Death like the slow addition of more and more tiny weak hands to your throat until it works. And it works. Man, I’m telling you, it works.

Motivating yourself to leave your apartment by cupping hot water to your face and looking at yourself in the mirror and saying, ‘Don’t ever die.’

Broken glass lining the inside of your coffin for when you wake up and try to escape.

A skull full of flies such that they split open your skull.

Feeling like each moment doesn’t count once the next one happens.

Adapting to the wait.

A helium balloon with a dead bird taped to it.

The same with my severed head.

Forehead to forehead while fucking.

And no idea how others see you.

Your bones in a pile in the woods, like a deer but, you know, different.

A fly eating a tiny bit of your bone and immediately growing to the size of an airplane.

Reinstalling the tinfoil lining on your brain.

The same with your heart.

The law that you’ll hurt yourself the necessary and predestined amount if something else doesn’t.

Because it’s already done.

Worst when done through a painless and fake life.

Thoughts descended from something else unfinished.

Jumping off a building to kill someone below.

My corpse, placed lovingly up underneath a highway overpass on a bed of fast-food wrappers.

My severed head, punted high up into a tree.

Everything that happens, happening without favorites.

Given that I’m everyone’s favorite all the time.

Given that you’re next in line but I don’t ever die.

Beat to death with a gold brick. Revived with one kiss, blown from ten miles away.

A pit that appears and disappears below each step you take.

A million dead yous at the bottom of each pit.

Immortal but living on the moon with one foot chained to the ground.

No more acting.

Brickmaker in heaven, please kill all the actors.

Hopeful that, even after so much disappointment, one night your pillow will swallow your head.

Suicide by head-butting through a windshield then pulling off your head. Considering yourself a guest no matter where you go.

No matter what.

The turning point when the love and excitement in you become a little painful and violent.

The relief once it happens.

A weird but refreshing new standard where a positive interaction with someone leaves you thinking, ‘You’re you and I’m me and that’s pretty much it and I won’t think about it anymore.’

Internal people-screening device that almost always reads, ‘not on my team.’

Where true love is being afraid of someone because you’re entirely sure you’d let them kill you if they wanted—you’d let them do whatever they want.

Which is what you’ve always wanted.

Where someone’s laughter is an accurate sign of who they are.

Where someone’s eye contact signals how dead they are.

Where you and I meet there is no you anymore just a pile of pretty-smelling dust for me to throw in the air.

Living as an actor vaguely aware of a role in which you are comically dedicated to maintaining a version of yourself that is only an echo of what you think others think about you and even they are bullshit built of echoes.

And it sucks.

Man I’m telling you, it sucks.