𝓘𝓷𝓽𝓮𝓻𝓷𝓪𝓵 𝓕𝓪𝓶𝓲𝓵𝔂 TEAM SLAYER



SHORT FICTION
08-28-02024

When did I begin to prefer meditating on death over life? Why is an ending more titillating than a thriving middle? Sure, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism . . . but when did it become hornier?

ᴍɪʏᴀᴍᴏᴛᴏ ᴍᴜꜱᴀꜱʜɪ and 𝕸𝖆𝖗𝖈𝖚𝖘 𝕬𝖚𝖗𝖊𝖑𝖎𝖚𝖘 (?when did their books move to the business section?) branded my early twenties with a skull and an hourglass. I needed them to heat my mundane. And as above, so chained to the dark core of my being, my life writhes six feet under—ʟᴏᴋɪ punishment-core. I feel most alive when pain quakes me. I’ve gotta make a change.



So, with gritted teeth, I force myself several times a day to imagine adult strangers as the children they were.

I’m building up to myself—to believing that a childhood happened to my body. The evidence is pitiful. Time changes memories like rivers change canyons, and stories are just stylized memories. This leaves photos—I’m even more skeptical of phots. They flaunt truth without decorum. Photos are rude, or maybe autistic—they don’t mean to offend.

My partner wanted to arrange a small gallery of childhood photos in our hallway. We fought about it, but I abandoned the argument because I couldn’t, at the time, communicate the internal *ick—an *ick that’s perplexing because my childhood was, for the most part, blast.

I’m afraid of the photos. They accuse me.

There’s a baby pic of me. It’s 1987, and I’m maybe six months old, wearing a navy blue sailor suit, the kind with the little flag falling down the back—a tar flap, it’s called. I’m laughing at something . . . or nothing. When babies laugh at nothing, it feels like they’ve got an inside joke with creation—one that will never be explained because language kills the bit—one that feels like it’s at my expense.

But I got the last laugh. The shadows and contours of my 37-year-old face haunt those cherub cheeks, like something sunk deep in its water—opaque, ominous, rising to clarity. Time floats me to the surface, and will shatter the peace of that face. A mandatory crime. I see the photo and feel guilty for aging. Over time, I victim blame . . .

“fuuuuck this kid.”

“Look to the past!”

My torso turns, my neck cranes, but my feet stay forward.

Giving the past my full frontal feels too intimate. I want past-gazing to be a contortion—something hard to do for long.

The future gets my attentive and loving gaze. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog-core—you know the painting. A dumb logic, because my future doesn’t want my love near as much as my past. Neediness turns me off though, as much as irrelevance entices.

The past gets no romance.



How is my past both mine and gone? Maybe it’s not gone. Maybe the past is diffused like a root structure, growing outwards in all the dark directions beneath my now, penetrating and being penetrated, until it’s inextricable from all pasts. Above, in daylight, I grow only up.

I’d rather put the past in the ground, in a place that feels like half of the world.

I lived in Thailand for a year once—that country’s got a real here-and-nowness. Past and future don’t hide behind anything out there. That year, I felt like I was wandering in a fog, not above it—what was behind me looked like what was ahead, and sameness felt as fresh as newness.

Goddammit, I love Buddhism. Buddhism makes the world into a womb. Not a Freudian one, not the womb of retreat-from-life. The womb-view it gave me a glimpse of was the clear and rational endstate of cultivating desire for what is here and now. When here and now harmonizes with desire, the world is the womb . . . or heaven . . . what’s even the difference?

I did Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy for a few years in my early thirties—that one where you discourse with all the cast of internal personas.

“IFS is a transformative tool that conceives of every human being as a system of protective and wounded inner parts led by a core Self.”

My ‘inner parts’ are a Larry Clark film cast of angst-ridden teens. Teens who are full of inner parts themselves—which would mean it’s inner parts all the way down in IFS. My constant harping on this fractal nature created some tension with my therapist, Dr. Dwayne.

“This overthinking impedes healing.”

Tattoo that on the inside of my skull, Dr. Dwayne? I’d like my neurons to chant it before every game. I don’t think it’s as dark in there as science tells me.

Fuck Dr. Dwayne. Dr. Dwayne is a grifter. He knows full well the scheme he’s got going with this IFS hustle. I came to him for relief from my depression, and by the end of the first hour, he’s got me playing therapist to a crew of sad boys listening to way too much Radiohead. That fucker Tom Sawyer’d me. I’m paying to paint my own fence. He’s even assigned me home meditations—30-minute focused internal dialogues with my inner parts. Usually, we just sit in my skull playing 𝗛𝗮𝗹𝗼 𝟮 𝗧𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝗦𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗿 on the Zanzibar map. I want them to like me, so I gave them their happy place. Helluva thing to burn palo santo before.



Baby me is there, in that derpy sailor suit with the tar flap. We take turns holding me, annoyed, sort of keeping me inside the ring of our controller-holding arms. But we start to enjoy my giggly blankness. A few of me begin to worry about Halo’s jarring, violent cacophony. We turn it off. We sit in a circle with baby me in the middle. We watch me laugh, go blank, and shake/bounce for no reason.

For no reason.

I don’t know if I will ever have that power again.

It’s pleasant enough to watch for now, once we adjust to the low stimuli of it. And also sad, because all of us are entering him, populating heaven with inner parts, coming out of the cold, into his warmth with our muddy boots on. What choice do we have? “Only the soul is of itself . . . . all else has reference to ensues.” (Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass)