Alsidicus: Thoughts of A Serious Person

TRIGGER WARNING: MENTAL HEALTH, HEAVY TOPICS, SUICIDE DISCUSSED

Man, oh man, how are you man?

OK.

K.

Kinda not cool.

Okay.

OK.

We use man a lot, don’t we.

Yes we do.

Well we shouldn’t.

Why?

We oughtn’t.

Haven’t heard that word in a while.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But then, thoughts of a suicidal human doesn’t have the crunch to it.

What crunch?

The crunch of a nodding crumbling patriarchy, (and I hope it dies a slow death, kill it with fire, and every oily fucker supporting it too).

You’re being weird again.

Again?

Again.

I’m K, it’s short for Kthanksbye. And this is suicidals anonymous. Except it isn’t. Suicidals don’t come together in a group. Unless you’re Manson’s people. But then you’re not suicidal.

I’m on a train, I’ll explain later, but by later I won’t be there anymore, I’ll either be in my empty flat, or, hopefully, not.

Floyd is playing Goodbye Cruel World right now. Good good.

I don’t want to, and won’t need to, take too much of your novel time. In the next fifteen or so shortish sections, I’ll be gone. Stay with me if you want, or if not, go. Doesn’t matter either way, but of course, I don’t mean it.

Not gone in that way, dummy. The text will be over. I’m a fictional character, so I’ll be dead on the last page (and in this way, you can help me by skipping to the last word, and killing me right away kthanksbye).

1. To Be A Workaholic:

K was told since K was a child that K had to work hard to distinguish himself.

K worked hard to distinguish himself.

K failed.

Because the more K learnt, the more K saw that someone was always better.

His parents filled his mind with stupid ideas like “even if you want to be a sweeper be the best sweeper in the world”.

But there’s no metric. How do you know you’re the best sweeper in the world? Is there a jury out there going HEY HEY THAT SWEEPING ACTION WAS GR8 BUT YOU’RE LACKING IN THE POSTURE, YOU GOTTA WORK ON THAT 8/10 or something?

Would you watch that as a reality TV? I would.

And the sweepers of the world would finally have a place to call their own. I think capitalism can make that happen. It’s made stupider shit happen before. But this workaholic culture was perhaps a way to escape. The harder you work, the lesser the time you get to think.

You shouldn’t think, by the way, it’s dangerous. I don’t mean think think, I mean think think. Let me elaborate:

Think about politics, think about the fascists, think about the liberals, think about your clothes, think about the new movies, think about celebrities, think about the world, think about music, think about science, think about everything except yourself. If you do that…oh well, more on that later.

K’s point was K ended up working K to death, to defy death- if you’re working yourself to death, you don’t have the time to think of dying.

That’s what I mean, precisely. You work hard enough, you turn hollow enough to forget to fill yourself, and then you can’t stop. If you stop, and rap your fingers against yourself, the sound will make you see how hollow you’ve become. And then, with renewed vigour, the suicidals will return.

So don’t stop working.

2. On Consumerism:

K is sitting in a café, chatting with friends, trying to fit in. He has no problems fitting in, because he mastered long ago the art of flattery, and he keeps his true comments in the field of humour, so no one takes him seriously. But his friends talk about some random things that he is not interested in, and his mind wanders until it doesn’t.

Oh yes, I need a new suit.

I need a colour TV.

I need to fill myself with a lot of strange things, I need to consume.

I need to consume even friendships. They are not relationships anymore, but something to consume, to eat, to dissect, to study, to lick clean and leave hollow the bones.

Consumerism is a viable alternative to suicide, K thinks.

K thought if K was rich enough, K wouldn’t want to die.

Perhaps K was right, K would never know.

His friends keep chatting away, and K fills the silences with some observational comedy. Their presence is enough to ward away the suicidals, at least for the while. K dreads going back home.

3. A Cigarette Is A Reset Button:

Every time you smoke, you go back to the last time you smoked.

All the thoughts in the middle vanish, and you’re a younger person in an older body.

So every time I have a suicidal thought, I smoke. And I forget I’m suicidal.

Reset.

The problem with addiction is that it will eat at you, and you will like it. Cigarettes, work, friendships, alcohol, drugs, reading.

Anything really.

The worst, though, is when you get addicted to people. Those fuckers are slippery.

See, a cigarette never changes shape or form. You smoke it, it’s gone, it gives you a rush. The same rush. Every time. Every. Time. Consistency: They who make cigarettes should be awarded and shot in the head, in that order.

People, however, change. People change. All the time. And your addiction doesn’t.

And so you’re left addicted to something that doesn’t exist anymore. That’s why it’s the worst.

Addiction, though, makes you forget that you don’t matter. That none of this matters. And so you cling to it.

4. Walking Everywhere With Nowhere To Go

This happens every time I’m going somewhere on a local train.

I’ve told everyone about it, whoever wants to listen. They all laugh, and say same same, but do they mean it?

What would make you sadder? That everyone thinks exactly like you, and therefore, you are not original? Or that you’re completely original, and therefore no one thinks like you, and you are alone?

I can’t decide.

K is walking with a friend in the crowded station. The friend is talking about the latest comedian. K smiles and engages the friend in conversation, even though it is not to his liking, he likes that the friend keeps the suicidals away.

However, suddenly approaching a turn, K’s vision shifts, and he sees hundreds of people in front of him, moving in perfect circles, closer or further from their homes with each step, moving in the same tracks they will for the rest of their lives before they wither and die.

People outside the station, in airports, aren’t any different. Except they’re flying, not walking. Everyone is travelling. Somewhere. Somehow.

And K sees himself as one of these many, walking around, without anywhere to go.

K’s friend asks him what happened, and he tells his friend he’s hungry.

They buy chips.

5. Knowledge Is Sadness

I sincerely believe that the suicidals exist only because I think too much.

Let me backtrack a second: suicidals are thoughts, they aren’t real. They’re formless. Like clouds. They don’t, or maybe they do (I don’t know), exist. But suicidals are a thing now, deal with it. Being suicidal is different from having the suicidals (maybe like how being sad is different from having the blues?) but maybe it’s all the same who knows.

When I was younger and had just started thinking too much, my mother told me not to think too much.

I scoffed at her and told her I didn’t want to be ignorant.

But have you ever seen anyone more ignorant about the system, and yet more happy, than a dog?

I haven’t.

Your teachers hate you, because they know more than you and are therefore sad. They can’t stand that you’re so happy, so they teach you, so that you get sad too.

I like teachers.

6. The Absence of God

After they’re done buying chips, the friend departs, as she lives elsewhere. K goes to his track to look for his train, and finds people everywhere, looking for something, looking for a purpose, after the absence of God.

K puts his earphones on, and puts The Wall by Pink Floyd. He skips to One Of My Turns (it is a cardinal sin to skip songs from a Pink Floyd album, and we will never forgive K for it).

K would much better prefer the Panopticon, the idea that someone is always looking, and we have no privacy, to the idea that no one is looking. Because if no one is looking, how does it matter what we do?

That freedom is unfreedom. One requires a freedom from absolute freedom too. That freedom one receives at the absence of God, is the loss of a leash that turned into a rope around one’s neck. The true freedom shall come then from the tightening of the noose. Death. The freedom from all freedoms.

Ever since the idea of God died in our minds, we have looked to some other way of reaffirming our beliefs in a higher purpose. Perhaps it is because of God’s death that we too have decided, like good followers, to follow God in death.

The suicidal committee would like to elect God as our Chairman.

But God is dead.

So let us all shoot ourselves.

Dadaism is a response to God’s death. There is no meaning now, so let us not have meaning Drr Drr Grr Grr I am an ice-cream sandwich.

How stupid are all these religious radicals? But then again, we are all stupid. Only Socrates was intelligent. That’s because he decided what intelligence meant.

Ever since God has died, we are all become consumerists. We have filled the God-shaped hole in our hearts, with a higher purpose: making rich people richer by buying some new clothes.

We better look for a better higher purpose, or we’re all doomed :)

7. I Am Not Even Free To Kill Myself

Moh means you care about the world.

Even though I don’t care about the world, I care about the world. Even suicidals sometimes like people. They like their parents (sometimes maybe), and even the idea of nothingness and eternal sleep will not satiate the fact that their friends and family (if they have any of either) will feel hurt by their deaths.

This is what stops suicidals for me sometimes.

At least it used to be. I met this girl once who told me she was very scared of people staring (the Gaze, she called it). She hated to be the centre of attention. I am the polar opposite, so it was hard for me to relate, but she was a good speaker, because she put the fear of the Gaze into me.

Now, the biggest problem for you, is, if you (you being me, being K, of course), standing here on this track, jump in front of the train, people who will stare at you and might get trauma watching you jump in front of the train, so you let the train pass, and instead sit on a seat you were never meant to occupy (which is what I’m sitting on right now, remember from the prologue?)

Except, like I told you, this is later, and I am alone at home. Disappointingly. And you were never meant to occupy that seat.

8. We All Wear Masks

So K sits at that seat, clutching strongly at his mask. He wishes to take it off. He wishes to tell everyone who he really is, and who everyone else is too. But he sits quietly, looking neither left, nor right, at a seat he was never meant to occupy.

If he had jumped in front of the train, it would have been him that died, and his soul that was freed. But since he didn’t jump, and someone had to jump, it is his soul that jumped, and him that is sitting there.

Now K is soulless, and purposeless, his eyes stitched with red string, and trying to keep himself pieced together. But the glue that he used the last time was cheap, and he is coming apart slowly, with every passing station, with every passing song.

He wears the mask that everyone wears. The only problem is, he has figured it out. He hates knowledge. He hates thinking.

We all wear masks, and we better hope we never find that out. If we do, there’s no more a reason to live.

9. Ode To Pink Floyd

Bach to Cioran. Pink Floyd to me.

There is no heaven for me, of course. There is only the soundscape of Pink Floyd. And when the curtain falls, whose lever, of course, is in my hands, it’ll be to a Pink Floyd song. Perhaps echoes.

Echoes. Echoing Cioran’s thoughts here. You can’t kill yourself, because whenever you do it’ll be too late.

Floyd transcends everything. I think Floyd will transcend my death too.

Little did K know how right he was.

10. If I’d taught myself to cry

I’ve not mentioned her yet have I?

I always thought we fit together so well. Like two halves of a pot broken in two halves (I’m not good with similes, please forgive me). I believed it right up till the day she died.

No she’s not the reason I want to kill myself. Please don’t be so base. But she did make me see things differently.

See, I never taught myself to cry. Kids do that at a young age, when they figure you’ll give them the moon and the stars and the heads of the billionaires in the world if they cry hard enough (maybe Lenin should’ve enlisted an army of infants). I didn’t do that. I simply asked, and received. I thought my parents were Gods, right up until I realized they weren’t. But one thing they did do was ensure I didn’t need to cry.

I saw movies that made them cry, and I wondered why they cried. One time I locked myself in the bathroom and sat on the floor, like I’d seen in the movies, and sort of pressed my gut to get the sobs out.

Nothing.

If I had taught myself to cry, perhaps I could have leaked out all my thinking through tears, and be left stupid and unthoughtful again.

The government ought to ban thought (I think they already have, not sure, let me Google), but not in that way. All thought that leads to more thought should be banned. All that should be allowed is an agreement with the government (yes I’m being sarcastic, please don’t tell me I’m fascist).

But I didn’t teach myself to cry; and I think the problem is with the word teach. It implies I can do it somewhere down the road (a belief I am starting to change).

But maybe that’s why I haven’t died yet. Because somewhere down the line, I believe things will be normal. And that’s dangerous. Actually what I believe is that somewhere down the line, I’ll go stupid again. And ignorant. And not die anymore.

11. I Can’t Be Left Alone

K reaches his house. His empty flat. He puts his Smartphone down. The Wall ended a while ago, leaving him once again completely alone. K thinks about what has happened to him.

I think it’s all my friends’ fault. They are too easy to talk to. I have been lulled into a false sense of security, that I can talk to them, and tell them anything. When I was an entertainer earlier, I could simply keep doing that, and not talk about how I’m feeling. But now, every second of every day, I feel the need to share things. This is not right.

Here, K is saying that one shouldn’t share things, I disagree. Of course you think that if you keep sharing your thoughts with people, they will start avoiding you, so you should seek professional help. Capitalism is at your service again: want to kill yourself and the only solution is talking? For just X rupees/hour, here we have a therapist willing to listen to you and help you find out why you don’t feel nice. Woohoo!

K thinks of the people around him every day, and how, earlier, he used to be able to live, for days even, without people, and thinks of a meme he laughed at a while back. He thinks of himself in relation with the meme:

I am unable to can in the absence of people.

12. The Various Times I Tried To Kill Myself

It won’t be like Sylvia Plath.

I’m too scared to be her.

I have had way too much of a privileged life to be her.

I’m too inferior to be her.

She tried to kill herself when she was young. She almost succeeded, and then they sent her to an asylum. She was a brilliant writer. I love her. But yeah, I can’t be her.

I tried to kill myself once by holding my breath. I did it because my parents didn’t give me a toy I wanted. My life, of course, depended on that toy. If I couldn’t have that toy, I would die. I would ensure I died. I would will myself out of existence.

And that attempt failed because I did it out of spite. I wanted to kill myself so that my parents kept thinking for the rest of their lives that if they’d gotten me that toy I’d still be alive. I wanted them to feel bad, and hurt them.

I wasn’t the nicest kid growing up. I don’t know if you could figure from that story. I was a bit nasty.

The second time I tried to kill myself, I tried to drink myself to death. Not alcohol. Water.

I’d read in a book if I drank enough water, I would die. I drank like two litres of water in five minutes. And then went to the loo. But I didn’t die. I was very sad with my repeated failed attempts.

The third time was at a beach. No one was looking, so I tried to bury myself to death. But when I started digging, this dog joined me. He was a nice doggo, and I ended up playing with him for a while, and by that time, it was time to go back.

The fourth time, I tried to burn myself to death. I thought if I’d self-immolate, my suicide would mean something, and that I could almost hide my true intentions behind a nobler cause of revolution.

HEADLINES: BOY BURNS HIMSELF BECAUSE THE CAPITALIST PIGS ARE KILLING THE POOR!

Yeah, that’s what would end capitalism. A burnt boy. Marx would be rolling in his grave.

But no. I didn’t do it. This time, I was scared to do it, because I thought, that for the first time, I would succeed.

I had read about this girl who tried to hang herself from a fan, and then the fan broke, and now she’s paralysed. I don’t want to be paralysed. I want to be either alive or dead. But there’s no binary in real life, unfortunately.

I had wondered about why she wanted to kill herself. I couldn’t ask her, I didn’t know her. But I wondered if it was the usual reasons, or something new and exciting.

And so we come to why I want to kill myself (remember, I won’t actually attempt it, and therefore it isn’t an actual issue, just a metaphorical one; that’s the justification to give when you ask yourself why you don’t get help): Why would a heterosexual male who has no crisis of gender, who is upper caste Brahmin, privileged economically, well-educated with a good job that satisfies his passions want to kill himself.

The answer to my despair is that I despair because I have no reason to despair.

That is all.

Dostoevsky was fucking spot on.

We are fucking animals. And I hope we stay that way. Because if we gain sentience in an ideal society, everyone will want to fucking die…

13. The Ideal Society

In the ideal society, everyone will have enough food, healthcare, clean water, a roof over their heads. And this is a very important ideal to strive towards.

But then what?

K seems to think (and here, I disagree with him) that once everyone’s needs are answered, there is no more any purpose in life. As a sentient being, K thinks, in the ideal society, once everyone has taken off their masks, overcome their lack of privilege, and when everyone is equal, we will all run to the nearest cliff and throw ourselves off of it.

There would be nothing to struggle for: food would be present, jobs would be plentiful, comfort and luxury afforded to all. Then, what would people do to while away their time everyday?

They would do the unthinkable (in fact, they should be unthinking but they will be doing the thinking which is the problem): they will THINK!

They will think. They will read. They will learn. And then they will die…and they will see this cycle for what it is, that no matter what, it won’t matter, and matter is particles, and what seems to be the matter cannot matter that much, and then they will realize that there is no.point.to.life.tm.

The ideal society is a society of mass-suicide.

Perhaps this is not so. Perhaps when everyone is happy, with healthy minds, and healthy hearts full of love and gratitude, we will finally know peace.

But K is a stubborn man (saying man would usually have sufficed, but I do not want to stereotype a gender, especially the privileged one). And it is hard to change K’s mind.

K believes the ideal society will be the death of humankind. And K is glad of it.

Humanity is sentient. And sentience is a cultural death sentence waiting to be understood.

14. The Myths Behind Suicide

When I was younger, K says to you (are you paying attention, probably you aren’t, but if you’ve made it this far, I hope I haven’t bored you, has it been sufficiently entertaining? Has it? Perhaps I’ll edit it all out and leave just a few lines together, and cobble them together to form some sort of pretentious and moving poem, moving to the bourgeoisie).

When I was younger, K begins again, once he’s completed his thought, my dad sat me down. His brother had just killed himself. He had a scotch in hand, and a cigarette in the other.

I was transfixed by the cigarette, because it was stunning. Smoke, I think, is incredible. Smoke is the only thing with purpose in this world.

He seemed angry, but I wasn’t sure. You could never be sure with my father. He was a stone. He could be a rock, but he chose to be a stone. I hated him for it, though I didn’t know it yet.

He was angry that my uncle killed himself. He was ranting: ‘He killed himself because he was weak.’

Now, I think there’s a problem with this statement, or any statement about this. Many glorifiers of suicide keep talking about how killing oneself is such a strong thing to do. ‘Oh I would never be so brave to be able to kill myself because life is so boring/pretentious/useless/purposeless/existential/devoid of meaning or something like that look me quote Camus or Kierkegaard to you, oh the only real philosophical question is the question of Suicide, huehuahuehuaXDXD no but honestly, massive respect for suicidals :)’

And then there’s my dad.

Suicide is done by the weak/by the strong/ by the stubborn/ by the helpless.

Foucault says knowledge is power. Foucault says if you want power over something, you must gain knowledge over it. You must study it.

I’m sure there’s people out there studying suicide. To gain power over the decaying and dying. But anyone who’s trying to classify them without understanding them wields a false power. And therefore these people aren’t all weak/strong etc etc etc.

A FRIENDLY REMINDER: At least leave the suicidals alone from your stereotyping. They literally could die, and they want it. Stop it.

The way I see it (the way I always saw it), it’s like this: have you ever been fishing? I’ve been fishing. It was annoying. I didn’t like it at all. The gutting, specially, was a little unappetizing. But I always noticed, if you took a fish out of the water, it would struggle. Futilely, but it would struggle.

Now, you take a very smort person, who goes to the fish, struggling against the hook, and says to the fish, oi fish, there’s no point in struggling; give it up; you can’t beat the hook; give up and die.

The fish wouldn’t be like oh right right you’re right sir of course why didn’t I see this myself guess I’ll die then.

No.

It would be highly absurd, and unrealistic to expect the fish to say that, or to stop struggling. The fish has no conscious.

But we do.

Which is why we can almost transform from a fish to a suicidal.

Some suicidals refuse to be understood: they won’t kill themselves because of some problem, because of some illness, because of some sadness.

Some suicidals out of water will not struggle.

Simply because it is futile.

Simply because they know it is futile.

15. K Has Friends

When K reaches home from his train ride, he is tired. He notices his headphones are missing, and thinks back.

When The Wall finished, K put his earphones in his pocket. Perhaps they fell out. Oh well, they don’t matter now.

K got on his Smartphone and started messaging his friends.

The struggling fish analogy had given him an idea.

How about an impromptu birthday party!

Whose birthday is it?

It’s my birthday!

No it’s not.

Yes it is.

No it’s not.

Aw come on! Be a sport! What if I were to die tomorrow?

K used rhetoric, and weird fallacies, it seemed to his friends, to get them to come immediately. He bought a cake from a bakery nearby, and a candle.

He wanted to buy a rope with a noose attached, but capitalists haven’t come up with a way to commodify suicide yet. So, he will have to wait to be reborn or something (yes, he was born a Hindu) to be able to kill himself in an eco-friendly consumerist-oriented way.

The what-if­-I-die-tomorrow argument is a lovely argument. It only works if the other person believes it, or wants to do something in the first place.

K chuckled at the thought of all his friends who had declined. No one had believed him when he said what if I die tomorrow. They didn’t know he had suicidals, he had never told him. He had never told himself.

So, all those who refused didn’t want to come. And all those who agreed wanted to come. He would be surrounded, on his self-proclaimed birthday, with people who wanted to surround him.

That gave him a moment of rest.

And now we shall give him a moment of rest too.

…

…

…

Alright, that’s quite enough.

His friends are here now (I know, it was a long moment, right?) and they are having a fun evening. K wants to talk about some obscure music, but the AUX is playing the latest Billboard hits. He jumps from conversation to conversations, not able to stay for more than a few seconds, enough to quip a joke here and there, get a few smiles, maybe a little attention, and flit away before he has to sustain it with actual conversation. That he cannot do. Never could.

 K wants to suggest that they do drugs. But these friends don’t bend that way. Never have. Can’t say they never will. Everyone breaks.

K nods at everyone every time they ask him to bring up the cake. Time’s running out. Time’s always running out. Everyone has to leave some time. K allows time to stand still. He tries. But fails, of course.

Seconds turn into minutes turn into hours. And it’s time. Everyone is clamouring now, baying for blood, wanting to tear him apart limb by limb if he doesn’t bring out the cake.

And that’s all he wants too: to be torn limb by limb.

He delays cutting the cake because if his friends go home, then he knows he will die. He wants to die of course, but not alone. He wants to be torn apart: limb by limb by limb. He wants his death to be a show. He wants an audience watching him die. Watching him kill himself for them. That would be the ultimate performance. And he wouldn’t have to top it up, or flit to another conversation. Because he would be dead.

There would be no pressure to entertain anymore.

16. After I Die

Dear all,

I love you very deeply. I do. Please do not be unreasonably upset with me. The honest truth, although you won’t get it, I think (it’s all a matter of subtext), is that I wanted to be a fish. I really do. I tried my hardest, and I know you all love fish, you love grilling fish. I do too. Not anymore though.

Anyhow. I tried. I really did. I wanted to be a trout, to be a salmon, to be a guppy, to be a goldfish, like a lost soul, like a guppy, maybe a Pink Floyd song. But I’m not a fish. At least not one with fins, you know.

To my friends, to all of my friends: I know you’ll hate me. But try not to. Look on the bright side. Now you can watch a film without me whispering in the corner. Now I won’t say hey bro look at this or look at that or check this white straight male philosopher out who has managed to completely understand the world. Of course he has. Now, I won’t eat your food. Now I won’t hog the conversation. Now I won’t be draining your energies with my constant chatter. Now I won’t won’t at all. Now, you’ll all have better memories of me, and think of me as a better person than I was, because I am dead.

To my non-friends who thought they were my friends: you weren’t. And you don’t even know you weren’t. And I guess that’s more of my fault than anyone else’s. But you were mostly nice anyway I guess. Good that you didn’t know.

To my non-friends who knew they were not my friends: y’all were smarter than those other idiots who didn’t know. G1.

To her: I’m sorry. I tried.

My mom told me once not to think too much. But I did because I wanted to rebel. I thought by thinking I was doing what she told me not to do.

I should’ve listened. Maybe not to all of what she said [because she could be quite an unreasonable fascist at times, which is annoying to say the least (I say annoying of course because I’m an upper-caste man and can afford to be only annoyed at fascism)], but yeah maybe to that one ignorant thing she said.

Oh well.

To my fishes: do not stop struggling.

Love,
Kthanksbye.

17. Comfortably Numb (or On Trial)

When K died, he looking over his dead body, and saw three people crying. He thought only three people loved him enough to cry, and then he looked again, and they were watching a TV set: daily soap opera.

Ah. So that’s why they cry.

He had wandered into his neighbour’s flat. They didn’t give a fuck about him, of course. Except that he was a bachelor, and that caused them some ideological discomfort.

K waited at Marine Drive, in the cold, but he didn’t feel cold. He didn’t at all.

Not much different from being alive, he thought. He walked around, and saw couples in love, and thought about her. He thought he’d finally meet her, but perhaps she wasn’t hanging out at marine drive two years after her accident.

He wondered if she was still at the train tracks. Accidentally dying.

Who knows. Maybe she was. But he was too tired to go there.

He waited for the morning, and went back. He looked at the people he knew, and saw only faceless masks. He saw them gasping with their gills, and waving their fins and saying probably (because he couldn’t hear them) how sad it was.

He took the time switch in his person (every dead person has a time switch, don’t you know), and fast-forwards a few months. The vacant expressions change, it’s Christmas, probably. He looks at them now. They are all smiling, their eyes are stitched together with red string, and their masks are clipped on. He thinks they’ll be okay.

They seem to be watching TV.

He sneaks an earphone from them, and goes back home to take his Smartphone. He puts on The Wall, skips (one should never skip songs on a Pink Floyd album, but we can give him a pass, since he’s dead) to Comfortably Numb, and listens to it once.

For the first time since he died, he feels.

He exhales as much as he can, because he has no breath, and puts down the earphones and phone. His body is long gone and still there. Decomposing and still intact. He is in two worlds, two times, two thoughts, a threshold, an in-betweener, a non-belonger, a ghost.

But didn’t I believe that there was nothing after death?

K did.

So how do I still exist?

K didn’t.

So I can just…fade away?

And then, K sat down, and thought himself out of existence.