Creative Writing
The remorse was slurped by some satan out of my soul when I started high school. I haven’t had a proper cry, the kind that oozes catharsis and heartache, in two or three years. The tears are instead secreted through my pores in sweat because it is eighty degrees in Manhattan and my father doesn’t want to pay for the air conditioner. I sleep on top of my duvet curled like a shrimp in the sticky heat, dreaming of Hitler coming to get me. I also dream of a yellowed grape on a recliner who shares an uncanny resemblance to my grandfather, tinged like old wallpaper from the bile build up of a broken liver. Instead of feeling despair as he makes his funeral arrangements, I am scornful while his second wife’s children desperately trade kindness for a place in his will. Fury has permeated things even dearer to me than my grandfather. My brother won a stuffed blue frog for me at the amusement park over a decade ago. I named the toy “Froggy,” (children are fountains of creativity,) and labeled him my most prized possession. We celebrated his birthday with a sprinkled cupcake and I would cut him a piece as if he could eat. Froggy still sits front and center on my bed, a once coveted spot but now a vulnerable position exposed to destructive inclinations. He becomes a matted blue torn skin, stuffing strewn about when I rage. I can use varying names and justifications, but the truth is that if I feel I feel anger.
My limited disposition is a defense against everything sharp. It was not brought upon by some world-shattering event, it is basic logic: things which do not exist cannot be harmed. I see myself as a knight stuck in chainmail. Making breakfast, sweating as metal clangs against the stove. In the shower, ignoring inevitable rust. (Fun fact, rust itself isn’t dangerous; what grows inside is.) Over time, protection decays into something that only harms. To feel or not to feel is the paradox: inability to feel sorrow and heartbreak comes with immunity to infatuation and thrill as well.
I fantasize on the weekends, but not about a utopian frosting world or Finn Wheatman’s lips. Instead, I imagine the plunge and pull of a butcher's knife into the carotid, aorta, and ventricle of my sociopathy. Twisting the blade deeper into the flesh, I marvel at its insides strewn across white walls like an exploded can of spaghetti-o’s. (Remorseless thoughts cannot cure a desensitized girl, though.) I flip through movies on the living room television, praying that one might sob me dry. I witness prohibited romance and mourning and genocide and failure. Melting into my gray couch, feet clinging to the ottoman, I hold nothing but a blank stare. As the credits lull on, I suppose there is something wrong with me.
I also peruse old binders of my father’s CD’s on the weekends. With each flip of a quartet comes the sound of plastic peeling and plopping. I scold Dad for not keeping the album casings, perplexed by his obsessive compulsive need to discard every tangible item. His ideal home is so minimalistic guests feel uncomfortable. At least he has not fallen victim to the capitalist agenda, disregarding his surplus of discs. With one more peel and plop I am in his binder’s “G” section, which holds Green Day, Grateful Dead, and the only known remedy to acknowledge and soothe my appetite for destruction, Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction.
Appetite for Destruction untangles the meticulous wiring of my remorselessness. It forces me to feel like a jerk so that I can see the fault in my raging numbness. The tracks siphon disillusionment and fuel their own rebellion, one of frivolous excess and womanizing and half-assed efforts. The album doesn’t take itself seriously, so I don’t take myself seriously. It reminds me of the idiocy in not letting myself feel, it feeds me cynicism until I am bloated and heaving over the toilet bowl. Axl Rose's raspy scream scratches the insides that need to be scratched, cleansing and then ushering out the hidden dopamine. When I click the CD into my purple stereo, I flop onto my comforter (I have convinced myself that there is some science that you are more spongy when lying down). The shriek of the guitar smoothes the dents and warps on my prefrontal cortex. The clanging crash of the drums drains the rage like a blood clot suctioned out of the artery. And the growl of the bass does what no therapy or medication can do: it rumbles my heart out of slumber.