Dead Inside

by Chandler Morrison

There is no greater tragedy than beauty needlessly wasted.

This is exactly the way I like it. I am a harmless phantom, floating below the radar of perception, granting me a ghostly existence that permits me to freely engage in my unusual extracurriculars. People don’t see me, and I don’t really see them. It’s better for everyone that way.

Self-awareness really doesn’t mean shit, though. It is, in fact, little more than psychological masturbation, and has about the same net worth as a wad of semen in a handful of crumpled tissues. No cockroach ever desired not to be a cockroach, just because it knew it was a cockroach.

It’s as though she’s looking into me, like she can see me for the perverse freak I am, but instead of turning away in disgust, she seems almost captivated.

We are who we are, just as anyone else is. How we got that way isn’t anyone’s business, least of all our own.

“What are you, then?” I let a rush of smoke out of my nostrils and stare at her though the gray haze. “Misplaced,” I say.

Shit, I’m not the only psycho at Preston Druse. Maybe there are more. Maybe everyone there is some sort of freak and I’m, gawd forbid, another commonplace cog in a system of which I never wanted any part. Maybe the system is a little different than I thought, and I really am nobody extraordinary.

“Nothing you know to be true, is true. Society has brainwashed you. Don’t be like the rest. Fuck the rest.”

“I envy the ease with which you can dismiss things.” “Envy is wasteful and purposeless.”

“It’s realistic thinking. No matter how much of an individual you are, no matter how unique and different and nonconformist and antiestablishment, you can’t deny the inescapable effects that society has on everyone, including you and me.”

The living are dangerous. They inflict pain. They’re so fueled by greed, a lust for useless material shit, a smoldering desire to fit in . . . and they’ll hurt and betray and destroy whomever they must in order to get anywhere close to all of it. None of them are any different.

“I don’t have fun. I have moments of satisfaction in between long bouts of plain existence. That’s it. I don’t even know what fun is.”