Rot.

He feared death so greatly. The only method he knew to beat back fear brought him closer to death.

Rot.

Trapped inside our own bodies. Which we also are. An empty box cannot be trapped within itself, but that is what humans are wired to believe. I am my body, yet harbor some illusion that I am not. I am inside of it. No you’re not. This is the only place I exist. It is a prison cell, and also the connecting circuit that brings me to life.

Escape is not a lock and key.

Escape is demolishing a wall.

Rot.

I’m losing words every day. I don’t want to leave, yet I hasten my retreat. This circuit is all I know. Will I plug in somewhere else? Will I need a power converter? Will an American soul circuit plug into a Greek power strip? This current hasn’t alternated one bit. I am dying. I am fading. I am shutting down. Directly.

Rot.

It doesn’t feel good. I think I used to feel better. But I don’t know. That thought also has faded. Some memories like a film of oil on a lake. Unsolid. A stain. Pollution on a blank canvas.

What were Dad’s final thoughts? He laid in bed with a floosy on his arm, whiskey in his belly, and opioids suffocating his brainstem. He felt so good, the chemicals told his brain he didn’t need to breathe anymore. His work was done. And then the oxycontin put a pillow over his medulla, just like he’d made me promise as a child to do to him, if he ever lost control of his faculties. We never got that far. Most 46 year olds don’t need to be “Put out of their misery”, but the old man was never one for popular opinions.

He crushed me so much by leaving that I immediately began building an express lane back to him. “Dad died by dulling the pain too much. Time to start dulling the pain too, I guess.”

“Daddy. Wait for me. I’m coming too.”

Another drop of poison to dull the edges. Eventually the edges advanced inward like pincers. Uh oh, what happened to the edge, how could I have known pouring acid on it for years would lead to this predictable result? Why does everything bad happen to me?

As I write this, my rabbit has shat on the floor. He has a litterbox, and he uses it. He also uses wherever the fuck he feels like. We’re both coping hard these days. He gobbles his dry turds up, to collect the undigested nutrients.

His instincts tell him to do that.

Mine tell me to drink.

Maybe the rabbit’s dad drank too. It would explain a lot.

Pah-lunk. Another drop of my mind, gone. Pah-lunk, dripping into the ocean. There goes a memory from 3rd grade. Pah-lunk. There goes any ability to recall the word “discombobulate”. Pah-lunk. There goes the memory of the actor’s name who played the villain in Scream. Pah-lunk.

You didn’t need it. All you need is this slow dissolving acid, eating you away, just as it’s done to your family for generations. Hear the alka-seltzer fizz of the ages, liquifying reason and humanity, of wives with black eyes, sons with belt marks, daughters fleeing into the night with the word “whore” chasing them out of their childhood home.

They followed their instincts. They drank to escape the fear, oftentimes becoming the fear themselves for others. They shat the floor and ate it.

Rot.