I’ve got a theory. I think that, maybe, in the middle of the night, a small, nearly undetectable earthquake shook the acoustic guitar off the stand. That’s when the guitar must have fallen face-first onto the beige tiled floor, the tensile explosion blasting the strings off their pegs.
That snapping must have come from an inordinate need to separate. The guitar strings must have been weak already, just the one nickel vein at their core keeping them from slashing the retinas out of my eyes during an intense, poorly composed chord progression.
That’s probably when they snaked their way into my room and dug themselves under my finger nails. There were only enough strings for one hand and a thumb, but it still hurt. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. How could I have been so stupid as to not wear those chain mail gloves that the postman got me for my birthday?
Now I’ve got wires sticking out of my fingernails, thrashing around violently like the tentacles of the Architeuthis, windshield-wiping the flesh away from the bed of my nails and lifting them off like calcium carjacks.
Sometimes the wires predict the present. They speak in nearly inaudible pitches like tuning forks of spider silk filament. They wriggle their way into my ear and tell me things about the present. For all the ulcers they give me, there is an equal exchange of incredible gifts I may have never been bestowed during my short lifetime.
For instance, just tonight they did something incredible. I was up and staring at the blaring blue light of my computer screen when the wires began to dance. I was tired, but I didn’t want to go to sleep. The dancing intensified and the wires found their way to my ear, where — in their special little tinkling language — they told me that I should go to sleep.
And so I did, because I always heed the wires. The wires may give me more ulcers if not. They may give me cancer or hepatitis or just jaundice in order to trick me into thinking that I have, this time, for real, destroyed my liver.
And you know what? The next day I woke up feeling refreshed after dreaming that I had been drafted in the army and was sent to Afghanistan in a large torpedo.