It’s sunny today, but the blue skies are infinite formless maws that devour my energy. The clouds are like white pillars and floating mountains of mockery of my existence and of everyone trapped here. I can’t escape. We can’t escape. All of us were never meant to leave. The colorful palette of Nature’s beauty revealed with the Sun’s illumination is but filled with poisonous horror that remained unseen underneath that mask for loveliness, it remained unseen to me until as of late.
Should I even mention my name? It feels like a hollow mask, a mask that was always my face with endless blackness beneath. No, I shall not mention it, you do not need to know who I am. What you need to know is what I need to tell you: why I write this and how I came to this unsettling truth of omnipresent malevolence.
My life was never exciting, nor was it free from the pains of the mind, body and soul. As I got older, my thirst for knowledge grew stronger. That thirst, that primordial hunger is different yet paradoxically similar to all forms of hunger. It should disturb me as it did when I realized it, but I don’t know if I can feel fear anymore. As years passed by after I graduated high-school and attempted to do the same with college, a subtle sense of dissatisfaction with things that gave other people life that I tried to partake of gradually built in intensity.
Romantic relationships never lasted more than a month due to my increasing self-awareness, self-criticism and cold calculative observance of everyone and everything. I also couldn’t hold onto a job for more than a few months either. Religion failed to satisfy my curiosity for insight into the grand scheme of everything. All religion showed me was that it was more so a belief system based on control, power, comforting delusion and a deranged shape of carnal lust in the guise of purity.
So that’s when I began smoking cigarettes, it was the only form of release and catharsis through its self-destructive nature. Alcohol and hallucinogenic substances were of no interest to me. Sex, well my sex wasn’t as important to me at the time. I just wanted to know the truth; the truth of existence and humanity’s purpose. So I dived deep into archaeology, anthropology, mysticism, the occult, spiritualism, psychology, philosophy, geometry, physics, biology and endless amounts of books. So many years of researching, so many hours into the late night pondering deeply about the things I studied. Yet I kept overlooking a consistent pattern, a constant theme interwoven in all of it.
It’s like my mind was doing its damn best to repress, to block out that cognitively hazardous truth, that insidious insight that lingered all throughout like an abominable specter haunting me without rest nor end. It took me until this year in the colorful foulness of Spring and its mocking facade of beauty.
I simply was finishing up drawing a fourth information synchronicity or pattern connectivity diagram of some sorts on immense poster board I tacked into my wall. As soon as I drew the final line to the malignantly basic strongest instinct in all forms of life, I dropped my marker in complete terror.
“Of course!” I gasped in overwhelming dread that flooded my entire being as the dam of comfort gave way for fathomless Stygian subconscious anxiety of the ultimate enlightenment.
I fell to the floor, the visage of that final center connection seared into my mind like vampiric teeth draining all the life out of me and turning me into the existentially and spiritually undead. Hunger. That horrifying word, that aspect of all that is, showed me something that still terrorizes me in my sleep.
That word itself devoured the poster board and tore a hole through the fabric of reality. That’s when unspeakably nightmarish things that looked like horrifically demented amalgamations of all forms of life, light, darkness and death saw me through the hole in reality and drained my entire being leaving me as a husk. Try to imagine every microscopic organism combined with all sea-life, insects, birds, lifeforms in the ground and land organisms as well constantly shifting in and out to form a psychotically sinister reflection of a human face. And they would emit this glow, this radiance that violated my mind. Thinking about it now just gave me an awful headache and is making my eyes feel like they’re black holes trying to eat everything around it.
Hours had passed yet it felt like eons. My friend found me lying on the floor with eyes staring beyond and not a single word escaping my mouth. They also saw a great hole in the wall where the poster board used to be. It of course just revealed the dark space between the walls and not the incomprehensible terrors that drank me dry of what gave me life. When my friend shook me, I did not jump but I simply turned slowly to them.
“What happened to the wall?” they asked me, understandably concerned. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I lied as I got back onto my feet, eyes fixed on the haunting hole, “I just got really pissed off. I’ll get it fixed tomorrow.”
They did remark that something felt off about me and my room but they couldn’t quite figure out what, how or why. Something about how the color felt ominous and how the bedroom and I were as if both were generated by an A.I. image generator with perfect conjuration yet still that emanating that unsettling emptiness.
My bedroom and I seemed to have this effect ever since. I’ve noticed it whenever I go outside to go on walks, buy groceries or clothes, by the looks and remarks people give me.
“Are you okay?” they always ask.
“Yes,” I tell them.
“Something just feels off about you,” they inform me.
And I just sell them a half-lie that I haven’t gotten much sleep, which to be honest I’ve been getting only 5-6 hours of sleep max every night when I’m a 32 year old who needs much more than that. They buy it every time, due to it being partially believable and them remaining indifferent to the matter anyways to move on and forget about it until we come across each other again.
I got the hole fixed but it doesn’t help with the uneasiness I feel when I’m in my bedroom. Still I smoke and still I feel completely empty. Still the colorful beauty of daylight is defiled with its true malignant nature exposed to me. Everything is so hungry, always so hungry, even me, even those things that drained me of hope and filled me with this vast abyssal ocean of existential despair.
The banality of life can cause people to go searching for things that the human mind wasn’t meant to know. Or was it meant to know? I don’t know which possibility is more terrifying: where we live in a reality that stumbling into unfathomably terrible vistas or beings is a horrible coincidence or that it was destined all to be.