(still end kicks)

My brain is a broken drop of stone held on in anxious hands.

And each night it's getting a little harder to believe...

In who i am and what i'm saying. what the fuck all i'm doing in this place where so many seem fulfilled (if not simply busy-bodied in the twitching light of a better life).

More than now it's what i was that's in question. all these stories i used to tell. so many characters that've grown foreign to me over the years. best friends saved now just for their anecdotal value. true loves. false pretences. so many things that seemed so real for so many years are breaching their final twilight goodbyes.

Or did they ever?

Was i just convincing myself of so much madness to ensure myself a place in my own pantheon of self-destruction? or did i live so much, so young that my time might fall in line with precisely the sort of thing that no one ever believes?

I used to joke that i didn't really think i existed before the age of thirteen. despite the fact that there was photographic evidence to the contrary. all a ruse, i assured. the crass cover up of shadow governments working in conjunction with my family to dissuade me from ever getting to the real truth of my inner workings. my life's struggle through childhood.

Now i wonder if i haven't simply fabricated the rest.

There are things i know for certain. i remember maisie. kevin. megan. justin. chuck. swann. jaimie. doug. smoking cigarettes. uncertain scars. i remember rob crying. i remember olivier coming out. i remember kisses and breaking julie's heart. the relentless joys in the simple convictions we carried in the face of a cold dark region i happened in by choice because...

I can't ever say for certain again.

I have my story. i know and i tend to stick to it. but did that whole chapter of my life really form out of spite or was i just walking caulfield?

Was i just the cheap imitation of literary predestination?

Was i, am i just a fucking parody of myself?

At this moment i have no idea. there's so much in question. so much askew. so much nonsense i carry in the day to fucking day fucking dimly contained trainwreck of a mind i'd be remissed if i believed a single fucking word of it.

But, yet, there has to be something. some purpose to all of this. some force that pulled me from the fat boy sweating his impotent rage in l.a. to the tattooed, chain-smoking, half-drunk i am today. more than cheap will. more than spite. more than happenstance rolled up in a great existential goldberg device.

I am someone, something that's come undone, ran away and hunched back from great distances to rat-a-tap my way again.

I just can't say for sure these days what made me up somewhere in between.

Still, even if my life is just a half-truth, there must me some great stories yet to fucking believe.