A Normie's Guide To Mind-Reading | ONC 2023

Sixteen ∆ Acceptance Is The Last Step To Denial

I am turning into water.

Gradually.

If it were quick like everyone else, it isn't torturous fun. That's the most convincing reason I can come up with anyway.

First impressions present this as a wonderful opportunity. I wouldn't have spiders of smoke crawling all over my body, for one. And I can finally experience what it's like to disappear from the surface of the world and remain the last human on Earth, courtesy of my older self. I hope he's returned to being human. There's nothing terrifying about beach balls.

That's what people said before a sentient tyre blew their heads off, hair extensions killed them and possessed jeans ripped them into pieces. It's like that Ryū Murakami quote my older self mentioned. The only good thing that comes out of drowning is I can no longer hear him. Or he cannot access the sea.

I have found myself, and now what? The illusion of the self comes apart.

I am both the subject and object of interpretation. My fingers merge with the water. Before I entered the water, the water was already in me. Something to that effect was preached by Thich Nhat Hanh as interbeing. So it makes sense when tingles ripple throughout my being even when I am still not fully water. I do not have to fully be water to sense the ticklish strokes of spider legs, in which ticklish is the understatement of the century to ensure the mind mixes up fear and amusement.

It's not merely a matter of changing states. The more fluid I become, the more invasive and intrusive the thoughts (most of which I can hardly consider my own, for they come without context and speak in plentiful tongues) and I can hardly conjure a plan against my older self. Nothing can be more absurd than trying to defeat a beach ball. Even the world's best overthinker will surrender to their flights of fancy. Albert Camus, Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera will be proud.

Listing famous names, or rather, the act of naming, carries a devious magnetism that compels the spiders to latch onto me. They crawl all over my face, my chest, my belly button and my ass. At this point, my limbs are no longer solid.

Their hairy legs sink into my flesh and bubbles shoot out where flesh once was, accompanied by serpentine trails of blood, a cooling yet warm sensation like choking on watermelon in a furnace. The perforation in my bedroom saw through a volleyball game between spiders. This time, my spherical chunks snowball on their smoky backs while a million tiny holes pepper what remains of my body, which isn't a lot. A spider had gouged out an eye, three ate my nose and penetrated whatever's underneath, five of them were diligent tooth fairies... I am becoming water piecewise.

Some distance away, a frazzled ball of light silently observes my operation. It would be nice to have some anaesthetic. I never knew Singapore had anglers. Not that it could save me. It would probably approach me thinking I'm a school of awkward fishes and the spiders are some hi-tech fishing net. Hopefully, none of the thoughts swirling around me belong to the angler.

Of course, that's a false hope.

Almost one with the sea, I can feel the angler's wobbly movement as it approaches at the speed of a lumbering bear in a honeyed forest. Meanwhile, the flesh ball the spiders are constructing can easily rival my older self's giant beach ball ego in size. Rolling the flesh ball merrily like dung beetles and their dung, the smoky spiders leave me with one eye, as if to say my body is now the sea, the incoming angler, the rocks, the beach, Singapore, the world at large—

Except it is no angler. It's a thought-Frankenstein in the form of an angler, thoughts spun into words of various languages such as Thai, Chinese, Hebrew, Tamil, Estonian, etc., etc., and a couple spiders are riding them, pulling it by the esca. Perhaps I could forgive them for turning me into a trypophobic delight. I should be able to forgive them and not be disgusted by the casual manner in which they slap my skin and flesh and bones onto the angler.