No Strings Attached

19xx – Winter.

'I've seen your face before,' I said, looking at a library wall. Men in gray suits, busy men, uniformed up with important angles and layers of clothing and light reflecting off the fabric. It was like a sketch of gestures from an old catalog of emotions. The memories never came easy. It like trying to learn a new language or use Norton Ghost to clone bad sectors from a wailing IDE drive. Undulating waves of fragmented data fitting together like an invisible puzzle. Strange languages, eyes, and faces with faded filters and classic looks. And then it felt like yesterday, something else was living in there, someone who wanted to stay hidden. It wanted to load up on carbs to dull the senses and puff a cigarette for the volatile chemicals to selectively inhibit the expression of classified DNA, hiding itself behind enemy lines. Felt like concealing dangerous behavior hidden in an open prison, but always living life on a knife edge. Suspiciously looking over your shoulder in public. Putting up a good mask to ricochet off the liars and cheats. They dug tooth and nail, but the facade was always deeper. I insulated myself with a buffer zone of estrogenic adipose, like a natural sedative. Remember back in grade 4? Drawing chalk swastikas on the blackboard at the gun club with Stu Johnson. Drawing gray Wehrmacht tanks and army men on a battlefield in whatever style of paint program the old Macs used to run. Playing Oregon trail to avoid dysentery, and typing stories about war, heroism, escape, and nature. I got good at playing their games. It was like sitting on a bench in front of a busy street, where each thought was a car driving on the road. Inside the cars, they watched me with high-tech cameras and other surveillance tools, but they could never quite see me. Their gaze always fell short. All their gazes like linear trajectories sliding off the target at the last moment, trying to bite a frozen popsicle but only getting some sharp splinters of ice.

Popping dexedrine like candy, trying to speed my way through all this nonsense.

I never left, just picked up the game after a long pause. It's just an alt-tabbed copy of GTA V running in steam to return to after a long sleep. The watchers poked and pried like trolls with sticks. I just sat back and wondered whenever they tried to take a shot. Many times my life felt like that facepalming Picard .gif on repeat. Sometimes entire days went like that. I just barricaded myself in a smear of indifference. That was my imitation. Pretended to care about a world of drone bases and skyscrapers. Vat-grown Taylor Swift analogues like Carrie and Felicia, programmed to countersignal, payrolled to fuck with my head. Everything a trigger nested in psychological profiling. Psychopathic tendencies, serial killer predispositions, delusional megalomania. The games changed, but their underlying premise was all the same. Joked about Blair Campbell and his engineer dad who brought me Halo and sleepover dinners like the ones with Stu Johnson and Alex Gale and Derek Notter. It became of a game of repeating patterns whose safest bet was to pretend to give a fuck. I smiled and nodded, gleefully feasting away on a paper plate of ground up cigarettes and cellphones. Wearing a moses robe with my dad driving a dumptruck full of breast implants. The boy who cried wolf smoking Nova Scotia weed and playing basketball in the morning light. Blair's room had a garbage can filled with cum-crusted kleenex, the smell reached out into the hallway. His dad would spy on my browsing habits and they'd joke about it, like Brent Lockwood and the keyloggers back in 2004. Carrie Snider and her political sluttiness, driving a hard bargin on jealousy triggers and inter-gender tension. Provoke a response. Felicia smoking menthols on the couch with John Doe, throwing temper tantrums and rolling around in fits of food and fury. Brandon Woodburn wearing the 3,000 years around his waist on a chain at Goodlife like a heavy medallion of prosperity, running side by side with me on the treadmills, always looking down with his nose and pointing into me with those brown beady eyes firing trajectories from cars passing eachother on a busy street in front of me, sitting on a bench, always trying to find something they could never quite see.