It started when I was fourteen at eight in the morning with two hits of acid and ended twenty years later in a Hyundai Elantra with a fistful of Xanax and a bottle of Jim Beam. I’d spent months looking for the right tree to wrap the car around. Fear of having it not work was the biggest obstacle, and it didn’t work, and sometimes I’m grateful but sometimes I’m not.

 

Brain damage isn’t what I imagined it would be. I thought it meant slurred speech and a dead lip, drooling with a spastic arm. Turns out brain damage is discrete and mysterious, I forgot how to draw the letter R and now cigarettes smell like asphalt.

 

It used to be about fingerbanging in my town. It used to be about dryhumps and hot knives and cold sores in my town. Now I’m back and everything’s changed. Everything looks the same and everyone sounds the same. Accents are gone, everyone shares the same drone. Cars only come in five colors. All the shops are gone except dentists, drug stores, and barbers. People don’t jog anymore, they just run for their lives.

 

This was the beginning of a story about twins. Twin brothers who looked the same but acted much differently. This was true of Giancarlo and I, that we acted much differently. I guess honestly, we didn’t look anything alike.

 

Fuck that guy for being dead.

Fuck everyone for dying.

Fuck every dead person.

“What,” the boy asked, “fate do you ascribe to the living?”

“Kill them all,” God said.

 

Gian would’ve liked this writing, because he was corny. He was corny and he died in the most corny way. All of this writing now is ash, uneditable and unread. It floats around like papery cinders singed with red, weak but fierce seeming. I have nothing left to say I say, then listen to myself spout interminable noise, aloud and internally, an unceasing jet of bullshit and nonsense.

 

Bullshit and nonsense, in a British accent too! Watching Double Jeopardy and texting my mom about the fuckface who won and his gross facial tic.

 

My sympathetic nervous system is on fire. I feel totally calm, but I’m shot through with electrified fibers, my feet are numb, my ears ring, I sweat, I can’t eat. He didn’t do this, but it sure didn’t help. She used to be called Pamela, but now she’s just that bitch called Klonopin.

 

When I was eleven, I dreamt that I fucked Wayne Gretzky’s wife while he watched in the corner. This part is true. In the morning, it’s this:

 

Hello from the gutters of self which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine, and blood. Hello from the sewers of self which swallow up these delicacies when they are washed away by the sweeper trucks. Hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of self and from the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed on the dried blood of the dead that has settled into the cracks. Don’t think because you haven’t heard from me that I went to sleep. No, rather, I am still here. Like a spirit roaming the night. Thirsty, hungry, seldom stopping to rest: anxious to please Brad. I love my work. Now the void has been filled.