America’s Agreeable Little Psycho

Putting the shovel down a little too late.

I think life takes something from me. Something like a tax, or bill; a continuous payment of some kind just for living. And maybe life takes something from you too, but I’m not you, I’m me, and just know, if you’re being taxed, I am being taxed double. And the stakes on my life just keep getting higher, so guess what? That tax we were just discussing, that keeps getting higher too. All this sun and sweat; all these rosaries, come at a price. The pretty girl who told me I couldn’t get sexier, that bagel being the best one I’ve had all week, my strong black coffee with honey; nothing seems better. Until the tax comes. Until that dreadful, elongated bill. Turns out, all those payments I received were just loans. Apparently life can get much, much better than this. I guess you don’t really know about wealth until what little you have is taken from you. I’ve been on this Earth for what feels like 2,000 years, and I reckon I’ll be here 2,000 more. And as I told [redacted] from my car on a weekday night with no stars, and what felt like, no streetlights either, I’m immortal and I’ll never die. I told [redacted] I’d watch everyone around me go, I’d watch mother nature swallow everyone whole with no remorse, but spit me back out. Everyone would go to that sunny, rainbow, grassy-field place, and I’d still be surrounded by pollution and poison ivy, and maybe even wasps too. When I told her this, I initially thought I was invincible. Like a god, or some foreign entity that could not be killed. I thought I defied laws of death and hell and heaven; I thought I defied mortality. Now, I just feel punished. Like someone forced to stay somewhere they don’t want to be for eternity. My own kind of hell, maybe. Like Sisyphus, who’s still pushing up that boulder and watching it fall down again, Like Kafka, still writing stories no one will hear till he’s gone, and me too. I’m a lot like Kafka in that way. I think it was a condition I was born with. Anyways, I told my sister that I feel like my life’s a TV show and everyone’s screaming “no!” at the TV while I do things I definitely shouldn’t. She said, confused, that she didn’t understand what I meant. As far as she’s concerned I don’t have a life at all, let alone an interesting enough one to write a TV show about. Well, I’ll tell you now that I thought about that for quite a while. Then I realized that people only know things about me that I want them to. Maybe that’s why Lyric questions my authenticity. I’ll tell you something that happened to me years after it happened, with not a care in the world, because I didn’t want you to know then but I don’t mind you knowing now. She doesn’t know a whole lot, but no one else does either. I just pray all the people in my life never get together and discuss me as a topic. But that’s my thing, isn’t it? I tell you just enough that you don’t ask the important questions. I make sure I never have to say anything revealing about myself. You’ll look up one day and realize that you don’t know much about me, and infact, you never even asked. But by that time, I’ll already be gone. This is all a bit weird and a little borderline also, but you must understand I firmly believe that to know me is to hate me. So, the good thing about me is that you’ll get all the good, and never the bad, because, well, I’ll be gone before you know it. Everyone in my life knows my favorite thing to do is disappear. I’m real good at it too. Real good. I’ll say I love you for the first time as a parting gift. I’ll say “I do” to see you smile one last time. A miserable girl I can be. Touched with melancholy. Touched with coldness. Only lightly grazed by love. All that messy, gory, gray-area stuff that makes us all human, that’s not how I was built. I look at people like time periods. I’ll date him a month and I’ll be in her life just until she finds a forever friend. I’m real nice, real friendly, real agreeable; friends come easy. I’m a kind-hearted person too, even though it doesn’t seem like it in light of this story I’m telling. I just know I’m only to be taken in small doses. I’m trying to help, for what it’s worth. I disappear so smoothly you won’t even realize I’m gone. The real cool part about this all is that you’ll look back at me later with no bitterness, only fondness, because I love you, and you’ll feel it even years after I’m gone. When I bump into someone I’ve left behind, I’m always happy to see them, and they always seem happier to see me. Still, maybe I’m really digging myself a hole here, so let me put this shovel down before I become America’s most loved, and most agreeable, little psycho.