It is Friday. Friday is beer day. I get a bunch of beers and I tell myself that I will only drink one. Then I drink six. All beers are gone by the end of Friday. That is why I don’t buy beers often.
When I open up my pantry, I see bread. It has many forms. Bread (bread-bread), pasta, asian noodles, oatmeal (a kind of soft, watery bread). I’m not so compelled to eat those breads. The bread won’t help me forget that I’m not well. The beer does. Beer is also a kind of bread, right?
I crouch down to the last row of the pantry, where there is a ziggurat of canned cat foods placed just so. I do not give much to my cats. It is a hassle. The little one doesn’t like it. The little one likes his food hard. He might like cocoa puffs or even stale cocoa puffs.
I refuse to feed him cocoa puffs because it would hurt him. If I hurt my cats, I might kill myself. If someone else does, I don’t want to say what I’ll do. I’m afraid that they’re watching me so I’ll just leave that there. It’s not a threat. It’s ambiguous, just like my mental illness.
I take a can of cat food out and open it up. It has the little soda-can top thing where you lift and it opens it a bit and then you pull back and the whole lid comes off like a rogue sawblade. I cut myself, of course. I don’t mean to say that of course I want to cut myself. I mean to say that I am such a clumsy cunt that it cuts me.
The smell of tuna and dusty ground chicken bones. It assaults my adrenal center. It overwhelms the cut. The cut closes up, stitching itself with the tiny flagella of microscopic skin cells that wriggle in the chasm of fat and blood.
It has no purpose if it can’t make me feel shitty. The cut leaves. One might infer that it killed itself because it didn’t feel important. If the cut could think, I’m sure that’s a possibility.
I dip my tongue into the pate. It moves under my tongue like pig-fat ballistic gel. I stick my tongue in and make a hole. I throw the can in the trash. I didn’t want to eat it, just taste it. There are another 40 cans in there. I think I’ll watch TV.