Everything could just disappear.

3:59am.

It's so early, but something is eating at me from the inside. It's been going on for a little while, but every here and there the indifference parts like a curtain, and the cast of characters inside me just stand there and blankly stare out, naked and unable, effortlessly apparently vague and questionless, limitless but without depth. Until the inevitable time where everything closes again and it dawns on me that bottling it up feels a whole lot better.

It used to be that I just didn't feel I had honest human blood in me; that somewhere inside my veins coursed the lineage of something distinctly inhuman. Kids, right? What a silly lot. Somewhere along the line that turned into a faded portrait of just some regular guy who didn't care. And people will say it's harder to frown than to smile, but motor responses are more dignified than to lay everything out on the line because you think you're smart enough to know the difference between the way most people in your neighborhood seem to be growing up, and the basic reality of grasp of concept. Especially if you don't have anything in life to lose, what's more indignant than posing as somebody who gets it? If I were to present a perfect case of very purely bland basic facts: No friends? Dumb job? No desire? Not even any expectations anymore? That composes a smile way more honest than the one you get when you give somebody a birthday gift, because a smile that means nothing means more than one that does.

So for a time I coasted along. So empty of anything moderately meaningful that you'd have counted me among the happiest people you'd have known. After all, it's easier to smile than to frown, if you listen along with those people who tell you stuff but don't know what they're talking about because they have husbands, wives and children they got saddled with too young in life to take it back and so really they're just kind of projecting.

So I coasted along. I got a car. I bought a couple CDs and listened to them at night in my car alone.

Then there came the years of trying to understand and reach back. But empty sand buckets are only so reminiscent of the vast beach it once tried to contain, and eventually that beach isn't so magical anymore, so you lose interest. I tend to fade away and just let the tide carry me further and further, against its own tide, into something less like the open sea and more like some front hall closet full of dusty jackets that only get taken out once a year.

Thank Christ that your twenties are just a constantly overlapping perspective of things, otherwise I'd have been stuck thinking like I did, in all those coils of interchanging lack of belief systems. It's not fun just coasting along unless you like it. I bet if you're rich, that you like it. Not to break the subject, but I bet if you're rich, it has to be pretty fun.

But.

At some point I grew a little faith, I think. And it was not faith in miracles, or in humanity, or in opportunity, or in passion or people or anything like that. Far from it, in fact, as it was a faith in nothing. Very literally, I grew to adore nothing. There is something in absence that can be felt more profoundly than love from another person. It wipes away desire, it takes the tenseness and worms out of the belly, until sickness simply doesn't exist anymore. Ailment may humble you, but sickness is just a frame of mind. And it doesn't have to exist in some respects. A sane man can eradicate sickness. A pair of crutches is no match for something eddying inside your head that'll give your nerves repeated punch-ups until the dawn of your death.

Lately I think I've lost faith in nothingness. I see myself in the mirror more than I used to. It used to be that I'd button my shirt up and comb my hair and be nondescript and presentable. Now, I start to see that there's an actual body in the mirror that does exist. I can't feel more lonely than that, really. Just being there to see me back and not having faith enough in nothing to understand that it's just a reflection. But it's not just a reflection. I've clocked into work enough times now to know it's not just a reflection -- there really is this walking person that does the things I do, and who resents doing it. I resent saying Yes when someone asks me a question. I resent saying No if I don't want to answer. Not because it means anything, but because I'm just plain tired of myself. Of hearing my voice, of being part of a conversation, of being around. I'm coming up with a shyness lately that's so thick I feel like it's smothering me. Getting stuck having to rely on your motor responses to get you through is like a sort of idiot prison. Feeling on the bottom of humanity's floor is a weight off one's shoulders, but you feel the pressure of all those strides and jaunts across your person, surely, as life just carries you on, and on, and on, until you're so riddled with disease and infirmity that you beg to be let back into that emotional prison and feel those ambitious others just rolling right the hell over you. Maybe that'll happen to me.



It's just stupid and lonely seeing yourself in a mirror and finally realizing you're really there when all your life it didn't quite seem like that and you'd already learned to live with it. So you have to learn to not exist within the you that does exist, regardless of how grudgingly that may be. I shouldn't be surprised that I have to do this over and over again. I blame it on faith.

When I dream, I don't exist. I am curled up on the floor and frowned upon, or being chased, hunted or pushed out. When I dream I don't exist, I am closer to me than I am when I am awake.



A blessing fell over me when I discovered the therapy of photography. That beautiful [silent] world of structures and hope and being. Something exists within that quiet frame, something that above all, I want. I'll always feel indebted to the guy who invented the camera. It's a world in eight days, or seven, or how many days or other it took to make this one. It's one of those.

There's nobody home when you talk to me, just so you know. I don't mind it, but I wish I didn't understand it so well. The things you do don't matter, I tell myself, and I believe myself. I believe in myself.

Yours truly,
JARET.