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Cybernaut Chronicles 3

Formulations fatal to friends

By Sam SwaimPublished 3 years ago 7 min read
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Cybernaut Chronicles 3
Photo by todd kent on Unsplash

For so many reasons this playlist labeled “Laurel” has infected me. It has inserted hairy tentacles beneath my skin and will never recede from within my flesh. They’re like the barbed penes of various winged insects. Once their inside, they never leave, by design.

She was so beautiful, and like all such beings, has permanently left my life. There’s a strange place in my head that even her concept evokes. Torn jeans and an impish smile. Sally Ann Salvage wardrobe on a body like a 12 year old boy on ‘roids. Red hair and cool tattoos. Deep scars, and a word here and there for myself. Not much else, and that’s fine. We were just ships in the night, her and I. I’m like that for a lot of people. A fading hologram smearing out of frame.

Maybe she heard these songs, and maybe she didn’t. Somehow I did manage to catch this particular version of lightning in the bottle, this strange but pleasant sensation she evoked. When I listen to these songs, sometimes, not every time, but sometimes, the feeling comes straight back. Its warm and still outside. The porchlight is on over the slanting patio. She’s sitting on the red couch. No wasps yet. A recent kitty mother attends to her wards inside a cardboard box.

I breathe in. Somebody’s body odour, but in this setting its nice somehow. I start to fall into another deep chasm of nostalgia. They are all around now, like potholes on Alberta roads in the spring. But its good. I let myself fall in. Somebody lights a clove cigarette. Its been a while, but tonight is the night. Oh, to have been a teenage goth. I bet that would have been fun.

I’m there, but in my head I’m somewhere else with every sense except sight. I see her and she sees me, and that's ok for a second. Just a second, hanging there in time forever.

Now forever has come and gone.

Your contaminated majesty

You live in my wounds

….

I drowned close to your loathing

Your broken monstrous love (your jaded presence)

Naked and bare like a knife

My bed is a tomb

I live in your virulent womb

-As Virulent as You, Virus

There is a song for every hour in the day minus one. Fodder for at least twenty three articles, but the concept will probably have run its course by then, at least in my own mind.

I’m dancing like nobody’s watching, which is easy when they aren’t. A plot wriggles forth and squirms and twitches. Undulations of tissue beneath a moist and grey skin. I am the mortification of your mind. The reductio ad absurdum, ad infiinitum, in ri.

Somewhere somebody is dying. Somebody is being tortured. Human blood oozes from rent flesh. Somewhere out there the Sun is setting and it looks like no other sunset. Live, laugh, love. I would like to see a “Live, suffer, die.” motivational poster put up somewhere.

Lately I’ve been looking at my own life like it's some kind of an archaeologist's trove of artifacts. Deep in some moldering tomb, I discovered the barely legible notebooks of a lunatic. There are a few boxes of them. Not a tonne, but it's a decent sized collection. Poorly organized. Every one of them is filled from cover to cover with my writing. Always in bad handwriting that always seems to drift from strange style to style over time. I think if a cryptographer looked at my writing they would have an aneurism. Some people claim that a wildly different handwriting style can be indicative of demonic possession, multiple personalities, or some other kind of psychic distress. No citations allowed.

Most of the contents of these journals is fairly drab. The stories are hum-drum kinds of daily recounting of angst and ennui and struggle. Others seem like they could have come from the brain of any male, caucasian, millennial. Nothing terribly illuminating, but occasionally there is a passage or two, or even a fairly complete narrative for a few pages. On closer inspection, the narratives are filled with problems of one kind or another. There is a good kernel in there somewhere. Right?

The only convention I have maintained in the kinds of notebooks contained in my personal archive is occasionally buying notebooks that look like those used by Ashton Kucher’s character in The Butterfly Effect. I know that movie isn’t the greatest, but its somehow important.

I think I was the same age as the young AK, in which time period the bones of the film’s plot are centred. Maybe that's the whole reason. All I had to do in this cabin in cottage country on Lake Superior was watch that movie over and over again. Oh sure, I had a family. A big family. And they were mostly there too. But it was just one of those things. Two weeks out of my routine and my environment. And yet, even the environment I left behind was uncomfortable. Bordering on intolerable. But it finally changed. What it changed into was not an improvement. That seems like the average state of my life. Always changing, never improving.

There are some standouts in my journals. But I would say that ninety percent of the words in all of those journals would be either insanely boring to read, or else cause for real concern in most people reading them.

When I read these records of my relatively recent history, I feel as though I don’t recognize the person who wrote them. I never did. That has to be some sort of fiction. Its written down. Don’t believe everything you read in a book, isn’t that what they say about books? Surely the rule applies to this situation as well.

But I was that person. Am still that person. And yet, that person is not the person I picture when I refer to “I”.

It's time for a new narrative. That's the kind of buzzword that a lot of people would use for this situation, I think. As though the story of your life were just a text document you could double click on and start editing. It's a tempting idea. Start fresh. Yet surely, some details must be retained. I can’t know if it's a lie, right? Otherwise it won’t work.

It goes like this: I am a man from nowhere. I was born multiple decades ago, but more than that nobody can say from looking at me. In my interpersonal relationships, people are not bothered by me. I’m no cut up, but sometimes I can deliver a joke. There is nothing distinctive about my voice except for the low tone. No localized english or vernacular is present in my speech.

There is something I do better than anybody else in the world. But it isn’t apparent what specifically. Just something. Everybody who meets me gets that feeling.

Its 2020. Never have human bodies been so diverse. That being said, there is something astoundingly unremarkable about my physique. My height, proportions, and posture all glide over attention spans. The clothes I wear are unlabeled and unbranded. Simple dark colours, rarely patterned in any way.

I could have passed you a thousand times throughout your life in whatever settlement you spent the majority of it in, and you would never have remembered me. I am human wallpaper.

That's all I want my story to be, nowadays. A nothing. A nobody. A never. I feel like from such a vantage point I could build a substantial existence. At present, I exist in too many stories at the same time. The matrix of possibility has been withered by reality. I can’t keep up with all of these stories. It would be nice to downsize. So many more things would be possible without the weight of history pressing down on my ruined shoulders for all eternity.

Will these chronicles only be part of another identity that I have to abandon in search of something more functional? Will you, rare person reading this, be some words in that new story when you tell somebody about reading this strange thing?

How would you edit your story, or would you change a thing? If it's perfect, could you e-mail it to me? I might be able to do something with that.

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About the Creator

Sam Swaim

Cybernaut and podcaster. Tongue is in cheek at most times. Profile image forthcoming. I'm edgy in that I want to dance on every razor's edge.

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