skeletons of people resembling pregnant mothers.

I formerly thought I was seeing the world tear at its seams. Turns out, my contacts just had flecks of dirt on their surface that floated over and around my corneas such that they resembled strange sparkling atoms in the sky. Plastics can often get dirty. There are very specific laws and rules that hold all things together in the world of men.

what of hope remains in the future. we are only and will only be men. sometimes a lack of sex drives people to madness. mental devastation. more often than not, we tell ourselves we need certain things when we only want them. the jaws of the beast held forcibly open, waiting.

we never wanted to be called creepy or stalkeresque. sometimes we're just staring into our future for what we want. Shopping around other peoples' windows and lingering when a complete sense of being catches our eye. Often we will return to a safe place if it is more comforting than what we have now. luridly watching strangers undress, or wanting to be watching strangers undress and become particularly lurid.

some people will grow beards to hide their face when they are no longer happy. disguising a double-chin with goatee. women are not so lucky. none of us are.

i.
life always made sense to him in terms of practicality and clear-cut rules, but lately, he confesses, he hasn't had the time to brood and reflect before making decisions. Hs rationality is broken and now he goes by a gut reaction, which is his intuition, which is a process fueled by a testosterone level which doctors have previously told him are 2 - 3 times the amount of an ordinary male. He has no more free time, only libido-chemical decisions which govern his argumentative stance he used to pride himself in. he has grown out his hair to a more casual length, perhaps to counterweight his cracking demeanor.

ii.
he would get excited about ideas he'd never follow through on. unable to hold his own consciousness cohesively for more than a few minutes of clarity, he would eagerly skip through conversations via loose associations, a rarely traceable progression that would baffle most acquaintances. sometimes he would make sense, other times he would make profound statements with supporting arguments that followed no logical sequence, often jumbled to the point of incoherence. he thought himself brilliant.

life made sense to him when he viewed the world as a phantasmal playground built exclusively for himself. he would toy around in conversations with people, etching their words into an ongoing script he'd keep track of in his head. he amused himself thinking the script was always steadily approaching a climax, and when it came, he would greet it madly through the destruction of all he'd known about himself and everyone else around him. A book, he would think. A book, a play, a movie. A conversation. Many.

iii.
She would buy herself more clothes because she wanted them. she wanted to wear them. they were interesting clothes. she'd eat at restaurants everyday and let the groceries she'd bought spoil. Bills would arrive in the mail every month, and after she'd pay them, she would fret about money several days onward. she hated worrying about money. her usual solution for worry was to go out and purchase an elaborate meal with friends. they would sit in a restaurant and drink for hours, eventually stumbling home, happy. they would sit on her porch and talk late into the night. the following day, she would try to do things differently.

iv.
a series of blunders and fleeting inoculations surmised his formative years. 23 years has made him unusually shrewd and cynical. he is always quick to point out the pathetic inefficiencies in other peoples lives, wondering how they can carry on in such meaningless fashion. He himself without meaning. Everyone around him without meaning. he would cite everything as the problem. no problem, all problem.

v.
he carefully removes a glass eye at night, before bed, and pulls off his plastic arms. He is in front of a mirror in the bathroom. everyone in his house is asleep. he closes the lid of his one remaining eye and tries to see out his other, empty eye socket into the mirror in front of him. He imagined himself at the least still seeing the sunspot burnt into his eyelids, but through this empty socket he sees only nothing.