Fred Aiken Writing

small, pent up olong grains marked with years of wear,

subjected to the strain of compounds wrought in abject solution and constant desolation,

hoping to one day see light,

there is light,

no, where is light,

torn asunder from its shell, its habitat, the only place that little grain felt safe, complete,

and not thrown out from the little corner of this universe it calls home,

where it can wash, rinse, repeat,

under an endless horizon

while bashing its head against the wall

and hoping for a good cup of tea

the worst question I was ever taught

happened to be the quest for why,

while sitting on a rock

going a few hundred, maybe even a thousand,

miles per hour in a void that

constantly expands and moves in an unknowable direction,

pondering the great mystery of why,

while an effervescent string of scenarios

play out without my knowledge or approval,

not that it needed it, nor I it,

yet here I am, occupying a space like any other 

carbon meat sack generalizing the world 

so I can understand everything about some vacuum

or atomic structure composed out of a billion

strains of code randomized into a composition

meant for great things, 

so I hear

the note I wrote in the fifth grade was a suicide letter

to my future self,

and of course I don’t want to make my past self

a liar,

so I made plans to kill myself.

though if I’m being honest,

I never knew how involved it would be to just die.

I had to explain it to my girlfriend,

my parents,

my sister,

and of course they all had the same sort of questions and comments,

busy-bodying themselves with why I would take a note

written so long ago,

and plan out my death around it.

at least, though,

my past self didn’t specify exactly how I needed to die,

so there was some leverage in deciding

how I wanted to go about it,

because I am an adult, 

and so I must know how I wanted to die,

but I didn’t.

there were so many different ways to go about doing it,

all of which sounded fairly painful,

none of which I wanted to go through with,

so I took some weeks to figure it out,

researched my options,
probably ended up on a government list of some  sort for

all the weird crap I looked up on the internet,

though by the time they got around to questioning me,

I imagine I’d already be dead,

or close to it.

in the end, I chose pills,

an antipsychotic,

that would just drift me off to another plane of existence,

or non-existence,

or non-non-existence,

barreling through a fix state,

from motion to,

stop,

closer to a place that my fifth grade self would enjoy,

or at least I hope so.