On Existence

It's like a little dollop of snow. Or maybe it would be more accurate to call it salt or flour, but snow is a lot more pleasant to think about. A short line of beautiful snow that I inhale, that is cold for a moment before it burns inside of me, followed by the small line of blood from my nose. I wish it tasted like snow, or even sugar, to make the experience more pleasant. Maybe saying that is a bit wrong, isn't it? You're looking at me weird now that you know what I'm talking about. It's supposed to be pleasant once you ingest it, to fill you with unimaginable euphoria, to take you to another world away from this one, to make you forget all of your worries. I'm sure that's nice for all of you, whose drugs actually work for them.

It really gets me thinking---the reason my body acts the way it does---is there some kind of higher meaning? Some god having decided for me before I was born that I was never meant to find relief like this? Or even any relief at all? Existence is agony, I'm sure you're aware, that's why we're doing this. That's why we sit down and consume poison willingly, to hurt ourselves in a way that doesn't hurt for just a little while. I envy your ability to do that. I want that feeling so badly, you have no idea---

"Will you shut the fuck up already?"

Oh, I was saying that out loud, wasn't I?

The pale, gaunt face of a woman whose name I could not remember was staring at me with an incredulous look on her face. Her eyelid was twitching, almost unnoticeably, and I found myself staring at the little spasms beneath her skin instead of meeting her gaze. "If you're not gonna take a hit, pass it on already. No one's here to listen to your self pity bullshit." She rubbed her eye with a skeletal calloused finger, but that didn't stop it from twitching.

I smiled at her, something insincere and sardonic, and did as she said. I leaned over the glass pane with the torn and wrinkled dollar bill in my hand, and quickly snorted up a line. My eyes watered slightly, I handed her the roll, and she sighed, the tension leaving her shoulders. I observed her taking her own hit, then leaning back, handing off the bill to the man beside her.

"I get the withdrawals, though," I said numbly. "In spades."

After taking his hit, he laughed drunkenly. "You're fucking crazy, man. You don't get the high but you get the withdrawals? That's not..." he coughed, swallowing, "That's not real."

I swallowed as well, the aftertaste on my tongue. "I'm not hooked on your snow, but I'm hooked on smack, if that counts for anything."

No one said anything else. How could they? No one gave any less of a shit about anything I was saying. They were just here for the snow, then maybe they'd crash on any one of the filthy mattresses in this room. With a slow and deliberate movement, I rose to my feet, the sound of my knees cracking echoing in the air. An old, familiar ache flared up in my back as I turned away from the circle of crackheads gathered behind me. My gaze shifted toward the filthy windows overlooking the industrial street, providing a somber view of the desolate landscape below. Rain streaked the glass, smearing the lights of the city in the distance breaking through the darkness of night in this neighborhood. I was ready to die of asbestos one of these days---too much squatting in these old rotted buildings, but I was still alive, unfortunately. In better health than most people here.

I watched them get high, enjoying their euphoria inhaled off of a dirt-streaked mirror in an apartment building filled with those who'd already given up on any hope in reality, feeling myself forever grounded against the splintered wooden planks, watching people fly with wings I could never have. All I could do was think in circles about the absurdity of it all, how nothing ever brings me relief from the pain or feeling from the nothingness. Oh, the nothingness. The void, the apathy, the anhedonia, the empty endless pit that nothing can fill. Negative or positive, it never reaches me.

The others had taken all of the filthy mattresses for themselves, leaving me to curl up in the corner once again with an old pillow and a comforter. I never demanded much, anyway. Just a room where the roof wasn't leaking would always be enough for me. But it wasn't exactly easy to fall asleep. My body was still wide awake, itching to move, to walk around, my hands curling as though they were holding a pen. I would have preferred to be writing if I could, but the last time I had been jumped I jammed my pen into the thigh of one of those assholes, and he took it with him. A tattered notebook but no pen to write with, how about that for torture. Stuck with my own thoughts and no place to spill them, and I was sure the lady with the twitchy eye would beat me up first chance she got if I decided to ramble out loud again.

I got to sleep eventually, but I was sure I resembled a pathetic stray dog curled up on a single blanket, an insult I'd heard before, and by morning, that was the exact position I'd assumed. The gray morning light woke me first, illuminating the still sleeping bodies in the room, some of which moved slightly to cover their eyes with their jackets, to catch more of that evasive rest. But once I was awake, I wasn't interested in going back to sleep.

I crept around the motionless druggies and to the door, finding my way through the hallway and down the exit stairs. Rain was still coming down relentlessly, slipping through the old cracks in the concrete, sloshing in the gutters and forming oiled puddles around old sharps. I observed a wet crow on the power line shake its wet feathers out before releasing a raw caw, reverberating off the walls of the nearby buildings. I watched it mindlessly until it flew away, and that's when I noticed I was soaking wet and shivering.

I pulled my hood up and kicked one of the sharps along the sidewalk as I headed down the street. There was a time I tried to kill myself with the drugs that continued to deny me. I'd collected quite a bit of it from the various acquaintances I had, and I thought it might be enough to kill me. Crouched alone in an old warehouse, I first stuck myself with heroin, watching it disappear into my distended veins, then swallowed the pills in chunks, washing it down with heavy gulps of whiskey. Shrooms followed, then acid, then cocaine, molly, and some other substances I didn't have the names of. None of it hit me by the time I had consumed the whole stash. There was no gut-wrenching pain, no euphoria, no consciousness lost to the depths of poison, just an awful taste in my mouth from my shitty meal and the whiskey I washed it down with. So I couldn't overdose either. The gods of oblivion would sooner allow me to bask in the absurdity of life than allow me to seek the release of death. What was I then? Their sacrifice?

That might've been the most anger I'd ever felt in my life. I screamed and cried and laughed until I passed out from exhaustion, then woke up to my awful human flesh begging me for hydration and sustenance, and the stifling numbness that was familiar to me. There was nothing more I wanted than for all of it to be over. I guess it couldn't be. So be it.

I stopped following the sharp when I kicked it into the street, where it was subsequently crushed under a passing car. The rain had lightened up just slightly, though I was still wet and cold. My body continued to shake, and I was less sure it was because of the temperature and more sure it was because I hadn't had a fix of smack in a while now. Multiple days must've gone by without me noticing, and admittedly, it's always difficult to keep track of the days when you don't have a real schedule to adhere to. It was always squatting until the police found us, then repeating the cycle.

One of my supposed friends wanted to meet at the place he was staying, which was just another abandoned building, though admittedly, with fewer assholes. It was once a bar, a condemned sign hanging on the front door for what must've been five years at this point. As far as I could tell, the owner must've died before they could do whatever they wanted to do with it. The windows were covered with old sheets and the inside was lit with Christmas lights powered by a generator sitting outside. I knew Dex's friends well enough, they knew me well enough, but not well enough to call me by my real name. Not even he knew my real name.

I walked in through the back entrance as I always did, and Dex greeted me with his wide, cigarette-yellowed grin, and wrapped his arm around my narrow shoulders. "Hey there, Void! It's good to see you!"

I'd never introduced myself as Void ever, but people had been calling me by that nickname since high school, so it stuck, and I never cared enough to correct anyone. "That must be nice," I said.

He chuckled. "Come on, I got something new for you to try."

Dex usually offered me new stuff to try, that was just how our friendship worked. He thought I was weird (good weird, according to him), and enjoyed my company. Nothing he gave me ever worked, but it was something to do. I'd take it over nothing.

It was amusing to listen to observe the attention in the room turn to me as soon as I entered, Dex's friends declaring in obvious manner that I had arrived. They all found me interesting for the very notion that no drug in the world has ever done anything to me, but I thought there were far more interesting things than the miserable freak that I was.

He sat me down in a corner booth that was essentially his own bedroom, the table removed and cluttered with his belongings. In one of his drug boxes, he pulled out a small plastic baggie containing capsules, and written in smudged black sharpie on the side were the initials "F.M.". With a confident grin, he offered it to me. "Foxy Methoxy. Good for raves, but might be good for you too. You ever tried it before?"

I took the bag from his hands and inspected the visibly hastily put together capsules. "Not that I can recall. Does the name need to rhyme?"

Dex shrugged. "It's more fun to say that way. Not that I'd know the scientific name anyway." He reached for a bottle of water. "Here, you can---"

I swallowed the capsules dry before he could offer me any water. He looked at me with his comically bewildered face and laughed. Soon enough though, his smile began to fade. After minutes of no reaction from me, it was safe of him to assume that once again, I'd been failed by yet another substance.

"Nothing?" he asked, looking quite like a disappointed child.

I shrugged. "Nothing. Again." I rolled up my sleeve and scratched at the track marks littering my arms. "No effects, only the withdrawals."

Dex slumped back in his seat. "Well it's not like your body is unaware of the drugs. It knows you're taking something."

"It just doesn't have the courtesy of letting me feel the good part." I held out my hand to him. "I'll take that water anyway. I can't remember the last time I had any."

He handed it to me, and after I chugged the whole thing, I felt a little bit better. After a moment of silence, he decided to ask, "Have you thought about staying here with us? It might be better than running from place to place."

I shrugged, staring absently at the covered windows.

"I've seen the people you've been hanging around. You know a lot of them lace their shit, right?"

I shrugged again. "You know it doesn't matter."

Dex sighed. "Right. But anyway, I heard you got jumped. You'd be safer if you hung around here."

"I'll think about it."

He smiled at me again, something softer, more genuine. "While you're thinking about it, why don't you eat something? You're going to wither into dust at this rate."

Once again, I shrugged. "Sure."

_________________________________________________

It was in a motel room I managed to secure for the night. I opened the door to a prostitute I paid for her company. She wore a short black dress, tight around her thighs and waist, covered in sequins that shimmered in the dim lighting, her pockmarked scarred cleavage pushed up by a bra whose straps were visible across her collarbones. She wasn't stupid enough to not wear a coat, but it was still the impractical kind, just a furred collar with cheap leather.

"What do you want?" she asks. "You paid me to come here, so what do you want me to do?"

Every time this happens, I feel that I can never quite articulate what it is I want out of these encounters. "Sex, I guess," I managed.

The woman rolled her eyes. "But what kind?"

It was always the simplest kind. I pulled her over to the bed and slowly began undressing her, with a hesitation that made it seem to her like I was inexperienced. She went along with it without protest, taking the lead from there, assisting me in removing her bra and crawling over me, straddling my hips as she worked on removing my clothes. Her kiss was salty, coupled with the tastes of cigarettes and whiskey. Her tongue slipped between my dry lips, sucking and pulling at what really wasn't there.

Once I was fully undressed, the cold of the room fully hitting me for the first time, she pulled back to breathe for a moment. She took a long look over my body and cracked a smile. "Are you sick or something?" One of her long fingers drew across my prominent rib cage, over a recent bruise. "You look like you haven't eaten in years."

I sat up slightly, meeting her eyes. "Depends what you consider 'sick'."

She kissed me again, gripping my shoulders as she pushed her body closer against mine. It was always a strange sensation to have a stranger's body pressed up against me, her soft breasts squishing gently against my chest, her warm thighs wrapped tightly around me. I can imagine this would be a pleasurable sensation for anyone else, but for me, there was a thin layer of cold emptiness between myself and her, preventing me from fully indulging in these feelings. I could be inside her, and it still wouldn't be enough to reach me.

It took me a moment to realize she'd stopped moving, and when I looked at her, she had an unamused expression on her face. "You're not into this, are you?" When I didn't respond, she continued, "You're not even turned on. So what are we doing here?"

"Just looking for some escapism," I replied quietly. "But not tonight, I guess." I leaned back against the pillow, my eyes rolling up at the popcorn ceiling above us.

With a sigh, she rolled off of me and fished in her jacket for a half-empty pack of cigarettes. A short pause, then she offered me one. With an old scratched up lighter she lit each of ours simultaneously. She laid beside me and we smoked in silence for a few minutes, both of us watching the ceiling as though there were something to be watched. That slow burn of the smoke curling inside of my chest was all I could feel then, the rest of my body far away from me, like dead weight hanging off of a distant bridge.

"What's the point of even getting a prostitute if you know you're not in the mood?" she asked. I wasn't looking at her, but I could feel her looking at me.

"I'm never in the mood," I muttered. "But sometimes I can force myself to be." The ash fell from the end of the cigarette, hitting the bed sheets. "Sometimes it's just nice to have companionship."

She sighed, her exhale of smoke hitting me. "You're a fucking weirdo."

I nodded slowly. "I know."

I really never had any true interest in sex, and that disinterest remained even through the onset of puberty, watching classmates fall head over heels for one another as they started looking more like real adults. For myself, I'd never quite understood the appeal. But becoming an adult, and people were starting to get serious about relationships, I was starting to wonder just what I was missing out on. I experimented by myself, figuring out how masturbation was supposed to feel, and I'd never felt a physical sensation like a climax before. But it was fleeting, and I got no pleasure from the experience, just the sensation. A sensation was better than nothing at all. My body responded as it was designed to, but to no enjoyment of my own.

"Do you ever read Sartre?"

She sighed again. "What?"

"He wrote about the concept of 'bad faith'. The idea of self deception as a means to avoid the unpleasant truth. We're always aware of more than what we are, what we are not, and hold a paradoxical belief that we cannot be more than we are because of our self-imposed roles." I looked at the remnants of the cigarette sitting between my fingers and glanced over at her, where she was already staring intently at me with ash staining her chipped nail polish. "Maybe that's all we use sex for. These fleeting moments of pleasure for self-deception, so that we can pretend as though we do not dread our lives, our roles, that we can maybe be more than we are when we are already limiting ourselves, the idea of ascendance."

"You might be right," she muttered, her eyes half closed. "But you sound like a hippie. I didn't come here for a philosophy lesson."

"You came here to do your job, for money, you know..." I sat up. "Sorry."

A brief moment of silence, before she sat up beside me. "You're saying sorry? Ridiculous. You paid me, so it's not like you wasted my time. At least you made it worth it."

I met her gaze, and she was smiling a small, sweet smile. It was cute. "What's your name?" I asked.

"I usually tell my clients to call me Angel."

I shook my head. "No, what's your real name?"

Angel's smile became sardonic. "No, you're not special enough for me to tell you that. You're still a nutjob." She stubbed out her cigarette. "You'll have to pay me a couple hundred extra for that."

I shrugged. "So be it, then." I put out my cigarette in the same manner as her and laid my head back down. "You can leave now, if you want."

"Don't be silly. It's cold and dark outside." She laid her head beside mine. "I'll stay here for the night. I'll be out of here in the morning."

"Okay."

That somehow managed a chuckle out of Angel. "You're weird."

I nodded. "I know."

There was a time I tried to date women seriously. And women only, because despite my lack of emotional connection to women, I was even less connected to men. I thought that should mean I'm straight, and this was further backed by how I would sooner imagine my more enjoyable sex fantasies with women rather than men. Women tend to be more outwardly emotional, and emotional in a multifaceted sort of way. They will let you see their anger, sadness, happiness, fear, anxiety, embarrassment, freely. Men mostly are encouraged to show aggression, or at least, are expected to. I was never really either. So being around emotional women helped to offset the nothingness I was constantly burdened with through my life. It was a distraction. I could feel more things through her than I could through myself, which was always a recipe for disaster.

They noticed my lack of engagement once the honeymoon phase was over. A time when I stopped fake smiling, stopped being overly affectionate, when I stopped answering every text message or call immediately. There was no way for them to understand it other than the idea that I was no longer interested. That I didn't care. Or something worse.

These relationships were not entirely pointless to me, but I don't believe I ever felt true love. Those moments of affection felt fake to me once they faded away. I couldn't tell whether anything I said was out of love or out of a need to follow an expected script. I would do everything for her, probably more than she did for me, to overcompensate with the obvious lack of engagement. It was tangible proof I still loved her. There was no way for her to say that I didn't. Except, not everyone is satisfied with material gifts and favors, and it's probably one of the reasons I ended up with little to no money. She wanted to hear from me, "I love you", "You're beautiful", "I want to spend my whole life with you", but those things felt so unnatural coming off of my tongue, even if I thought them to be true. She wanted to cuddle, to kiss, to fuck with deep passion, and my body just felt like lead to me most of the time. She would lean on my shoulder, and I would find any reason to move. When she wanted sex, I would oblige, but my mind was always miles away.

This cycle repeated with each woman I dated. For the first few months, I could feed off her energy and return the affection, then it would gradually die out of me, and I was back to the same voided husk I always was. She would either be angry or disheartened. It was either an attack against me or she would blame herself. The more and more this happened, the more I started to realize just how similar everyone is. None of these women did anything I hadn't seen before. They were all like mannequins, puppets, robots preprogrammed to react to things in certain ways. Which is ironic, considering most people would consider me to be the robot, precisely because of my lack of reaction, because of my lack of emotion. Maybe that's true, but are they any less of one? Society preprograms us to react to certain situations in a number of different ways, but they're all expected. Nothingness is not expected, and even considered disconcerting.

So my girlfriends were scared of me. I think I would be considered just sad if I were a girl, but since I am a man expressing no emotion, I tend to be intimidating to people. Ironic, because I know how harmless I am. I'm sure anyone could just look at me and know how little of a threat I pose. I'm barely average height, and I've never been all that muscular. I'm not very confrontational in real life, and I would sooner remove myself from such a situation than engage, if I can help it. But to women, I was uncaring and cold, which was threatening to them.

Needless to say, I gave up on these attempts at real relationships. It was better for me, since they created an undue amount of stress that my mind couldn't handle, and it was better for any potential partners, for they could find someone who they could actually get real affection from. Without having to worry about girlfriends, I was given a sense of relief. I could be alone and only think about myself, without having to remember there was another person I was supposed to be sharing my life with. Friends were always less demanding than romantic partners. They could sit in the background, remain unbothered if you were gone for months, and reconnect like nothing happened, because nothing ever did happen. Worse would be a friend that somehow fell in love with me. I was never looking forward to that potentially happening.

I never really thought I had any other option than to get into a relationship. Ever since I was a child, it was implicit in me that we were all meant to grow up, get married, have children. I never objected. It wasn't until adolescence that I actually became consciously aware of the difference between myself and others, the difference between that expectation and how the real world actually worked. Maybe as a child, I sensed those little differences---my parents definitely did---but I didn't consciously acknowledge them. Children are wonderfully oblivious.

Relationships are not completely unimportant to me, but they certainly affect me differently than they do everyone else. Sometimes I am repulsed by them, sometimes I desire them. It's a strange contradictory existence. And I am in an even stranger limbo when I am actually involved with someone. So where am I supposed to be?

_________________________________________________

It was the little things. I knew I was different, but to what extent, I wasn't quite aware. When I was about six, my mother would take me to the park almost every day, hoping that I would make some new friends. Each one of those days, I would sit alone and play in the dirt or wood chips. Sometimes I would dig up worms for company instead. What the other kids were doing was always of no interest to me.

I would be sitting on the swings, staring absently at the wood chips beneath my small sneakers, and my mother would not have it. She strode over to me and knelt down, trying to meet my gaze. "Why don't you go and play with the other kids? There's a game of tag going on. I'm sure they would like to have you play with them."

I shook my head. "It's boring. I don't want to."

She sighed, a tired sigh, gentle but exasperated. "How do you know you don't like it if you won't try it? Come on, I'm sure you'll have fun."

I raised my head slightly, looking over at the children running in the grass, between the trees, in the late summer sun. Screaming and laughing and chasing each other like dogs. "I don't see the point," I muttered. "They're just running around."

"Well what about the slide? You could play in the jungle gym, the monkey bars, maybe?"

I shook my head again. "I don't feel like it."

Another sigh. "Well, alright then. We'll leave in about fifteen minutes, okay?" She patted my hair and stood up, brushing the dirt from her knees, before turning away, leaving me to my space. The sound of the other children persisted in my ears, almost mocking me for not being able to enjoy what they could enjoy. Unable to understand the draw towards the simple, mindless activity.

My seventh birthday party stood out in particular amongst the plethora of memories from my childhood years. A number of children were there, all of which were children from my class that my mother insisted I hand out invites to, after seeing how we somewhat got along. The children were mostly friends with one another, at least, and they mostly saw my party as an opportunity to hang out. None of them were the slightest interested in my party specifically. I could see it in the looks on their faces when I handed them the invitations, looking at me like I was crazy for thinking they'd want to come. I never blamed them.

One of the children was a girl who openly had a crush on me; her name was Jenna, though everyone called her Jenny. A cute cheerful girl with long brown hair who wore a different pink skirt almost every day. I don't know why she was ever interested in me to begin with---one day she just decided to sit next to me in class, at lunch, follow me around during recess and through the hallways. She spoke to me all the time, despite how little I'd respond. I did everything I could to try and figure out why she was infatuated with me, but to no avail. This persisted throughout my life: me never understanding why people ever had an interest in me.

On this day, my mother had gotten me a vanilla cake. She knew I preferred vanilla, and encouraged me to try new flavors, but I had little interest in suggesting any others. For the other kids, she got a chocolate one, knowing they would all be disappointed in my choice of vanilla.

Seven crooked candles stuck out of white frosting of the small cake that was just for me. The children and their parents sang happy birthday all around me while I stared blankly into the flickering flames, dissociating out of reality, their voices turning to mush around me. This was how it felt most of the time---the world around me being a faraway, distant melting pot of sounds, sensations and images. My mother drew me back into my body by placing a hand on my shoulder and leaning close.

"Blow out the candles, sweetheart. Make sure to make a wish."

I looked at her, looked at my candles, and blew out the candles, watching them disappear in thin wisps of smoke.

Jenny leaned close to me with a wide smile. "What did you wish for?"

I looked at her and offered a small smile in return. "I can't tell you, or else it won't come true."

She giggled. "No fair! I want to know!"

I forced a laugh.

The truth was, I hadn't wished for anything. There wasn't one real thing I could think to wish for, whether hopeful or tangible. I hadn't one real feasible desire that I could think to wish for. Of course that changed as I grew older, but only for the worse. Once it was explicitly clear to me that I could not feel true pleasure, the only thing I ever wanted was to live no longer.

There were times I'd wonder what happened to Jenna after her family moved away, the kind of person she became, whether she remembered me at all. I never thought of myself as particularly memorable, but still, I wondered. I couldn't stop myself from wondering. She was such a cheerful girl---did she stay that way? Was she even truly cheerful? She could've had something going on that made her fake such happiness, such expression, so maybe I didn't even know the true her. But unless I ever ran into her, I'd never know for sure.

The first time I tried recreational drugs was when I was fourteen. My mother was very pushy about getting me to hang out with friends, so I found myself pathetically asking the group I was working with in chemistry if they wanted to hang out. There we were, the four of us, sitting in the basement of Jake's house while his family wasn't home, and him rolling a blunt with a clear lack of skill. He managed to keep it from falling apart, lit it up, and took a puff.

After a slow exhale, he sighed with relaxation. "Just like that. Why don't you give it a try?" He passed it to Chloe, who plucked it from his hand as if it were a revolting piece of trash. She stared at him, then at the blunt, before tentatively setting it against her lips and inhaling deeply.

Chloe broke out into a fit of coughing, her eyes watering. "Christ, I don't know how you do that." She handed it off to Cillian. "No thanks."

Cillian said nothing, took a puff, and handed it to me. I examined the blunt, pretending to hesitate, and cautiously imitated the way they had been doing it. I took one slow inhale, held it for a moment, and sighed before passing it back to Jake. We kept passing it, and I observed how the others' mannerisms changed the deeper they fell into it, and I was wondering if I was supposed to be feeling anything, or maybe it was just supposed to taste good?

Jake, eyes red and almost out of it, nudged me in the shoulder. "How are you feeling?" He had a lopsided grin on his face, looking at me with some sort of forced pride.

I shrugged. "Alright, I guess. I don't really feel any different."

A look of confusion mixed with disappointment crossed his face. "Maybe you didn't take enough. Try another hit." He handed the joint to me, and without objection, I did as he said. I held my breath for longer this time, feeling that burn inside of my chest, before slowly exhaling. Nothing changed. I kept smoking marijuana with them, to no effect. They looked at me strangely, disappointed and bewildered at my lack of reaction, but none of them dared to ask any questions. Not that I'd have any answers, anyway.

The cycle continued when I was fifteen. With some boys at summer camp who'd smuggled alcohol into camp, we went outside behind our cabin at night and drank the bottles entirely. I was completely sober, watching them all become drunk idiots. There was less confusion then, and more frustration. They were bored of me and stopped offering me any drinks when they realized it wasn't doing anything for me. This reaction I barely understood, and the confusion was not helped when they continued to shun me for the rest of camp. Maybe they were frustrated that some of their stash was wasted on me, but it's not like that's what had been demonstrated to me.

Sixteen now, I found more kids who were into drugs and invited myself to their parties. Not like they minded that I was there, I was nothing more than a ghost. They were experimenting with pills at their junkyard parties, xanax, adderall, whatever they could get their hands on. I was sure that one of the hosts of the party was getting them from prescriptions and had stockpiled them for months. So I took pills, to no avail. It was darkly comedic to them, who were enjoying riding their high with no worries in the world.

"Dude, you're like a fucking robot, man," one of the guys said at one of these many parties, the name of whom I have no recollection. "Does nothing work on you?"

I simply shook my head. There was nothing to say, nothing to explain. I didn't know any better than anyone else why I was the way I was. It didn't take long for me to try almost everything "mainstream", LSD, ecstasy, heroin, and none of it gave me anything. Those so-called friends who were around me most often compared me to a black hole. Everything entering me disappeared into an empty void with no trace it was ever there. It was a joke at first, before it became a maddening truth. "Void" was my name. They were frustrated with my inability to truly join them in their experiences, and kept offering me things, hoping that it would break through whatever steel barrier was inside of me. Sometimes I'd hope the same.

None of this excluded typical prescription medications or flu remedies or whatever else a doctor would give you to help you get over a sickness. I played outside in the backyard frequently as a child, and I was not immune to catching the occasional cold or flu. There were times I would lay in bed staring hopelessly at the ceiling, feeling as though I was going to die. My mother would cook warm soup for me, give me every remedy she could think of, even calling my doctor for advice. Every medication she gave me seemingly disappeared as soon as I swallowed it. None of it eased my symptoms, the pain, or the fever. I just had to suffer and wait as my body fought off the infection on its own.

What made it worse is when I was diagnosed with chronic migraines at twelve. I was prescribed preventative medication that I took regularly, and on top of painkillers that I would take at the onset of the headache, none of it eased the agony. Every time it would feel as though there were sharp knives digging into my skull, little slivers of light would make it worse, and I would be awoken at night by the pain. The nausea and vomiting from these experiences were likely one of the reasons for my very slight frame. The migraines had their own schedule, and would always undo any of my attempts to take care of myself. No painkillers and no prescriptions could ever do anything for me. No better than street drugs.

_________________________________________________

"Dex, what's going on with him?"

I was curled up on the floor, in a sleeping bag Dex had offered me. I agreed to stay with him and his little troupe for a while, for I had nothing better to do. I gripped my head tightly, my fingers digging into my scalp as a migraine attacked me without mercy. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't move, I couldn't open my eyes without the light making the pain worse.

"He gets migraines," Dex answered. His footsteps approached me before he set down a bottle of ibuprofen and a glass of water beside me. He said quietly, "It might not work, but it's better than nothing."

I cracked my eyes open slightly, flinching at the onslaught of stimuli entering my vision, and hastily opened the bottle of painkillers. Dex watched me wordlessly as I dumped half the bottle into my hand and swallowed all of it, chugging the water. With the glass empty, I slumped back down onto the ground, burying my face in the pillow. None of it would help, but nothing was stopping me from trying at any chance I could get. What other choice did I have?

Juno was the one who'd asked the question, a blue-haired girl that was also hooked on heroin, and I'd previously spent time with. She walked over to me, sitting beside Dex. "So not even normal medicine works?"

"No," I managed. I took in a deep breath and sighed. After a brief peek at the two of them next to me, I said, "What do you hope to do by sitting there?"

"Just in case you need anything," Dex answered. "It wouldn't be very helpful to leave you here alone."

I didn't respond for a few moments, burying my head deeper into my pillow. "I don't even understand why you keep me around at all," I murmured. "You have more interesting people to spend your time with."

There was a physical silence between myself and Dex. It was clear to me he was processing his answer, albeit very slowly. It wasn't the first time I thought something like this, with the amount of times someone would actively seek out my company, but it was the first time I'd said it out loud to Dex. And after that moment of silence had passed, he answered, "You must be stupid or something to not think of yourself as interesting. You're like no one else I've ever met."

I didn't dare argue, but nothing about me ever felt particularly remarkable. It was the nothingness they were all drawn to---hoping they could find something inside, something they could rationalize and understand, but they never would. They cannot conceptualize the very notion that there really is nothing beneath the surface. They would never be able to truly understand. There is nothing remarkable about me, because there is no real me. I can pretend to be just like everyone else for as long as I can, but that void always cracks through eventually. Able to see those fake porcelain masks, to see the true lack of interest, the true apathy, no one wants anything to do with that. When the mystery isn't so easily romanticized, they no longer desire it.

I sighed. "If you say so."

The universe is undeniably cruel. We as humans have obtained a level of self-consciousness other creatures generally don't have. We are painfully aware of our existence, our bodies, our minds, our ability to think and make decisions. We're not beholden to primal instincts and the mindless need to reproduce and hunt and ensure our offspring survives to become the next generation. And there is free will. We can choose to do anything, create anything, be whatever we want, but we have created a society in which the majority of its population is miserable.

I would guess that the idea of being beholden to nothing but primal instincts and mindlessly hunting is horrifying to most. But that's only because we have lived a life without that. Animals, as they are, as we think of them as more primitive, have never known anything different. They have no reason to question their lives or their existence. What is the point? They have lives to live, offspring to care for, and self preservation to care about. I'd argue that existence is more freeing than the supposed free will we have. If you are not subjected to the horrors of having to comprehend your own existence, you can be eternally happy.

Some people live by these other instincts we've created, so maybe they don't have to process their existence in the way I do. They have some layer of self-awareness, maybe by beauty standards or self-identification or something as simple as the ability to recognize your own reflection, but how many people have any reason to think any further about their own existence? They have to work to survive in this world we've created, with new expectations, new survival instincts, new traumas entirely unlike those of the natural world. All of this free will, and we just further trapped ourselves. Living lives over and over with cycles of hurt and betrayal and trauma and pain in a way only we invented. How many times do you see animals building emotional connections only to betray them? Tell me how much more cruel that is than being mauled in a forest.

Of course, I don't really have any reason to care about this either. It's my only excuse to not think about the pain, I guess. When the world does not offer you the ability to enjoy things around you, can only offer you pain and indifference, it gives you space to contemplate why.

But really, all I could wonder was why Dex and Juno spent the entire night with me while I was curled up in pain.