Forty-Nine

Even back then, everybody understood immediately. Even people walking past him on the street couldn’t help but roll their eyes.

It was a profound understanding; it surpassed his own.

Fifty

Why write at all? Why not lay there, perfectly content, still, quiet, and alone in your bed, breathing through your mouth and staring at the patterns in the white paint on the ceiling?

Why not settle into languor? Why not toss a cape across your mind and let it rest? Why not draw your arm across your face and bore your gaze into the stupid darkness?

Far better to feel your bones gradually drifting apart, each one getting lost on its own in the night.

Far better to slide off both your socks half-way. The library of Babel—for all its glory—could never even offer you that brief, inconsequential satisfaction.

Far better to leak away, dribbling down the drain, lost in some private vice.

Far better to dull and deaden yourself, like a chisel that’s been driven too many times into the stone. Hold it in your palm and thumb the point; it can’t hurt anybody anymore.

But you could stay like this forever. So you will.