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It still burns me inside but you know what?
I don't care.

I am not dead yet so I exist. I just go. I move with the tides of time.
If life is such a vengeful, careless bitch why should I be any different?
Was I ever any different?

I just sit in a junky room alone with my thoughts and I waste my time on nothingness that numbs my pain.

There were several times when I thought that I truly can into meaningful achievements.
After that it was a time when I though I can just retire and just be myself, if I can manage to find myself.
Now I know that I cannot do neither and I just try to plan ahead -- more than it's rational.

Or not.
Time will tell.

Another day, and I indulged in my other side, remembering things from my previous life, when I hit the page I didn't look at for ages.
Well, shit.
I see dead people.

When I created a folder on my then very outdated PC somewhere around 2009, or was it 2010? When I did it, I didn't think it will come to that.

I had written you off decades ago and I was right, but seeing your grave is still hurting me, because I never thought that will come to this.
I should have, no, I must have ignored even more people. As it if matters.
As if anything in this life matters.

We will all go under, just as you have done.
Sooner or later.
We all will.
Everything will perish eventually.

But you did it sooner.

WTF I am even doing here.

it flashes before my eyes while I am trying to delve into the intricacies of the dirty dataset I try to wriggle its secrets from.

It flashes before my eyes like a epileptic kaleidoscope of madness, the blend of VR and IRL, crazy but infinitely attractive, a fire and I fly towards it...

...Fire. It burns, fumes are slowly drifting to the silent Greek sky. The gravel is splashed with black, the stray rubbery tire quietly rots near the gates.
It keeps us warm through the cold nights on the mountain P, when I point my camera at it and it blends into the sensor with warm, spleen-like patterns.
It is inside, scorching me this night.
It is i^WAnd then we're all done for.

I should not have become fake.
I should have stayed genuine BUT
I was so fucking tired of it.

At that fateful time, pretty young and already obsessed for years, losing chances after chances after chances, constantly caught between vivid flashbacks and grueling, desperate work -- I was losing it.
I was losing it so much I barely had any will to live.
I needed something, just fucking something to make me feel better.
I found it and it cursed me. Maybe blessed me. But it certainly cursed me, all that talk about blessing and curses makes me remember what I was at that time and how much I deserved it.
Understanding it doesn't change the outcome.
I thought I would die before this moment but alas.

I was pretty unhinged in the last years.
I think it is time to become hinged.

Even if it hurts as fuck, who cares.

Where are those -- free, bright, genuine, where are they now... how were they calling themselves?
M-something? M-someting-M? M-something... nah, can't forget without having a shot.

Anyway, ye'r asking where are they?
Dead.
All of them, more or less, some just like that, killed in the hail of horrific events, some succumb to the cocoon of the inner emigration, and the happiest of them are building a new life elsewhere. They will never be -- never be that anymore. A force.

But why? The future? They were the future! Their future.
Well, who knows, buddy?
They killed the future. Now they have no future.
Ans us? Do we have one?
Remains to be seen.

And then I slowly go to sleep, fairly depressed.

I was living in a haze,
Lost in sweetened disguise,
Met by people that don’t exist at all

I thought my life was a blaze
Amidst the tides that rise
I saw them all, I saw them fall

Then I wake up in sweat, dang I am retarded
I had made all my bets, now my life is sharded
I’m just paying my debts to be found discarded
In the graveyard for pets I am reduced to shreds and I have lost common sense I had, but lost my one chance to not be lost in the dense, and now I’m lost in suspense for being lost is my trance that brings me over the fence

I glitch, and then I’m inside.

"And I don't hold killing me against you, I told you as much."
In those stony days of the n-ties, it was all different.

He didn't. And that old, frail lady who was surrounded by her close ones, was not, strictly speaking, the one who had left him for dead in the grass of the midnight park.

Another dialogue, m years ago, with those pesky officials plays in his head
- but she left you to die, didn't she?
- Only because I asked her to. She was about to...
- People are judged by their actions, not intentions.
- My action was to ask her to let me die, then. Go judge me on that in addition to...

They all knew what he did.
And they all knew who killed him.
He calculated it perfectly.
Win-win.

Last days of The Bridge,
I am full of cringe
There are six of us really,
We’re crossing the ridge

The ridge to the ditch,
My memories glitch,
I go down the stairs
And I open my fridge

I blink, then I flinch
For just within my reach
There’s one little bottle
Of poisonous bleach

Our time has no mercy,
Our time had been up,
We just aren’t worth it
We’re going to pop

Shit.
This day is so fitting for the last vacation day.
Bad news all day, dialogues overheard that threw me in the abyss of flashbacks afterwards.
I want to vomit, to make it all different, fuck it, to smoke, to leave it all behind.. Not to leave it behind, dammit it is physically hurting me, I think I am back to the 2008 levels of madness.
I want just to burn it all, erase all of the data so carefully stored and live on a farm somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

Instead I would try to fit 4 weeks of AI courses in 6 hours, and prepare for tomorrow.

I am a fucking coward, a hypocrite, a weakling and a traitor.
It never hurt me more to know it than today, but tomorrow it might hurt me more.

Fire eats me, it eats me slowly but steadily until I forget to breathe...
I drift off to sleep.
I wake up.
IT is standing over me, around me, tormenting me, playing with me like a diligent cat with a stupid mouse, imitating the strikes that never happen.
And then I wake up.
I try to relive the vibes and peer into the archives with blind eyes, until...
Until I find another line to tug to spill the burning sands of time on my gentle skin.
Fuck, it hurts.
Suppressing the desire to curl into a ball, I desperately turn on the music while I still have some sanity left in me to do it.
It calms me down for a while.
Then I go here and write it down.
As if it helps.
It actually might.
I should stop.

In retrospect, I had good reasons not to die.
I still might have them.

I might.

Unfamiliar sounds bring memories I am not supposed to have, I don't have, I can't have.
I go full paranoiac and start checking every nook and cranny for the sound source, like in <censored> <censored> years ago.

At night I am listening to Maes, the Moroccan lad I picked up on in Paris, speaking to LLMs about the weirdest of stuff instead of playing Skyrim or doing labs -- because I can.

It all would not have happened if I had ended my life those n years ago.

It's not why I think I had reasons not to die.
Those reasons lie outside of me (yes I am Cartesian as fuck and so what?)

There is only emptiness inside.

My will to live is at the lowest point since 2008.
Probably, significantly lower than that.

I kind of want to vomit and die.
To vomit all of my personalities, all the incompatible di-tri-quadro-tomies of irreconcilable mess that the current version of me seem to be.
To die afterwards, because what's left is just black emptiness.

It's 2005, and we walk with my cousin on the disrepaired street towards city center.
We see a fresh body on the street, someone fell off the window apparently.
"shit, bad luck" -- I say.
A sexy, but indifferent blonde from the Motorola ad is looking at the scene with an empty, pointless expression.
It's 2006 and we are at the mountain P.
It's 2007 and I drown in the rainwater from above.
It's... It's...
I wake up suddenly in 2024.
It's not me.
It never was.

It feels wrong, indulging in guilty pleasures at the time like this, and yet
It clears me head.
It makes me understand the way.
Or maybe, the absence of it, the void I am looking into, the feeling of being damaged goods as much as I am.
I need days upon days of sleep, and yet I spend hours upon hours up at night, trying to hydrate and sort out the clusterfuck that my life is.

I want to smoke
To drink
To... forget? No, rather to numb it.

And then...
I look at the window.
I don't remember closing the curtains.
The curtains. Why.
And my paranoia kicks in, and I am rushing to reconstruct the last few hours of my whereabouts and interactions to search and fill the gaps.

I went through the half-closed doors under the rays outside.
Defeated, weak and crippled, with my escape undone, I felt 15 years younger, in the hostile, soulless City that doesn't care, doesn't give a single damn about anything at all.

But I am 15 years older now, slowly pushing myself into the mindset I hoped to never have again, into the logical continuation of everything after that evening on the empty motorway when I understood that my escape was in vain.
"Fuck, but I escaped, Lachesis! I escaped!"
For this to happen? Really?
Really.

And now I am getting ready to go through the half-closed doors under the rays outside.
Fuck it, I'll do it for as long as it is needed.
As long as I can.

click.
kickback and the sharp pain in the injured hand.
Rinse and repeat.

After half of my life, vengeance is still something that is served chilled, even frozen, if I may.
I may.

Flashbacks flash, the road is disappearing under the wheels like the vinyl track under the needle, while the sun burns the surrounding to crisp.
I stare in the merciless sky through the stained window of the navette.

Trying to breathe in the smoke of the never-lit cigarette I never bought, I calm down.
I break down.
I calm down.
I break down.

Like a mechanism on its last legs, I need maintenance, care and restoration.
Instead, I will get the service life extension, signed on paper by someone who never saw things

1400, 100, 32, 128, 40, 28000, 95, 98, 2000.
Even when you leave only the numbers, it is still quite obvious to most who care.
I even asked AI, and it guessed it, albeit with the direct tip on the topic.

I keep returning over and over to it, as if there is no tomorrow and no yesterday, only that moment, forever etched in the stillness of the frozen times.
It is not.

Do I care?
During Covid, I had a respite and I used it -- not optimally wise, but wisely anyway, on reflections and self-analysis, on delving into the depths of the past seeking the pearls of enlightenment.
Silly it was that I've found only the goo of times, the bedrock of lies, and the ossified excrements of my past selves.

Nah sorry, not really.
I should have been dead to be happy, as much of a paradox that is.

In a very young age, I had my paramount happiness, and the grief as well.
I just can't do it anymore, I can't be it anymore, and for a very long time.

Things had changed so much in those years few people recognize the things that were typical, and yet...

Old clips still can rip my receptors like nothing new.
That drive for self-destruction and obsession with rot and death were not unfounded -- look at where we are now? Wasn't it just better to off ourselves at the time it was really popular?

I don't really know who I am anymore, and it lasts for the better half of my life.
Silly.

Fuck I didn't realize how much of a damaged goods I am.
This page did become a touch of depressive, and I had become rather dull and depressive myself, but every fucking time I see something that triggers this throbbing pain in me, I feel it all anew.
I'm standing at the tram stop half of my life ago and I beg the Gods of the Universe silently not to take it all away.

But they are unmoving and they undeniably don't give a damn about my wishful thinking.

Ethically ambiguous topics, they call them, huh?
People should care less about their egos and more about explaining the whys and hows -- and listening, listening, listening...

But do I follow this advice myself?
No.

Shit.
Weep and die.
It's 2010 again, and I receive a phone call from a friend.
She doesn't seem to be aware who I even am, just surprised by unknown number in recent SMS, not remembering who I was -- all amid me slowly losing my sanity, and forgetting things constantly.
I freak out.
14 years later, in my head there's about 4 versions of reality that happened that day, and I don't know which of those I live in.
6 years prior, I witness the same person forget about someone else so completely that the very reflexive behaviors that were related to him disappear.

There are chains of events I want to off myself thinking about.
This is not one of them.
Thinking about it, I wish I had never existed.

Your orders.
The plaque stares me in the face from the WQHD screen.
Your orders?
*I stand on the empty concrete, the rain is moving slowly to the southwest, the smell of burnt rubber and dust mixed with rainwater, the car is off road trailing wisps of smoke, and the lads chatting in the background*

What am I even doing here.
WHAT AM I FUCKING EVEN DOING HERE?

My game plan fucked everything up for the what? umpteenth time, and I am staring to the old photos, that remember me -- the traitor, the confused and the mortally ill.
Now, when the hair on my balls had grown white with age, I stare in the past and I curse it all.

To be happy, you need to follow yourself.
But I understood it too late.

Pain, mixed with joy, and again with pain
The hardest part of my life, internally, that had changed me, but in retrospect...
Maybe it was necessary learning.
Fuck, people, some primal part of me wants to yell "AAA BE FUCKED", but instead I consciously say silent prayers for Gods-know-whom -- "Please, be happy. Please, have it in you."
You had enough shit already, and please just live the happiest of lives possible.
I hope that's the best end of your story, c**d.
I was not there when it mattered the most for you, but I am glad that others were.

I will walk the cliffs today, and think of you, and yours. If I could bless, you would have had all my blessings.

Don't look back. Even I try not to.

Eat me alive, burn me down, erase me,
Do it in style, turn around then chase me,
Make me believe that I almost got out of this mess
End my reprieve with a crackling snap of my chest

Make me believe that I almost had it
Make me relax so I almost get it
Mock my despair, so I almost lose it
Whisper the words in my ear, "You choose it"

I am alone, and yet mad with people
They are like stone but I cannot flake them
My heart is locked, but they've got the needle
They are like gurus, I cannot fake them

Nights follow up with days, all empty.
Thoughts follow up with rage, all useless.
Anger's discounted today. I have it.
Sanity's scarce in this age. I lose it.

I see the Arrogance.
They forgot. They noticed.
They don't want to notice that The Integrity.
It is broken.

The pieces of perceptions.
The Wisdom. The Critique.
They obliviate me by ignoring me,
But only the most unwitting of fools can think
THAT I DO NOT SEE IT!!!!!

Maybe, I am paranoid.
Maybe, I always was.
But only the blind can't notice
The psychomental BLACK HOLE in your
Righteous, pure doglike eyes...

The sky rips my receptors apart.
(me, 2008)

I can't describe it, I can't describe it to this day.
It is alive inside me, I just need to look at the documents for the period and the nausea overwhelms me.
I am there again, too weak and dumb to change things.
I want to die.