Deep Purplization Disorder

The days have been very long. I lose hours like a hemophiliac losing blood. My mind is numb and tired, cramping like the clenched fist of the old man at sea, holding fast to a line. The line holds a fish, that holds the man. All of us, prisoners. 

Fatigue pulls at my eyelids, applies ice to my fingers while I try to type. My mind, a sleeping ocean, without waves; without motion. I try to stir it, to break the surface tension, but it remains placid and impenetrable, a great glass mirror.

I stare into it, trying to glimpse sight of myself in what lurks beneath, but I see only my vacant reflection. Narcissus' death wasn't of vanity. It was suicide. A self sacrifice to the water; thirst for knowledge and understanding, for freedom from uncertainty and fear...pain; absolution. 

So much of our lives are spent moving away from pain and sadness, if only we were all masochists; we'd always be happy. That we run so quickly toward happiness and everything soft is almost a kind of mental-illness. All of us know life is suffering, Buddha fucking told us so! Yet we keep grasping, keep clutching, the blood in our muscles aggregating in stagnant puddles, bloated and hard, until we're fooled into thinking the sensation of pins and needles is actually feeling.

With each passing day this week I feel more and more my personhood loses circulation, like an arm I've slept on and can no longer raise. It almost feels like I've been administered small, imperceptible amounts of some substance that simulates depersonalization disorder. Maybe they add it to the water at work. It keeps the employees unconcerned with their personal affairs as their sense of self dwindles and vanishes, like a word erased on chalkboard. 

What if instead it were deep purplization disorder? I'd want my theme music to be Smoke on the Water. I'd play it loud for every occasion, especially the inappropriate ones: walking out of the bathroom with the sheet of toilet-paper you had used to line the toilet seat tucked into your underwear, hanging out behind you where your pants meet your shirt, trailing you like a streaming ribbon of shame. Or when you go to take a sip of water and somehow swallow it incorrectly, precipitating an embarrassing fit of violent coughing and choking. Or falling up the stairs with your lunch in your hands, sending a steaming bowl of clam chowder spiraling into the air in slow motion, the contents of the bowl sloshing out and raining down upon the crotch of your new black slacks, creating the appearance of a sloppy accidental ejaculation, just as the cute girl at the office turns the corner to see you with your face contorted as you cry out like a mentally handicapped child with a speech impediment, cooing spastically like a baby and tumbling downward as you fail to ascend the stairs, all while the DUHH DUH DUHHH of the guitars echo off of the ears of mortified onlookers. 

Oh how I'd trade it for depersonalization disorder at that moment.