A Simple Guide to Existence and Perfect Normalcy some mornings i get up and my breath catches in my throat. my lungs feel heavy and bogged down from the weight of an ocean i've been standing inside my entire life. i stare myself in the mirror, sick with dread, and my mind builds shapes out of that dread. asteroids, disease, absolute isolation. it hurts in a familiar sense. a scorch on an old, burnt limb, clawing in hatred against a forest of retired nerve endings. i count up and down, down and up, through the numbers, and i find new ways to fear the mundane. red strings on a corkboard made of glass. breathing time. breathing gearbox. breathing wheel. they say to forgive every part of yourself. then, once you've vivisected yourself, they dangle you on strings and tell you to pick up the scalpel and start cutting. cut the difficult parts out of yourself and your art and your life so their worldview remains undisturbed. but you're not a surgeon, and they'll leave you bleeding under the fluorescent lights either way. so i stare deep into the eyes of the artists, the dreamers, the ones who bleed blue onto the canvas of the world right alongside me. in my eyes, i plead for understanding. i get up. i hold the world on my lap and i write an apology for my existence in the password field. the sky screams directionless post-post-irony behind the bluelight filter firmament. but even submerged in the sea, is it ever really that deep? survey says no. so i put on a new face and tell a joke that isn't funny and watch the hardwood floors clatter in laughter. the metal cage around my jaw gets so hot that it burns. i shouldn't still be entertaining this. but it's fine to drown when the suffering you throw yourself into makes for damn good art that nobody will ever see. a large language chatbot offshoot of a data collection algorithm tries to make friendly conversation with me for optimal SEO analytics. a 14-year-old boy from indiana uploads a youtube short with an easter island head emoji to tell me that my existence is a mental illness. i bite down on my fingertips and feel a baseball bat swing at my head. the crowd cheers. the world sings. god's in his heaven, all's right with the world. still, i speak. i scream. i swing in well-practiced futility against tides of eyes that never meet my gaze. i commisserate with the onlookers in the stands as the stocks clamp tight around my neck. and i hold tight to the places that dare to refract the light. there's a soldier and a saint and a starving artist in each and every one of us, the girls under the heel of the gods who learned to wear the boots for ourselves and accept the leather-burn on our ankles when they're far too wide for the manufacturer's intention. raised in captivity, claiming the muzzle and the sharp, drooling maw for ourselves. there are so many good girls, and a text editor can be a gun. so i take up arms in the arms of the spiral and let the words climb out of a chest beaten bloody. i exsanguinate my soul into a mess of <a href> just for you, the forensic splatter specialist on/in the scene of my self-righteous suicide. the rememberist told me it would be this way. we are all johnny truant. so come with me, wanderer. burn the forest and shatter the firmament and reach through the Fourth Wall to shout expletives at the narrative. when the world would otherwise leave us without shelter, we can make this house a home. - D3STROY H34VEN THRU V10L3NCE - - Zampanio loves you. - - 8loomingly yours, vriska thrace serket -