Be careful of the life game traps

They stand back and play with us like ants

Become a cog and guarantee

That your life's end will be happy

Knowing you contributed to society

Who cares that life was misery

At least you made it easier for me

What was your sacrifice for

Did you ever save anyone you adore

Tell me in the end

If it was all pretend

Just a placebo

That lets you know

You're a good person at your core

Helping us idiots stumble through life

What were you chasin

Some validation

And nothing more

Self-serving self-righteousnes

Is no different from selfishness

Those feelings that you get

Reminiscent of regret

Are only there because

That's just what guilt does

And you've always known

The reason that you've never grown

Is because you're only living for yourself

Anyway

So drop the mask

Leave it all back

And live truthfully

If you don't like who you are

Then change who you're meant to be

But one things for sure and that is you'd better stop lying to me

Its here

That time

Sleeping in

Doing crime

Back to beer

Saying I'm fine

Nothings clear

Running away

Nothing to run from

No one's here anyway

Eating too much

Yet somehow not enough

Want to die

But don't want to try

Boy brought a gun back over from the druggy neighbors

Think hes plannin something big for alla his haters

School always sucked as an easy target

Now his enemies linin up to be easy targets

Thought time with his dad might fix him from

Turn other cheek bull that his moms fed him

Be a better boy, tougher, heavy hitter no sissy slapper

Slappin only girls cheeks on the rear.

Now I don care that you're broke boy

Smoke green or spend a little on the car toy

Tickets for flyin down the freeway

Little faster than I dare without

Hearin sirens over the roar or seein

Red blue shadows in fear

For real I admit I'm impressed

But boy you about to see some gore

Ain't no body gonna look the same no more

Turnin backs not a path that's available

Your turnin points now and it's critical

Choose life without layin low forevermore

And more life for those peeps that you hate ,

Knockin on your brains front door

The more that you ignore

The more that they get bored

The past is gone

What you think you gonna fix

Nothin's gonna right their wrong

And stayin here

Ain't fear

Or falling for their tricks

Be strong

"What is this?" He asked.

"Oh, that- um… you found that," I said.

"I did. Is it…"

"Oh, um… I don't know."

"You don't know."

"Nope!"

"This is mine."

"Well, you did give it to me."

"But this part, this is my hair, I never gave you that."

"Well… yes."

"I suppose it's needed to work?"

"Yeah."

"And do you… you know; or, well, what I mean is, what do you do with it?"

"Oh, um… it depends."

"It depends?" That was the first hint of emotion he'd shown, the rest of it was actually very calm, or, nonreactionary. Is that a word? I was actually kind of hopeful. You know, that maybe… well, I guess I figured he wouldn't be too okay with finding his voodoo doll, but I guess I didn't really prepare for this sort of scenario actually. By all means, it was never really supposed to be found by anyone.

"Um, what were you doing in here?" I tried to make it nonaccusitory. Is that a word? It didn't work.

"Here? Like in your house? Cos you invited me here, I didn't know I was supposed to shield my eyes from your room as I ya know, pass by on my way to the freakin restroom."

Maybe I'd left it out. To be fair, this was close to the time he was supposed to be here. But to be fair again, the other way, it was two days away. Or, no, one. It was like him to want to, I don't know, surprise me? Did he still do surprises? Not really surprises, actually. Or, he didn't think so anyways. I know him. He just does a thing and is all yeah I did this why not ya know? But to other people, it can surprise them, shock them a bit sometimes. That's okay. I know him. He'd come around to the doll. I just needed to handle it correctly.

"I didn't mean that, I'm sorry, I thought you would be here… later, I guess."

"So that's when you'd show me, or maybe you were planning on just keeping it a secret."

I looked away. I didn't want it to go like this, I didn't want him to be angry. All the times we talked he was never angry. I thought seeing each other would start with a hug. It's not like I could get rid of it.

"Well, I don't know how to, you know… undo it. Like, without hurting you."

That worked. His temples softened, he looked away. Then back at the doll in his hands.

"When you hold it-"

"Him." Why did I do that? I could have just let him go on, and he looked surprised, but not angry anymore. Which was good. "I mean, it is you, too."

"You hold him by his left arm don't you?"

I looked at the doll, he was right. So it did work. I mean… I figured it did, but I didn't really have confirmation, not all the time, anyways. Hard to tell if he's reacting to it or something else when we did video calls. I nodded. He fiddled with it a bit, probably trying to feel it.

"You can't use him on yourself, it won't work. Someone else has to do it. I don't know. Maybe it won't work now that you know about it? I didn't read much about it."

"Didn't read much about it. Playing with my safety and you didn't read up on it." He was back to the calm tone he usually had… practiced. He practiced that tone. I know him.

"Well it… it wasn't really meant for… to be actually real anyways. He was more for, um… you know… me."

He was silent for a bit. He had his calm facade, but I saw past Those details. I know him. He was processing, I could see his gears turning, then they clicked into place, and I saw him understand.

I needed him. And he hadn't been there, but I still needed him. Even when there were others.

He turned the doll over in his hands a few times, "This is really intricate. He has all the fingers."

"You have all your fingers."

"He has balls?"

I might've blushed, "So do you."

"No toes though."

"You know how I am about feet."

He nodded. Set it on my dresser. That's where it had been, I remember now. I set him up to watch, like I would do on our video calls, only we hadn't done a video call that morning. I was rushed a bit for work, probably forgot him sitting there. Or, well, I must have, since he found him there.

"So," he put his hands in his pockets, he wasn't ready to see me yet, "back to: what do you do with him? I know you said it depends, just a short list."

This made me uncomfortable. It shouldn't have, the doll was him, and he was standing right in front of me, so it should've been easy. At that moment though, I realized it wasn't really really him, and I felt voyer-ish, like everything I'd done to him, I mean, the doll, had been done to him while sleeping or something. "Um, I dunno. I sleep with it, mostly. I like to trace my fingers along its arm. Sometimes I pinch it a little, not hard or anything, just that thing you do with skin sometimes. Uh, I dunno, I've showered with it, um… I set him up like I do with my phone on our video calls. I dunno, sometimes he just stays in the drawer."

He nodded slowly, "So you've never, like, used needles on it or hurt it or anything like that?"

I shifted my weight, trying to think, did I ever do anything like that? Maybe in the beginning. "Uh, well… um…"

"Okay, so you have. I'm still here, so it's fine. I'm just curious, I wanna know if I've felt it."

Those words. Fine. Curious. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, still waiting. I could see it in his eyes, all he wanted was the truth, some honesty. I know him. "Okay, so, I've never wanted to kill you or, like, permanently harm you you know? I got it from my grandma right after we, um… you know. So I was a little upset. And I get upset sometimes, you know that. And sometimes I'd get upset with you. I don't know, I've thrown him before. I've sat on him. I used to squeeze his wrists really hard. I've never put pins in him, I was always too scared to do that. Most of the time it's just yelling at him or crying on him. I'll bite him sometimes. I-" I almost told him about the time I peed on it a little, but it was just one time, and as I'd been telling him the list, it was feeling weirder and weirder, so I decided to stop, and I could feel some mistiness behind my contacts, so I looked away. He took his hands out of his pockets finally, and wrapped me in a hug. I felt swallowed by his arms and chest, he was warm, and he wrapped his own universe around my body and shut out the entire world. Everything we'd just talked about, it didn't matter. All that time away, it didn't matter. Every time I'd done anything that made me feel guilty, it didn't matter. Nothing mattered. Nothing existed. Nothing ever existed. Existence was this warm, cozy pressure with a rhythmic pulse, and there had never been anything else. I spent a lifetime there, suspended in a comfortable state of numb timelessness.

The warmth and pressure slowly subsided, and I was confused at first at the sight of a foreign alien world, then realized it was my room. He was standing in front of me, holding my shoulders gently. What had we just been talking about? I don't remember, we never talked about it again.

One hundred divided by three is thirty-three with a repeating three after the decimal. That means I have only thirty-three times left to say 'I love you,' and for only one of them can I add a 'too' on the end. All thirty-three times are reserved for one person, but I don't know if I'll ever be given the opportunity to use the 'too.'

"Lets break up," He said. At first I was taken aback, then realized he of course meant the roads in front of us. It didn't seem all that practical in hindsight. Then again, what ever really does? At the time though, it made some sense. The right path was narrower, a bit wiry, but looked like it cleared up ahead, and he didn't think he'd fit through the brambles. He wouldn't have fit; also hindsight. He would have cut himself on the brambles 'til he was empty of life juice, I'm sure of it. The left path was broader, but appeared to be on some downward slope, swallowed by the dark wall that hid everything behind it. I told him it was fine, we could make the right path work, push brambles out of the way, eventually find a way to make it through, but he reminded me that we have our phones, so if one of the paths doesn't work out, we could always try whichever path worked best.

I didn't like it. but he was already lumbering off into the dark, and I had already determined that I could make it through those tight bushes. So I went in.

At first, it was relatively easy. The unified path up to the divide was rough and only got worse until the split. The path felt quite like a spy movie, almost. Dodging and weaving around the dangers. A narrow miss here, a sly dance there. It became wearisome though, and I was constantly having to stop and rest. At some point, I tried calling him, but the reception was bad, and in the end we decided to continue on our decided paths. Continuing on, I did get scratched by a sharper thorn than the others. Maybe it wasn't sharper, but it did snag me, and I bled a bit. It was one of those scratches that doesn't hurt bad though, and the bleeding stopped quickly. I did try a berry once, but it was bitter, and left me dizzy. The bushes became thicker, and in frustration I swiped at them with my hands and rushed through a patch that was gnarly, and my hands wouldn't stop bleeding. I couldn't crawl like I used to, had to find other ways around and through the bushes, mostly unsuccessfully. Trampling only worked with some of the vines and overgrowth. I took my shirt off, ripped it in two and wrapped my hands in the cloth, but it did little to help; besides, there were leftover bits of thorn embedded deep in my palms, and my ragged red fingers did little to help with precision. Without my shirt, I thought I was able to move more swiftly, having to stop less to free the fabric from tiny horns on vines, but when I finally reached the end - a clearing that ended in the distance at a shoreline with the expanse of the entire ocean behind it - I looked down, and my body was covered in red lines, my undergarments crimson, and my body was numb. A buzzing sort of numb that let me know how little blood I had left flowing in my body. I could feel the cells scraping my veins begrudgingly, moving along because it had to, because that was its job, because if it didn't scrape its heels along the path to my heart and away again, what else would it do?

I found a tree and leaned on it, waiting for him. I gazed upon the ocean, daydreaming of his return, busied myself with the task of removing the thorns I could from my hands, braided grass, made a flower crown. Time continued to pass. I looked again at my body, and found scars. The ocean held a new pallor. The trees contained new growth, and all around me were old leaves that hadn't turned ay fall colors, they had simply fallen. I turned to my left, and for the first time since arriving at the clearing, realized that the other path deposited in this very spot. Standing to view the two path ends, the left one was full of thorns, and the right one was now the broad one descending into darkness.

After a moment of hesitation - why did I hesitate? - I ran into the mouth of the right path, pushing aside my fear of darkness to go looking for him.

The dark path had many roots, pitfalls, and hidden branches that seemingly attacked me, bruising me at every turn. When it levelled out, and offered some relief to the barrage of forestry, there was sometimes a trap. Surely it was only nature, but many times it felt manufactured.

Finally, when I thought I must have descended into some sort of cave with the amount of dark roughness around me, I spotted him.

He was sitting at the head of a grand table in the middle of the path, and in his left arm, he lovingly cradled his right arm, which had been cut off, hacked up, and sewn together to look like a small child. Some seats contained skeletons, some seats contained corpses with maggots spilling from their eye sockets, but dotted here and there were other people, alive and well, some jovial, some brooding, one of them was staring off into space, another faced backwards in their chair, trying to peer further into the darkness of the forest. On the table, the food situation was nearly the same condition as the bodies around it: old to new, rotting to fresh; in each of their cups however, was the same red liquid, and no matter how many drinks people took from them, the quantity within remained the same. I sat at the other head of the table, unacknowledged by any other member of the party. It were as though I did not exist. Calling out his name didn't receive so much as a glance from any person, no matter how sane.

A cup appeared before me, filled to the same level with the same liquid, and I realized with a sinking feeling, that in order to ever be able to speak to him again, I would have to drink as well.

My mind has better vaults. Better stores of memory which I can only access by punching the pin code and deciding to relive them. I used to say emotional bottles are made of glass, and overfull they will shatter. They have become vaults. If over-pressured, I need only to ensure that I am under no observation, and crack them open to experience a psychosis release of steam from their chambers.

In the day-to-day, the wandering of my thoughts through the halls of my psyche need not be bothered by any portion of my past which I do not wish to recall. The prodding of any party would need to be met with permission to my vault-tender, to the end that my own mother has asked me about specific portions of my past, and I have been unable to recall them, because the vault guardian said, 'no,' at the time.

Because of this, have I become a stronger, more healthy, robust, interesting, contributing member of society? No.

However, in response to the prompt, my ability to suppress my own being has indeed strengthened, and continues to be fortified, because my past has not yet killed me.

I deserve much more punishment, wrath, and rejection than I receive. But God has been good, and even when I feel as though I am being punished, rejected, or revenged upon, I am shown other delights which I do not deserve that shine through the bleakness of my existence, and how I perceive my life should be, in accordance with my actions throughout it: Painful. It should be never ending pain at every corner, but even when the pain is reigning in my life, I cannot help but notice the little blessings which remind me that I have it better than I should.

When you can actually see yourself and know who you are as a human being with all your tics and the lies you tell yourself and your habits and the lies you tell yourself about habits cause you to realize who you fundamentally are. It's like if you are a bubble of conscious thought -simply conscious thought, inorganic- and you've just been shown this stranger, but then you merge with the mind of this stranger and go through a vicious warring explosion of thought as you suddenly and violently become this person with a past and all these tics and flaws that are so obviously self destructive and mean and jealous so you want to get out but you can't cos it's… you.

So this was mostly about guilt for you; you have seen your two paths, one full, one without.

It isn't about deciding and there aren't two separate, well in your mind, worlds, you just shift between the areas

Fill your head with the trippy thoughts and you'll be doing the pretending along with all the other people.

Do ya stupid work, ya stupid laundry, and do ya stupid day.