and digested and regurgitated into a slurry? I knew once, what all these words meant, and there was magic in knowing. A code. A recipe. I could spin beauty and thread it through the corners of your own inner maze, and maybe it would refract a light someday and you would remember or not remember that I left that shimmer behind. You would remember or not remember a feeling. You would remember or not remember the friends we once were. Are we still friends? All this sharing and taking, all this damage and debris. What is a mind? What is this ceaseless loop, this consuming awareness, and how can I be free? Smoke and mirrors. I seek that which vanishes. Take me away. My dreams have been too vivid, and I cannot escape their grasp. I am in the long hallway now, and I did not study for the test. It will not matter when I wake, and would it change anything even in the conscious world? If I stood before the audience with a bare chest? A rabid nihilism screeches through the cacophony. I cannot behave or misbehave my way out of existence, out of the unrelenting scream. I can close my eyes and shut my ears, and I can do it for good. But I might wake up again, blank, innocent, still trapped. Another round. We invent Hell, I believe, for fear we already live it.