Untitled
Cavin Bryce Gonzalez
Wearing a seatbelt betrays the fundamental freedom achieved when driving. A 1996 Honda Civic can bring you anywhere: let Google Maps deliver you to an unobtainable future. Strike a pose at the camera flashin when you run the toll booth, a headshot, on the brink of insanity. Make a left turn when maps says to make a right. Turn the music up so loud it’s distorted and you can heard the message in between the lines — like a satanist playing a record backwards. I see flowers in the morning and feel repulsed. The sun is in my eyes now and I can’t see where I’m going. It’s better this way. End destination is a surprise. Run out of gas, get out, make a new name. New job. New home. New wife.
Save up $600 and buy another Honda Civid.
Do it again.
I wrote this doing 90 on the highway
Ejecting an empty redbull can from my cupholder onto the passenger side floorboard going, “schhk” like it’s a shotgun cartridge. Feeling distinctly evil and witnessed upon reading an indeed notification that states I have been “noticed”. The skin on my hand is flayed and crusting leading further evidence of my undead nature. Finding it increasingly probable I died that night back in 2017 and all of this is a Heaven of sorts. Limbo. A shitty A24 movie and the audience is going to be really pissed about this dream sequence.
Because if it was all a dream, then what was the point?
Just briefly imagined a slow sad-like montage of a relationship slowly crumbling in tiny moments like letting the dishes pile up and never saying goodbye or “i love you” when you leave.
Slammed on my brakes at a yellow light to the dismay of a myriad lost expressions.
Love is born in glances, I think. In the corner of the eye. Back of the mind. Slow and perpetual, like a steam engine.
The same story ad infinitum.
That’s a term I learned in college: ad infinitum.
“Lorem ipsum” is eternity fractured and meaningless.
I’m sure you know.
The concept of home being perpetually… liquid. Taking shape and shifting. Home is a bloodied kitchen counter — vomit encrusted toilet seat. Home is a snarling dog. Home is Various faces like a revolving picture, faces and bodies beginning foreign and becoming home and then existing totally antagonistically. Home is the enemy. Home is where you pay your rent at. The phone number you have memorized. The story you choose to describe someone you love. Home is the harvest and the plague. Home is the cave. Home is the salamander. The valley between your ribs - a skeletal fault line crunching down into calcium. The whole world upside down and cast in this blue hue. Birds fall from the sky and insects turn to tar.
I have imagined a million deaths and only ever died twice - or once, technically, depending on your definition. They are all painful. Some are less so. But the final moment is always horrifying. There was a priest who killed people by making them take sleeping medication and attaching their unconscious mouths to helium tanks. The helium tanks came in boxes with children smiling at balloons. I would like my death to be children smiling at balloons. I would like my death to be the climax of a film. I would like my death to be a mystery to all those who never me - a YouTube podcast half ignored on the drive to work. But I will never die. I scoff at God. I have survived car crashes and gunshots and knives, disease, love. I have survived eternity like a vampire who feeds on gas station hot dogs and red-bull. My stomach hurts and my heart is retarded, confused. My mind racing. Two crows picking at my liver for all eternity. The first fish to flop on land. The first man to own a house. Work is death and the cartoons don’t work anymore. I’m sick and i’m failing. And I will fail a million times more. The hearts left discarded and tests zeroed the shifts unworked the questions unanswered my mom sobs and asks me why my sister frowns and understands entirely. My curse is to wound everyone I love. Last weekend my nephew begged me for dinosaurs and so I procured them. More a magician than a necromancer but I can do anything if the right persons asks me to. From the Earth, I commanded their corpses to dance. And so they did. He smiled, approvingly, saying “dinosaurs!”. I held a gun to his head, because that is my nature.
And I wept.
And I fired.
There is a show about cake on the large tv - the largest tv i’ve ever seen in my life. seeing a group of people stand in like smiling, guessing what is cake and not cake. is the lamp cake? The host walks into a room that is either made out of cake or not made out of cake. He clicks the lamp on, raises an eyebrow. The guest says that the bottom of the lamp is cake and so the host points the tip of the knife to it, slices off a long strip. And so the lamp is cake. The crowd cheers. The host orchestrating this horrific event makes a joke. It’s so funny. Everybody is laughing. Some people are crying. The show cuts to commercial. It’s a commercial about old people medicine, of which i mean all the people in the commercial are old and smiling really big, bigger than i’ve ever smiled. When the show cuts back from commercial everyone in the room is debating what is and is not cake. i guess wrong. I guess an item is cake and it is not. fear floods my every thought. i approach the knife drawer. i draw a large knife and approach the ham. i ask “is it cake?” and nobody says anything. i cut deep into the ham and juice squirts out into my eye, which is wide and unblinking. i raise my arm and place the knife tip to an intersection of my veins. I say “is it cake? is it cake? is it cake?” and everyone laughs it’s cake! It’s cake! And I cut deep into my arm, screaming. Blood and gore oozing from the wound - people screaming, my mom sobbing. I sawed at the tendons and the veins and cut so hard I believe it chipped bone. It hurt. God, yes. It hurt. Feeling every piece sever, every tendon snap. The knife slipping in my bloody palm. I Cut down to the elbow, and the knife caught. They begged me to stop. Pleaded. But I couldn’t, not until I knew, and so I sawed. I sawed past the elbow. My arm flopped down onto the table. And I saw that it was cake. It was cake, it was fucking cake. And everyone clapped, they cheered. My mom cried. Because it was cake. From skin to sinew to bone. Always had been.