2024
When you’re on the wrong end of the universe’s wrath, days stop being days. They blend into a mess of hours, interchanging between awake and sleep, a steady loop where you try to build something meaningful while grieving what you’ve lost. Potential slips away, held back by whatever dread seems to fill you.
Dread isn’t constant, but it lingers. As time hoards your memories, dread connects the fragments with an existential glue—a substance that drains meaning, even from the best moments, rendering them hollow. The routine becomes stale, a wad of chewed-up gum, and its toughening isn’t just laborious; it’s numbing.
“You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to keep going,” my father sighs.
The living room is dark, thick with life lived to its fullest—and then some. It feels like a cave, a hovel for a beast who never leaves. To emerge would break the routine, an upheaval too radical for the life he’s settled into.
“In being a cult of personality, you’ve got big shoes to fill. ‘Possess’ is the right word for how your energy fills a room,” I say, hunched over the kitchen nook, nursing a cigarette and thinking too deeply about the damage I’m doing to my insides.