You know I won’t. I mean, I can’t. Not to say I wouldn’t. God knows there have been times I wanted to. What person ever didn’t want to kill every person ever, in the history of the world.
You can’t because you’re dead, right? So you are not real.
Yes, I’m dead. And so? So what. I’m as real as any pixel in your face. What’s any different about me now than I was ever, to you or anybody, including me.
Not dying when everybody else did die is like dying harder than everybody else.
You’re dumb.
I am dumb. So what if I am dumb. So what if I’m alive. So what if what. So. So. So.
Stop it. That’s not what life is. To say it like that. That’s not being alive. I would know.
Did I tell you I tried to kill myself too. I tried to come along. To be a person with the rest.
Did I already tell you. It didn’t work. Me killing myself, I couldn’t do it. I tried hard.
In my life before people started killing each other more than usual I tried so many times.
I tried by not trying. I said words like, Fuck god, and Fuck America, and Fuck fuck.
Every day I would say something like, I am going to fucking kill myself motherfucker.
But I never even really tried. To be honest, I couldn’t imagine the world without me.
I continued living. I lived in America. I tried in America. A lot of other people did die.
Then all of you died. Every single one of you. Except me. I went on on this tape alone.
Pretty much if you are reading this or seeing this, however, you are dead and I’m alive.
Though in another way it could be like I am dead and you are living in the flood function.
Because where you are, beyond human existence, it will probably seem like life to you.
Whatever you are experiencing there will feel like your life going on forever and yes.
Even if everyone in America is dead as fuck if you are hearing this you will think: Life.
Even if you are in there wanting to kill yourself you’ll still be thinking something yours.
That is so yours. Please take it. Please let it be you. Forget your arms. There is the word.
I wonder if you’re having a great day in your world there, either way. I hope you are.
I hope you are. I need a message of hope here so I will make one, even if it is nothing.
FLOOD: I didn’t believe anything I said even as I said it. It kept on coming out no matter what I did behind my face in the language. It would not stop. I could already see what was coming for me in every element and yet when it hit it felt like nothing I could have expected. Like histories erased. Like light that didn’t want me in it but was the only fiber of the world.
How many years could I have gone on in here in repetition. How long could the tape continue to repeat me without becoming thin in places, blacking out. It was like the tape went on because I knew it shouldn’t. It was like the tape was my whole mind. Where was my mind in anyone now not appearing. Would I be able to tell the difference between when my body began to be eaten apart by the wear of the reading eye over the band of color language that made me what I was. Already my hands and body seemed so old, so pulled apart from how they seemed to want to remember having felt all they ever had, though I could not remember any actual time and setting attached to that. Only the gaps. The tape was the gaps in us. Every sense of myself was only a residue floating on the cusp of a world long disappeared from underneath itself.
I kept expecting the ground to fall out beneath my feet, to light me down into a space beneath the image, even less than nothing. The blight of my mind inside the tape hid in a secret mind like what we’d always thought of as heaven, or a black hole carried in the grain of the make of everything unseen until you were encompassed by it. Suddenly anything the tape could not contain made more sense to me than any of the ruins and wrecks of landscapes, or the terrifying forms of empty homes, however inconceivable, no less real, whereas here I was only pressed forever in no understanding, no longer even sure how much of me remained in me and less so every second.
And yet the ground did not open up. The sky remained in place and kept its color to itself. No wear would change the world around me any less than how time in my human body had eaten into me without me knowing. When sometime likely soon the tape no longer was able to turn its gears over and again repeating, it would feel exactly like going forward did. What I carried in my blood would always remain forever only mine, all connection to any possible space beyond the daily reality of being as black and inaccessible as an eye seeing itself. Every iteration of the repetition would begin to seem more and more the way it had always been forever until I couldn’t tell the difference between one day and the rest. Knowing I wouldn’t know already hurt more than never having had. Death here would feel just the same as living.
Can I tell you about our life together.
Please don’t.
It will feel good for you to hear it.
I won’t remember.
It will feel good for you to hear, even if you don’t remember. You can remember it while I’m saying it. You can believe me.
I can’t. It won’t.
You were my husband.
No.
You loved me and I loved you.
I was never married. I lived alone.
We lived inside a house together and we tried. We both had lives of long hours apart. We did anyway everything we could. You went and wore a uniform and carried a weapon and talked to people in the streets and did as you were told and hoped if you worked hard enough as a person you could move beyond that point to something that made you feel less fucked each day a little less and were happy in between. I tried hard too and had different jobs I hated even more than you hated yours and at night when I came home you were often still working and I would try to stay up so I could see you when you came in but usually by the time you did come you were so tired you just lay down and passed or I was already asleep. We both ate out of boxes. I remember when we shared meals. That was great. That was enough.
You’re not a person. I’m not a person. Not anymore. Look at this place.
Why does it matter what a place is.
Because I can’t see anything else.
People died because they did. Because they had to. You’re only alive as anybody else. You are only on the far side of any mirror.
You are not there.
You hear me.
No I don’t. I can’t. The tape’s about to end. Then I’ll just have to start over.
How can you know the tape’s about to end if you can’t remember anything.
I feel it melting in my center, its ending and beginning.
That is me. You were my husband and I loved you. This is only one part of me among the many ways that I have been and am and will be, but it is still true. It is true and has been always.
Goodbye.
The face of the sky refused to change. Even in the lash of the breadth of the dead in my memory, the colors of the world wouldn’t let me be released. In every layer of the faces of the rooms, the smoke waited to encamp my mind and repeat its time over and again even in the absence of any decay. The ground made not of bones and flesh turned back to loam but forever video.