another revealed truth

failed effort

trigger warnings listed in opening author's note

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the date and time are a mystery that karl can't even begin to solve, not when his phone has been out of charge for an incalculable period of time and he can't be asked to plug it in.

he can't imagine that anyone is trying to contact him anyway, since they'll all be too busy with their happy christmases and happier families and other happy things that he doesn't quite understand.

that side of life is lost to him, so he doesn't bother to go searching for it. instead, he tries to learn to live with the quiet nothingness of his own sad existence.

karl has spent his days thinking back on fond memories and trying his best to pinpoint when his life started to get bad again. of course, it was never exactly good, but he feels like he sees bright days in his past where he can't predict them in his future.

it's little things that he misses, like going around george's house as teens and spending hours playing sims and making sims of all of their school peers just to make fake drama on the video game. they're too old for that now, and karl doesn't have the motivation, and george doesn't have the time.

if karl was a sim, the diamond above his head would be bold red.

he's so hungry, and he knows he smells, and he really needs the toilet. plus he's had no human interaction or any type of entertainment for days now.

what happens when all of a sim's needs run out?

he also finds himself feeling sadder and sadder every time he thinks of a new art concept. he's always had the best ideas when he's deep in his depression, but it sucks when he doesn't even have the motivation to make them something real. he can't even be bothered to write down his ideas to come back to another time, so he just keeps forgetting them all and coming up empty-handed at the end of the day when he eventually passes out from exhaustion.

he wants to self-harm too. like, so desperately.

his blade has blood on it though and it looks... bad. karl can't put a label on it, but the blade does not look safe to use - ironic. he doesn't have the energy to clean it, and he definitely doesn't have the energy to break out a new one, and he seriously doesn't want to go through the effort of dealing with an infection, so he hasn't been cutting either.

he hasn't been doing anything, really.

karl thinks that the top two issues right now are his hunger and his need to use the bathroom, and he starts to silently prepare himself to fix those problems before something bad can actually happen.

he's not even starving himself on purpose, he just ran out of food in his room and he can't be bothered to get up to get something so he hasn't eaten since... whenever he last woke up... or maybe the time before then?

either way, the hunger inside him feels like it's starting to eat at his insides, and it's actually aching so much that he feels like he could vomit. like, he feels physically sick, which scares him because he knows he has nothing to throw up.