The Unbearable, Inescapable Terror of Everything

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 It was like a sucking depression filling up or opening up, like a wet velvet skein of fabric trimmings peeling off from his face, and Gregory was awake again inside a world he unwillingly accepted as real. There was an awful need to piss, and his dick and balls were glued to a soft pillow with ejaculate. He remained in the yellow, comfortable bed, as hazed blue light poured onto him from through the bedroom’s window – checked-over denim curtain - and just tried so hard to keep his grasp on the sleeper’s vacuous mind while it pulled away into the unreachable… but he had to get up and crawl across the broken glass and paper cups that were his floor and go into the bathroom where he could spray his clear urine into the filthy sink. So doing this, he looked at his reflection in the mirror and frowned.
 The air in the bathroom was cold, and separate from the rest of the apartment. A small, black fly landed on the mirror and crawled like a flicking cursor upon his reflected mouth, while Gregory frowned and watched the tiny fly as it strangely moved. It had watchers, a row of several more hidden in the rusted lips of the bathtub behind his knees. He examined himself for a moment longer before he remembered the warmth of his mattress and stepping out, closing the door, left the space of dark tiles. Now again in the dark, the other tiny flies emerged from their brown, gritted metal walls and flew out into a void of nothingness. Within the void of nothingness they spun and closed their wings and fell and rose up and flittered like just so tiny little black dots flittering about in the blackness. Nothing ever saw them doing it and Gregory got back in his bed.
 He had not been employed for eleven months and two weeks, after returning to the pest control technician job had grown impossible. Despite a violent effort with drugs and alcohols, and repeated admonishments of his own emotional weakness, the voices of the cockroaches could not be ignored. There had been enough money to live on at first but he saw it was draining, and the bills were becoming scarier to pay. He would flop like a mewling baby across the tits of depression and suckle on the gregarious negative emotion until slumber counted another day off his pointless life, and that was every day until he met Luna the moth. A sepulcher shroud of grays was draped over him – woodcuts: hanging at Black Mountain, runoff of the plague, the burial of the children, or here it is this carpet pulled over a pile of paper plates – and it cradled the darkness of a warm hate, directed as were his thoughts.
 So entering into a new day Gregory forced his eyes shut and screamed and screamed with his brain into his black cotton eyelids, but no sound came out, just heat and vibrations from his face. The fucking clock kept ticking and slicing off the non-existent seconds and none of it mattered. The sunlight pissed in on him and every time it did the blackness of nighttime went away and he wanted to kill it. The daytimes were getting warm and he preferred the cold, preferred Winter which was leaving. He thought the new Batman game was coming out that day so maybe he could buy it if he was able to ride the bus to the videogame store and get enough credit for his old stuff, and it would mean actually going outside that week. Also he was pretty sure he needed more soda. Suicide was the immediate option and he decided today is the day I’m just going to cut my wrists and lie in bed until I die, and he did lie in bed for another two hours but he didn’t kill himself and he did get up and go outside with his backpack in the sun and ride the bus with his shades on to the mall and trade in the games he wished he didn’t have to sell to the store for store credit, and he did buy the new Batman game. And he rode the bus home and pissed again and played the game until he wanted to sleep, and in black nothing sitting motionless were the flies.
 Until, lying there, safe, darkness, in his pillows and blankets, reaching over towards a dusty shelf right at his hand by the bed, taking up a lighter and taking up a thick candle, arching his back and twisting at the buttocks like a sexual tempter, Gregory burned the wick of a fool’s light, and the flies’ fragmented vision felt in heart a giving warmth, and they took off into emptiness to find it. The first ones came like whispers, like tears in sleep, and in the blackness of it Gregory was too lost to understand what the sounds meant. Sleep came over him again and he dreamed about a field of green grass, and a yellow tree with a girl in a dress in the shadows. As he snored his head rested at an angle on the pillow, and his mouth drooped open, and a fly who had no name entered Gregory’s mouth and found its death in there, and others sat on Gregory’s slowly falling and rising chest.
 The sunlight streamed in again the next morning, but he woke up because his phone was vibrating, fallen onto an empty bag of candy making a sound like a rattle snake. It took him a few moments to find it on the floor, to shift the blankets off from coiling around his feet so he could bend and pick it up. It was an automatic message, a reminder to buy more ringtones, and Gregory decided to turn the phone off and throw it against the wall. He put his blankets back the way they were and then began coughing horribly as a sudden awful roughness scratched his sensitive throat aching for moisture. He tripped getting out of bed and stumbled into the cold dark tiled bathroom where he ran the faucet and got a drink. As the water spilled into the film-encrusted steel sink and he scooped it into his hands, a squadron of black flies buzzed off from somewhere behind the mirror and disappeared into the untraceable paths of their chaotic maneuvering. Gregory didn’t notice them and he took his morning piss in the sink as well and then went out to the kitchen to decide if he wanted to try to eat.
 He was able to swallow some pancakes he got from his step-father’s house the week before, so he carried the plastic bag of them into the bedroom and lay back down. His family had been moving their eldest mother into a hospital to live, sorting out her belongings and old dust and metal home. Gregory cried searching through boxes of old photographs, seeing family of the old woman, her as a child, and his step-father growing up through the years. It made him think about the lines of blood between people, about how the people in the photos were loved and important, and how he slept most of the time and pissed in his sink and was alone. He showed the photos to his step-dad and was quiet the rest of the time spent there, and he took the pancakes she offered because his mom had made too many and she wanted to make sure he had food, and as he remembered this sitting on his bed and eating he was happy for a very brief second. Then he felt little hooks twitch at the itchy small hairs under his lower lip and Gregory spat and sat up and wiped his mouth and cursed his horrid existence. A fly had been crawling on his lips. He wiped crumbs from his blankets and noticed as he did this he also swept away the bodies of seven or eight small black flies that were lying dead all around him. He took the bag of food and dropped it onto the floor. The flies and crumbs and bag of pancakes all sat there together as Gregory remained motionless.
 The pain in his stomach was numbed for a time, so Gregory felt comfortable enough to scooch over and pull his computer table close to the bed. He pulled the chain to turn on his lamp, then picked up a tiny plastic container like an old film case, and flipped up the round lid, tapping out a measure of the contents over a glass bulb with a depression and attached stem. He took the lighter from the candle before and burned now this flame again inflaming the white salt and taking in its smoke, and he put down the pipe and stared at it until twenty minutes had passed, and he remembered to take some more. After another hit Gregory slumped in front of the glowing screen and looked at pictures of UFOs. Behind him the doorknob of the door out of his bedroom began to crawl down and onto the floor and up onto his shoulder, and it sat there and talked to him about how nice it was being a doorknob. It was better to be the doorknob of a bedroom door and not a bathroom door. They talked quietly so as not to offend the bathroom door and its doorknob. Soon the doors both came off their hinges but only in the area outside of colors. They grinned wickedly and pulled into each other, and left empty blank spaces, and Gregory closed his brain in those directions so nothing could reach through and scratch at the inside of his head. Then he came up out of sleep about twelve hours later. It was pitch black in his room.
 Gregory had to lie with his eyes closed in the comfortable bed for an entire hour before he could find enough energy to think. When he did begin to believe in reality again, he opened his eyes and took perspective. It was pitch black in his room. He felt dry inside, and was just a head at first. There was some difference to the feel of everything; he realized a power failure must have occurred because he could sense the absence of electricity, and then he felt pain from something biting at the cradle of his throat. It was eating him, drinking his blood. He shook himself violently away as an awful amount of spiderlike things sucked their thin straws back out of his neck and skittered off into the darkness. He shouted out loud NO and bent his chin down protectively over his exposed throat, but the things had run far away, and he caressed his neck and realized they hadn’t actually been there - hallucinated, just like everything else. He reached for the pull-chain of his lamp and then remembered the power was out, so he pulled the chain a few times on and off trying to remember if the light was on or off before he had passed out, and then in the darkness he felt Luna touching his face. Her fingers landed on his eyelashes and she laughed, and cooed, and flew off again, and his heart stopped beating. It was pitch black in his room, and he just sat there.
 And in the bathroom, the cold white solid walls. And the tub. Sink. The rust dripping down the steel pipes, like ancient one-celled lifes expanding their massive colony down into blackness, crawled over by thousands - thousands of tiny black flies. The flies took off and there was no light but they didn’t need it, because they could feel His love, in their hearts they could feel it, and they could see it in all that blackness like a warm, blue candle - just a glowing emanation of visible love, and they flew as one to it and spun and spun in whirls around His face and thought please kill me your humble creation O God, and in one nameless idiot spark burning out arcing fire the bold died and Gregory spat and spat and screamed FUCKING FLIES and swatted his hands in the air blind with anger. His wrist bones collided together at full swing and it crashed pain like both his arms had broken.
 Gregory cradled his hands under his weak chest and felt the beginning warmth stinging at his eyelids, and his cheekbones blushed as he began to just ever so lightly cry. Quickly his sinuses alleviated themselves of excess fluid, and a dripping of snot proceeded out of his throat by way of his nostril and dribbled onto his lip, so he sucked it back into itself to form a perfect loop of mucous continuing down through his mouth back up into his nose. It squiggled around for a second a complete thing, revolving through his face like a clown’s ribbons forever spewing from her pocket, and then he sucked it entirely down and swallowed it, and thought about what had happened. Who was that girl? Where had she come from? Shouldering his hands and bending tighter into a curl, Gregory felt his pelvis open up, and he thought about the moth and he forgot his wrists were hurting.
 It was just so shocking, to be touched in that way… but also, so relieving. He hadn’t been touched that way in a long time. He never expected to find that kind of feeling again, especially not at the hands of a moth, but love was crazy. Love was blind. It was pitch black in his room. A crimson river hadn’t flowed in some time, and it was painful when blood started again to drip into his heart. But he hopelessly lost himself in the fantasy of it, of learning her name and making eye contact and holding it, and smiling and seeing inside of her face. But how could he ever love a moth? How could he physically love her? And how could she love him, a pathetic waste of a man? He thought about what it felt like when her wings had flapped.
 Purple syrup curtains pulled in around his face, and Gregory breathed for the first time in forty-five seconds, and sighed. He reached over to the table and blindly, by feel, took up his pipe and hit it, bending it just slightly at an angle so as not to spill anything. He was careful in putting it back down, and then rested his head on his cold pillow, and as he flattened himself out his muscles ached for the strain of bending up so long. Red scars in mud, just rubber velvet stretched across this, like an image of bleeding cracked skin, and Gregory felt comfortable. And he kept his mouth shut just in case more flies came. And he reached down and pulled his blankets back over his body.
 The sweetest of dreams are dreams where upon waking you want to go back, and you don’t want to be awake or be you anymore; the dreams that are too good, and leaving are painful, into one of these then Gregory fell. A palatial glass and wood estate, in the snowy midnight mountain cold of a warm time, and gathered among all who are loving him, Greg is clothed in fabric and slipping through conversation like the focused attention of youth and sex, and you don’t need to look for it because all of these girls want to fuck you, but there are family here too and I need to talk to them and Grandpa has to get into the car now but watch out for the ice…………………… and there’s frost in your breath, and in your hair, and on the black glass of the car window. Penelope is here. Their room is dark, and lit only by candles, and most of the floor is a bed somehow; the air feels like blankets wrapped around your face, and you know you are moving but when you look at your body it remains perfectly still. Greg reached out with his telekinesis and moved the alarm clock over to his face, and clutched at it with his hand, but then he saw his hand had remained at his groin, and the alarm clock was still on the table by the pile of clothes, and the burning candles. Penelope came in with Derrick, and Derrick gave Greg a hug, and I felt perfectly okay with him in that moment, but then he left and I said goodbye through an inhale, and Penelope sat next to me and we made love with our eyes, and we held each other, and then Gregory woke up because his phone was ringing, making a horrible sound like a dentist drill, and the lights were on again and hurt his eyes badly and he closed them and did not move and let the phone ring and he forgot her name at that moment, but he remembered the mansion… and there was a forest. And someone was there… his family, and his brother he thought. The phone stopped ringing. The light from his lamp was white and blue and flickering like teeth through his eyelids. Gregory reached over and turned it off without looking. He fell asleep again but he never went back to that place.
 The next day Gregory spent at a lower sink of depression than normal because he couldn’t quite remember the face of the girl in his dream from the night before, but he was pretty sure he had been in love with her. Videogames and drugs just left him staring off into nothingness thinking about her and the two of them cuddling in bed, and how badly he wanted that to be real. He thought about a girl he had known named Natalie, and how he had pushed her away when she unexpectedly tried to hug him, and how he had always regretted that ever since High School, because he had really been in love with Natalie, and no other girl had come close since her. The afghan comforter on his bed was yellow, but he wished it to be red and within red walls. The image of this in his mind gave a vivid, but gradually obscured sensation of a room where important people lived, where were people who had other people. This was one thing Gregory wanted to experience again before he died: that feeling of being liked. The thought of it made him cry most of the day, and long for so many real and potentially real and wholly imagined people whom with he could have been friends and had sex. It was miserable and warm out and he had to run two separate fans to not be hot during the day. Winter was pretty much gone. He had always preferred Winter to the other seasons.
 It was during those warm days when he took the blades out from the sock kept by his bed – sharp razors fresh out of their package, he had tested them on his calves and upper arms and found them fitting for the job, if he ever was able to actually perform it – and sometimes everything he knew told him there was only this one way out and then he’d be free or nothing, neither mattered more than the other, as alternate to what he was preferred over anything in his value. Other times he imagined a better life, or a motivation, or a purpose outside of videogames and drugs, and he just left the sock folded up on the shelf, just there in case he needed to look at the blades again. Taking a shower or defecating made him feel better, or masturbating, so he did all three things… his shower head was broken and leaked so he had taken it off the wall, and showering involved letting the water spray uncomfortably out of the pipe onto his exposed body, standing and reaching and bending in strange ways and scrubbing most of the soap away with his fingertips; his toilet was also very clogged and dirty so he preferred to pass his waste into the tub and dissolve it by holding it under the running water in his hand before letting it flow down the drain; he jacked himself off so much that cumming was only minorly pleasant and felt like vomiting a small amount before spitting it out or swallowing it… but having done these things Gregory looked upon his spent fluid and considered the effort involved, depressed.
 She doesn’t love me, he thought. She just bumped into me, an accident. She’s probably laughing about it with the other moth girls. He would then have to feel sad about this thing, he realized. He was accustomed to feeling baseline depressed, and had learned to stay below the threshold of excitement, never suffering the fall back down. He had grown familiar with despair as it was all he knew. She might never come back, he told himself. It will be better not thinking about her now, just being the same as always without worrying about impressing her. The longing felt comfortable and familiar, and the blood in his heart cooled slowly over the course of the afternoon into the evening, and he considered a trip to the store for some bug spray to combat the increasing fly population, but settled into routine instead and welcomed the darkness of the moonlight. He could remember days when he was happy, and made blissful in the warmth of the sun, but he couldn’t remember why, now knowing so completely the embrace of darkness and ghosts.
 Shadows and bed sheets and cool air, and nothing outside and no people to think about walking around in the streets, and the glowing familiar unjudging screen on his desk, and the hissing breath of his fan and the tingle of something he remembered as imagination, and Gregory had several times seen the flickers of the flies crawl around the tits and round buttocks of his digital avatars, but in his heart he longed to see the thicker blackness of Luna again, who he had named Luna after Her, but he scolded himself each time, and continued to persist at believing in things. Still, his corrupted brain forced the ideal, and he found himself distracted from the videogame, thinking about her again, Luna, the girl he had met just briefly, and he closed the game and opened his internet browser and began researching moths, and the letters on the screen were blurred at times by the flies crawling over them, but Gregory hardly noticed as he learned. He searched for specifically ‘moth girl’ and found a fringe fetish cartoon about human-like insect girls in college, and he bookmarked it for later, guiltily. He sweated and he looked at videos of moths being born, and dying, and breaking out of their cocoons, and at last his heart beat irregular and his breath quickened as he took out his flashlight and clicked it on and left it on, and waited.
 Luna flitted through the beam of yellow light and made it all the grayer with her dusty float. Tears came to Gregory’s eyes and he held his breath and instantly turned off the computer. The flashlight batteries were dying, and the tiny bulb flickered on and off in the black room. Luna came to rest upon the gray plastic rod of it and stilled, bending her antennae, turning her body up and down against, casual and perfect. Gregory looked at her and could not speak or take air. Luna’s eyes were the stigma of a flower.
 He then in that moment felt heat inside himself he had not felt since accidentally touching the strap of Natalie’s bra, and his cock got hard in an instant, and he held Luna’s gaze. His testicles filled and rose into him, and he reached down to his pants and pulled them down to his shaft, letting the pulse out, his asshole tightened and his dick fighting. His entire being in that moment knew its reason. Luna came off the flashlight and landed on the head of his erection. Her hands were the brush of falling rain. A dam burst inside him and the semen hit the ceiling his orgasm was so powerful. Gregory collapsed backwards on the bed in the greatest moment of his life.
 This event was not known to the flies what crawled about on the ceiling, latched to it, nor those on the walls or flying through the air. To them, it had not happened. They wished only to be part of Him. While He lived, they would sacrifice upon Him their utmost; if He were to die, they would eat of His flesh and drink of His blood. Later some fed on the dried remnants of His cum in communion.
 Luna felt the surge of ejaculate and took off disappearing into the blackness, frightened and exhilarated. She thought of then caught and ate a fly, of which there were many.
 Gregory forgot everything, all the pain he always had in him, and just thought about her, in a cloud of pleasure and safety, for a long time, and drifted off in to sleeping, and it’s hard to describe right now or even think about how he had to wake up from that sleep, and be awake again, but eventually he had to wake up, and did so, and the sun was shining again. It never really stopped shining, but sometimes he didn’t have to see it.
 Gregory’s intravenous system in his face felt like drained dark-red tubes, and he couldn’t remember when he had last eaten. The pancakes in the bag were still there, but trying them he found them dry and tasteless, and he tossed them into a pile of garbage in the corner, and forgot about them. He got up to piss and the sink crawled over with black things. They hugged him and felt perfect there, and he let them do it as his cock drained, and then he stared into the sink and watched the syrupy piss drain into the sewer, and he felt light-headed, and the image of the sink doubled and twisted in his blurring vision, and he had to place his hand upon the mirror to steady his legs, and he crushed three black flies to death into the mirror with his palm without realizing it, and the flies knew their reason for existence in that hand for a very small amount of time before everything went away. Gregory felt a little bit more stable after a few minutes of standing there, and he washed off his face with water.
 That evening, the moon came out, and She was beautiful. Gregory was bent on the edge of his bed, in a fury of them, with enough chemicals in his blood to kill him if he moved too much, and Luna, attracted by the glowing monitor, landed on it, and looked at him. He looked back at her, and the electric glow passed through her body like a knife stabbing him in the intestines. In everything there is misery which the knowing does not make better, the understanding cannot release the pureness of this horror out of you, and inside you and each of us is a dark, horrible thing that yearns to be freed. He looked at her and in that moment of love and hatred and shame picked up and flicked the lighter over toward the screen and killed her. She actually was completely in love with him and had no idea what was coming or what was happening. She just felt unbearable pain all over her body for what felt like a long time, and she couldn’t do anything about it or stop it, and then the feeling that was herself, maybe always it had been like a flimsy paper cup, and it felt like the cup got crushed suddenly, and she felt herself crush with it, and then she couldn’t feel anything and was dead. He watched her body fall and land so gently and emptily onto the dirty tabletop, and he went to blow at her to blow her away, and his heart broke in half and spilled blood into his lungs and he stopped and he couldn’t do it. He started shaking, and his eyes streamed tears, and he blew her body away into the darkness and filth on the ground and he sucked back his air as soon as she was gone and he instantly regretted it and wanted her back and thought FUCK YOU I LOVED HER. He fell out of the bed onto his hands and knees and bent awkwardly under the table looking for Luna’s body but couldn’t find it. And he kept looking, picking through crumbs and hair and flies on the floor, until he just stared at all the little bits of things and forgot what he wanted. Then he curled up and cried with his eyes wide open staring at the carpet. He thought about the people in those old photos at his grandma’s house. They had been loved, people cared about them. They were all dead now. Luna was dead, she was dead, and he wanted to be dead too, and he didn’t care his family was going to be sad. People were always going to be sad. Eventually, they’d die.