Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (Jalex)

Twenty Six - Distorted Views

Staring blankly at the plain wall confronting my eyes, I sniffed, scrapping my nails across my skull, remaining the perfect picture of calm as new ideas and uncertainty wrecked through my mind. Crap, I already thought about enough messed up insanity, and did not need to be completely reevaluating my entire existence. 

I’d finished organizing the neatly hung up clothes in my closet and paused the video playing on my laptop for entertainment three hours earlier, finding myself lacking anything to waste the rest of my night on. After spending ten minutes aimlessly wandering the house and stopping when my mom struck up a quick, meaningless conversation, I decided that I needed to be pulled out of myself and have a break from being me.

I knew that the most effective medium for successfully doing this was a book, and May had come home from the library the day before with a stack of novels, carelessly dumping them on our dusty dining room table and not yet having bothered to relocate them to a more sensible location. Like, maybe, the bookshelf. 

A quick jaunt to the toppled pile and scan of the titles produced a little book, barely a hundred and forty pages, that looked interesting and was focused a screwed up main character who both heard a voice and had a younger brother who’d accidentally killed himself. Extremely philosophical, quick and easy to read, perfect for distracting my mind from itself. Exactly the cure I was seeking out.

So I’d curled up with the short novel in my favorite chair with the mottled cushions shaped exactly to my limbs, curled up in a blanket, and flipped it open. I spent the majority of the story frowning at the pages with a  confused squint, trying to riddle out what was going on and decode the confusing plot.  

Basically, this kid had been fighting over the remote with his little brother when he pulled out their father’s gun and mistakenly shot himself. Years later, during the bulk of the tale, the main character went through this impressively average school day. He was bullied, pushed around, ignored, and ridiculed by his ex girlfriend, all the while being forced along and tormented by this singular voice leading him through the painful hours in his head. His life majorly sucked and he wanted it all to end, so he stole his mother’s prescription pills after getting home and downed the bottle.

This would be the end, if the voice in his head didn’t yell at him to wake up the next morning, and endlessly prompt him to repeat the exact same day. By the third do over, the protagonist realized that he was the one barking at his parents – who were just trying to be kind and help – shoving kids aggressively aside in the halls, and snapping at his ex for no reason.

It turned out that the day he was living over was the one year anniversary of his brother’s unintentional suicide, and when his old best friend wanted to meet up with him in the back stairwell, it was to ask if he was going to the memorial service, not beat him up. Despite discovering that he was the source of all his problems, the boy can’t control his preset actions, and still swallows the deathly medication.

Eventually, the book jumps forward three or four months, and it’s revealed that the main character had, in fact, attempted to end his life with those handfuls of lethal pills, unsuccessfully, and the voice was actually his therapist, coaxing him through the day he’d been reliving in a hypnotic treatment. This all led to him now knowing that it was by his own design that everything was dreadful for him.

Naturally, this completely and totally fucked with my head. It was a great book, for sure; I whipped through it in three hours with nothing fleeting through my mind except for the exclusive thoughts that were spotlight focused on the story. But I did not appreciate being subjected to ideas that scrambled my brain further than it already was due to its constant commotion.

Frowning, I allowed the book to fall closed, toppling out of my grasp and flopping into the crevice of the cushions. Rubbing a hand across my stubbly chin, I shifted further back into the chair, prick of pain appearing in the back of my head as I contemplated the reality of every slightly annoying or bad that that had recently happened to me. My eyes went hazy and unfocused, staring at some random point but not seeing, head tripping over itself to try to make sense of what I’d read and apply it correctly to my own life.