It’s easy to get wasted on success and stop, satisfied, cruising on the feeling of completion, and sometimes, there is a point in life where you are accepted. For brief moments in your years, there are times when you forget the almost constant darkly funk of despondency that surrounds and consumes you; every so often, you will actually notice the tinge of orange on the edge of the otherwise starkly red flower.

            I was young once, and I used to laugh and mean it. I didn’t laugh because things were funny, I laughed because things were so exciting and fun that laughter was literally pushed out of my lungs. The woods behind my house were filled with mosquitoes and glass and thorns and trash and I trampled through them anyway. I didn’t know, yet, how sad I was. If I could slip into the past and whisper one thing into my ear, I would let myself know that there was no point in trying to enjoy life; the let-down would be coming soon enough.

            I don’t want God to think he got me, so I don’t believe in him (even if it’s only out of spite). I imagine the giggles he gets out of watching the people in their churches, praying, thinking they bought their ticket with a buck in the collection plate; if I was God, I wouldn’t share. And so far, I haven’t. So every day I write new people, sometimes familiar faces, and I like to hit them with cars. There are many ways to kill a man, but the shock of a car slamming into a body and fracturing everything, splitting open skulls and popping hearts and deflating lungs, reducing the man to a heap of guts and floppy, useless appendages, it’s very satisfying. God likes disease and cancer. It’s natural, and I think he likes that. I try to avoid using God’s creations because I don’t want him to think I’m copying him (even if, in all actuality, I am).

            Monkey see, monkey do.

            I could torture my people, I suppose, if I really sought agony from my work; I could torture them and rape them and spit on them and leave them in the desert, but that’s just sick. I love the worlds I write, and I love the people that live in the lines.

            When I was a kid, I didn’t know I could kill them. I created them and I loved them and they loved me and they did things that I couldn’t do and hey, I got jealous. I got jealous, I did. So, people died. At first, people… almost died. There were a lot of close encounters but they always came back after a little pain and a little suffering. At one point, amid the crayon boxes and multi-chrome action, there was a beating that became so severe that one of them stopped fighting back and just took the punches and kicks and went limp and bled out and then he was dead.

            That afternoon, I took a little time to make a replacement. It wasn’t hard, I was energized and pumped and excited and pretty impressed with myself; the process of creation wasn’t difficult when I could get to that heightened feeling of glee. It was a drug, a jolt of power running through my veins, and I got hooked. Not right away, really, I guess I just played with it for a while, allowing months and weeks between slayings, but as the years flopped by like un-bowled goldfish, my cast began to decay. Eventually, I was actually killing them directly at the point of creation.

            Very few of the original characters still exist. Some still walk the streets and cross on red lights; I fear for them. I know I cannot love them forever as strongly as I do now, and I don’t love them as strongly as I once did. Love is temporary. Their deaths give so little pleasure, now, that characters must constantly be ushered into the flow of traffic and one day, in one desperate attempt to feel, the ones I still cling to will be crushed, just to try to clutch at some of that fleeting joy.

            I’m waiting for my own car to come. It’s tense, stressful waiting for lights to change. I’m naturally impatient, but I know there are certain places that are worth the wait. I want to step out into the road and get across as quickly as I can, but God looks for humor and joy anywhere he can. He’ll hit me with a car because he’ll think it’s hilarious. I know he’s paying attention; we love the bitter, disparaging ones the most. They’ve got a certain rebellious nature that makes us pay extra special attention.

            Him and I, we’re a team, but we don’t work together. He will kill me one day; I would kill him, if I could. We have similar goals, similar habits.

We can hurl planes at buildings and make people scatter, and when they can’t run anymore, when their fear weighs their feet to the earth, they’ll fall to their knees and pray to us, at least for a little while. And when they think they’re on their own, when they try to say that they’ve been abandoned, what can we do except lash out? When they start to sever my control, when they begin move all on their own, how can I gain their faith in me except by showing them the insides of their bodies so that they understand how intricately I designed them? What am I supposed to do? I do what he does. We do it together.

 Life overlaps and falls apart and is eventually forgotten altogether because you are dead, and your family is dead, and your friends are dead. It is something we come to expect, or maybe deny, but it is truth. Sometimes, if you are miserable and rotten enough, you can almost expedite the process without even dying; you can simply alienate yourself and the world will try to deny you even existed. Rain is a perfect example of a temporal flush, perfect in motivation and failure. Even after all the wetness and death and rearrangement of all the dirt on the streets, nothing has changed and nothing has truly moved. The grass grows until it rots and the bodies pile up in the dirt, but with or without breath, they all flow back and it restarts, never ending, never really beginning.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this. You know this, I know this, he knows this, we all know it. I just want Pyou to feel worse today. I can’t kill you, and it probably wouldn’t be as satisfying if I did. You’re his, and I am too. We can kill each other and we know that we’re stealing… I guess some people get off on that kind of thing. I have some respect for private property, especially when it’s as valuable as we can be.

No. It’s not about hurting you. There is a point to all of this, and, like in life, it gets buried under the weight of knowledge.