Struggling to Write

Struggling to write. Struggling to think. Like my block is a brain––no, no, no. Like my brain is a block of jello. Like a block of jello. I feel like time is a sandy wind, making billions of microscopic incisions in my skin, tearing through my clothes. Bit by bit, over centuries, I am reduced to a red, bloodied slab, then to a skeleton, then to dust, then ground against billions of other grains until I am finally totally indistinct. I can reason but I can’t reason with higher intelligence, as if I were a child. I can attempt, at least in part, to try to understand what I am and why I am like this, but I will always be hampered by the fact that I can only rely on what I already know, not on what else there may be. New ideas come like sludge, pouring down a pipe and into my open mouth. My jaw is locked outwards, the muscles in my throat tentatively arched open, and I wait for the idea to finally slide down my throat, and I am forced to see that the sludge has hardened, slowing on the verge of the pipe’s exit. I will wait and maybe hop up, trying to reach the pipe, and when I least expect it, the sludge will fall onto my closed lips with a cold, wet sound. Anger, naturally, comes with it, and of course, I feel violent, but my body is uncoordinated and lazy, and when I move, it swings like a broken scale, tottering and leaping outwards at random.

I was going to write about the Sphinx’s point of view. That massive Egyptian structure that is its own mountain, its head the summit. And I was going to write about how time feels like it’s struggling against the Sphinx, how the Sphinx struggles against time––it’s always running out, always vanishing into nowhere and reappearing in your memories with nothing but regret and this constant, nagging sense of dread.

But time is not a thing that the un-fleshly struggle against. Mountains simply are, regardless of their states of consciousness. They are in a state of being that will continue, until, abruptly, the mountain no longer counts as a mountain, reduced to rubble. This is perhaps even the way that animals see the world. They do not live, wrapped up, in the fact that the time is stripping them down. They are aware and they derive pleasure from that spontaneous gift of awareness. As long as their basic needs are met, injury and age have no hold on them. A dog missing a leg and its eyes can hobble and sniff and bark with the same fervor and intensity as one that has kept itself whole from the day that it was born, provided that their owners both give them the needed affection and food and water.

So then, where do I fit into all of this? I rave and I talk about the un-fleshly in this educated, verbose tone, and I have nothing to show for it––I’m just talking––spinning little webs, trying to string one across the room, hoping that it’ll lead me somewhere interesting, from there, I’ll build more webs––I see across the street a building. Its side has windows randomly scattered. There is no structure, no choice, in which tenant getting robbed blind for living there, will get the pretty window view. It is as if it didn’t even matter. I look down and see a perfectly preserved insect, dead at my feet. Winged, grey, with red and orange wings. Its legs are curled together so densely I can’t tell where one limb ends and another begins. I search blindly for some vague inspiration, observing, observing, observing, hoping that I can somehow tack together something, anything, one little piece of a story––

The anxious, perpetual clicking of Sam Howard’s keyboard stops. There are no disgruntled sighs. There are no long pauses as he adjusts his glasses and coughs. He doesn’t anxiously head to the mirror and inspect the blackheads that have embedded themselves like mines, waiting to explode out from his skin––somehow unable to be released by the sheer lack of any proper skincare whatsoever to aid that dry, deserted carapace. He is silent. The apartment is silent, for once.

Sam Howard now skitters about the floor, disorganized, now hundreds of times too small to even wear his glasses. He is aware, of course, of this sudden shift of pace. He feels angrier than ever. He was going to write something today. He was going to be somebody. He was going to do all the things he normally does, but he was going to succeed, to write some masterpiece. And now, he can’t even walk around the house. Going from the living room to the bathroom is a journey that would take days. He paces, back and forth, letting every worry overtake him.

What if there’s a cockroach and I have to fight it, don’t they have teeth and legs and disgusting, rotten bellies full of the stench of garbage––and the pollution, my lungs are going to be ruined, they’re so small, I can’t even breathe anymore, with every breath my tiny body will be overpowered by the disgusting fumes of the city, and that girl I was seeing––well, she never liked me anyway, but wait, what if she did––Even in metamorphosis, he is still concerned with what could be rather than what is.

An hour later and he has managed to climb up to the table. He admires the breathtaking view of 23rd Street from the window. The buildings have a majestic, almost mythical quality, now that they are so impossibly far away. He wishes that he could be transformed back––that he could go from this fat little spider to that slender but painfully short man that he once was––that he’d have such a story to tell that everyone would love. But nothing happens. He wishes and wishes and wishes for the future to become the present; to instantly be transformed now that he has learned some imaginary lesson about something or other, and nothing happens again.

An hour later and he is sulking about on the ceiling. Trying to figure out how he’ll eat the food in the cabinet if it’ll start to go bad eventually. He agonizes over the masterpiece he was writing just a few hours ago––yes, it was messy, yes, he still feels angry at himself for only being able to voice his frustrations through his art instead of making a story––but it was progress, regardless. Abruptly, he realizes that he has spinnerets. He crawls from one corner to another and tentatively begins to cross that tiny gap with webbing. The process is dull, but he derives something from it, although he’s not exactly sure what.

By the time that the sun has melted into the sky and become one with the dull sea of grey, like all winter sunsets do, Sam Howard has finished his second web. He broods in the second one, which is substantially more stable than the first, contemplating his situation.

By nightfall, he is asleep, unlike usual.

In the morning, he instinctually reaches for his phone. When his eyes have adjusted to the light, he is reminded by his hideous, alien body. The innumerable bristles and bits of leg and hardened segments. He scrambles over his webbing, furious. He pounds it with his front legs, feeling every vibration as the web is stretched with pressure. Letting every bit of pent up rage out, he flails and swings, bouncing higher and higher. The web snaps. He falls.

When he awakens, it is with the great reluctance of someone severely injured. Two of his legs quake, shuddering with red hot pain. He tries to move them, but the muscle at the base of the leg is all that he can manage. The rest flops uselessly at the ground with a sharp, needle-like pain.

Angry and out of ideas, he climbs up, slower than before, back to his original web. He modifies it, adding new bits and strands to it, playing around with the form. Despite the injury, he notices that he’s able to finish the web a little faster this time. He spends the rest of the day, huddled on top of his webbing, waiting for the pain to go away. He watches the clouds through the window, feeling, suddenly, the way he did when he was a child. That same sense of graininess, that same, vivid, pictorial quality you’d get on a sunny day. Everything zoomed in, little details noticed and cherished. The abstractness of the way that the light hits the room and lets every shadow out. The glow of the sun on a building. The encroaching coldness of sunset and the magic of when the sun’s colors start to bleed through the clouds.

Once again, he falls asleep as night hits.

And again, he reaches for his phone after waking up. This time, the disorientation period is shorter and the rage period is almost as intense. As he is about to start letting his emotions over take him, he pauses for a moment, terrified of breaking the web again.

He decides to spend the day building another web. This one is sparser, requiring less webbing than the webs that have come before it, but it is just as sturdy. It pleases him when it is finished and he decides to build a bridge that connects both webs.

As the sun sets, he eyes the destroyed web with a tinge of sadness. For something that he has put so much time, so much effort into, to see it uselessly flowing in the air feels as if he has broken something beautiful, something that he has cared about.

He wakes up. Time has started to become like a wheel for him, speeding up, slowing down, almost pulsating through its movements in a comfortable rhythm.

He is hungry. Too hungry. He cautiously moves down from the new web, crossing the bridge and going to the original web, where he finds a fly. The fly will die soon, and he instinctually knows that a dead fly is an inedible fly. With a gentle movement he scoops it up and starts to eat it as it squirms. The taste of its skin is neither disgusting or delicious. It simply is––kind of how you’d imagine cardboard or foam to taste as a kid. Struggling for a while, he manages to break through the shell, devouring one of the legs in the process. The juice from the fly’s stomach is strong in taste but not repulsive, either. It simply is. When he is finished, he delicately lets the half-eaten remnants fall to the ground, disappearing into the indistinctness below him.

He spends the rest of his time building another web, allowing himself to get carried away within patterns of patterns of patterns.

By the time that a week has passed, the entire ceiling is carpeted in webbing. When he wakes up, he takes pleasure in the act of creating. In reveling in what he has built. Finding ways to take down what he is unhappy with, learning not to get too attached, rebuilding and reinventing.

He looks down on the laptop, still lying on the table, collecting dust. Its black screen reflects golden light from the window.

What a shame…

There is no point in thinking about what can’t be undone. He continues to build his web giddily.

By the second week, half of the living room is white.

One night, he dreams of the field. A place in a park that he used to visit as a teenager. He can see himself, standing tall, above the grass. He’s eating candy, running and joking with his friend. The air is warm, and he has his phone, he has his glasses, he’s astronomically larger than he was half an hour ago. Those wondrous layered chords within his throat harmonize together and create sound, sound that could be whatever he wants; not a low growl or a chirp; both transient and partially uncontrollable. He is free. The wind picks up a little, rustling his clothes and his hair. His hair feels longer than he expected it to be––almost as if the human within him was still growing in chrysalis, even while he had been a spider. He closes his eyes and lets the serenity blanket him with warmth, with love, with hope.

He wakes up.

The clock ticks 2:00AM, but its batteries are dying and its lights are flickering close to black, existing as a solitary flash of pale red numbers in darkness.

This part always reminds him of what he read about dementia patients. How, sometimes, when they wake up, they go into confusion, unsure of where they are, who they are, and what they are. There can be rage states. When suddenly their brains piece together something to do, a purpose created from the ruins of their internal architecture. Broken pillars and paintings and floorboards coalesce until chemicals decide that aggression is the best way to proceed. This is the option his brain has chosen, too. The difference is that when he rages right now, tearing through his webbing with his mandibles, jumping, skittering, trying, almost, to crawl out of his own putrid skin, he has no excuse. He cannot blame a disease for what he is. He cannot even blame fate, because fate doesn’t turn people into anything. Fate simply is. And so is he. He is.

He is this disgusting little creature that crawls on his belly. Day in, day out.

Tirelessly, he works and wrecks everything, shredding it.

Now he sits on the floor, staring at the last few strands that hang limply above him. Adrenaline pumps through his tired veins, giving him new hope.

“I’m going to do it this time,” he tells himself breathlessly, “I’m going to get outside. I’m going to find other people and there’s going to be a way to undo this, I’m going to join other people, I’m going to be people, no more feeling like an outsider, no more eight legs, I’m going to––I’m going to, yes, yes I will. I’m going to succeed. There is no way that I won’t. I will succeed. I’m going to go and everyone will love me because I’ll be special, because I’m the first human-spider-human, I’m the absolute first, and there’s nothing that can stop me, it’s all will, it’s all internal––I’ve got this. You’ve got this. Take baby steps, regain your breath, calm down, calm down. Down. Calm. Get it together. You’re starting to––you’re starting to get inconsistent––I mean, incoherent. Come on. Let’s go. One leg after another. Just get it. Just get it, go get it––you remember those girls that used to say to each-other ‘you go girl’? You go, champion, you’re doing it. Come closer to the door, closer, one more––more more breath––I mean step, just pull everything together…” he mutters perpetually.

The process of going from the living room to the front door takes four hours. For once, Howard realizes that his apartment isn’t that small. By the time that he’s at the door, he can see fresh dawn light, streaming through the door’s crack. If he had the glands to, he’d be sobbing. The spider-veil that covers his soul is unfeeling, stoic. With the last of his energy, he rushes to the door, fitting his head under it. He’s already halfway there. Just a little push and he’d be out. But he’s almost stuck. He can feel his bulky abdomen getting in the way, squeezed until it might pop like some grotesque pimple, his organs exploding out from his anus. He almost wants to laugh, because on paper, this thought is hilarious to him, but there still lingers the reality that his body is a prison, a delicate prison which cannot withstand the stress he wants to apply to it. So, he waits.

A day, and he has not eaten in hopes of slimming down. His energies are renewed and he feels better than before. He slinks under the door again, this time sliding through almost all the way. But it’s not enough.

Another day. He’s weaker now, but he knows that it’s going to be alright. His stomach burns with hunger.

Another day. His body has slowed down, almost like it was enveloped in ice-cold waters. He still doesn’t fit.

Another day. He struggles to get up after falling asleep, and he can feel individual body-parts coming close to failure.

Another day.

Another day.

Still

Not

Slim

Enough

He’s feeling the hydraulics that power his body strain with every last bit effort to get him up. He’s feeling the numbness as he shambles towards the crack. He slides under without touching the door.

“Come on, come one, one more step, one more––you’re close––I’m close, I mean, I’m close, and I have it, I have it, it’s right there, it’s just one more––maybe two more, and I’m there, I’m there, I’m there, and then I can have everything, I can just carry out the plan like normal and maybe I can communicate somehow, I don’t know, but I just need to see the sun, breathe the air, and I’ll be better. I can tell, obviously. It’s not a big deal. It’s absolutely not a big deal, come on, it doesn’t hurt that bad. It isn’t that bad of an issue…

“How will I hunt?

“No, don’t think about that. Don’t think. Do not think. Stop thinking. Stop. Just. Get. Do the thing. Do it. You’re almost there, you’re practically out. Move your body. No, it’s not your body. You don’t have it. It’s the remnants of your human body, and it’s awaiting us, you, me, whatever you want to call it, stop thinking about tense. Stop thinking. Humanity is right there, it’s less than three inches away and I know that I can take it.

“How will I eat if I can barely even spin a web right now?

“Don’t think, no, no, no, no, no, no, don’t think, don’t––stop thinking. I am in control. Just… Come on, suck it up, just get it right. Get it right.”

Abruptly––although he knows that this was inevitable, the spider-body collapses two-thirds of the way out. He is still fully conscious, still fully aware, still able to tell himself to get up, to keep pushing, and the veil has fallen––it has served his purpose. His shriveled stomach lurches with regret, total regret, at even bothering to leave the house, fully knowing that he could’ve led his life along well enough, albeit in a lesser state. Or maybe it wasn’t a lesser state. He also recognizes the fact that regretting anything right now is a terrible idea, because he can still feel his stomach lurching and burning and coiling around itself in hunger and pain and anger and desperation, and nothing can fix that. So here he sits, humming to himself. He pretends to hum. He has no throat for humming. So he sits, thinking about humming to himself, careful to not think about the human in him that’s pretending to hum. And he stays like this; pretending, as the sun reaches up in the sky, filling his eyes with light that he can’t stop looking at because he has no eyelids. Everything starts to go just a little green the longer he stares, thinking about humming. And pain shoots through the parts of his eyes that are affected, but he can’t look away, so he thinks about humming louder as things start to go painfully blurry, green becoming a totality that floods everything in his eyes. When the sun reaches its zenith the unimaginable pain lessens and all the green goes away and is replaced by a massive dark spot in the center of his vision. It grows, the destroyed sections of his eyes pretending to shoot up with pain, when in reality, they have been shot to hell and beyond. He thinks about humming and pretends that it’s so loud that it’s roaring, almost like the aggressive voice of some lioness, screaming and wailing in his ears that everything’s going to be okay. The only problem is that he technically doesn’t even have ears.

The last act of thinking that he allows himself is to tell himself that he’s going to rest for a short while before getting up and continuing the journey.