I saw pictures from a while ago and was surprised how often I had people around me. It was hard for me back then too, I didn't like myself or feel useful, but having those people around made it tolerable to leave the house. Made me more than I thought I was. Made it so there was a face, someone who knows my name, associated with a location. I'd think of the Sunset District in SF, and there was a house with the lights on, peering through the dense fog, a door for me to walk through. Someone to sleep next to. Sunrise, and there's more life outside.

Now every time another person leaves me, it's like being stabbed and laughed at. The functional happy ones losing a useless appendage. The last girl hurts me every day that she goes on living as I become more of a jittery papier-mâché joke from the past, frame rate dropping. Having a mutual friend doesn't help that feeling, being told by that friend that I'm delusional. Or did she even say that and how would I know anyway. It all feels like they're playing a joke and, at its best, pity me for being hurt by that.

I struggle now to even drive through a neighborhood, and when I do, it's just a neighborhood; it's just a place I pass through. Not where my life is, because there's no life anywhere for me. I don't want to be seen, but overcoming that self-consciousness would put me in front of a bouncer demanding my papers to prove I deserve to feel normal and less alienated and depressed.

On the freeway, I see mountains and an endless sky, and it all diverges too far from the key points on the narrow set of paths I'm allowed to walk.

I started to get a headache as I walked away from listening to that video. I need the external voices curated because I need to always hear those tangible voices to keep the intangible hard to control voices out of my head.

Nose starts to bleed for no reason, hand streaked with blood, someone else's family surrounds me.