Six Thirty (I Mean, 360)

When I lifted the toilet’s lid, I found the head of Theopholis. Theopholis had a bearded face that was half-rotten and foaming in piss water. It stared at me like those that suffer in Hell, buried to the neck while earthworms eat them alive eternally.

Rewind. Okay. Stepping into the toilet stall, I knew, even before I looked inside; it was immediately evident that someone had unleashed the full fury of nature—the wrath of a powerful god. I stayed there at the doorway of the stall, unable to move. The residual aura was all-consuming, making everything fade from my sight—the tiles, the toilet, towel dispenser. The door finally closed behind me. Having taken in all that I could bear, I came to a point where I was in deep reflection, concocting evidence for subtle theories.

Evil was never the opposite of good. They were never even related, ever since the origins of the first acts that would flesh them into concepts. Yet many talk about the two necessary sides of a coin. Is love the same as hate? Where do all these philosophies come from? In our hearts, we know the truth. We must. But wit and cleverness are commendable virtues. They brew what we prefer to see: the spark of craft over the spoils of body parts and common wisdom.

I step out of the stall and into public life. There are crowds of people. It is an environment of guided missiles that are set off as soon as I enter the zone. People come at me. They come from different directions and converge in spots, narrowly missing one another. When all the trajectories are traced at the end of time, they will form imploding stars that come together and pull apart.

In the crossings, there she is. This stranger looks at me with eyes alive with curiosity. Though we stare at each other, we must pass each other by. How do I get into pants that tight? A breast that large in my mouth? Eyes that soulful to need me? Things just seem to happen—situations have nothing to do with me. That time when I took the love letter and put each word on a stone, I came to a revelation: tear your words apart and pile them in a vessel. So, I put the stones in a glass bowl I picked up at a thrift store and walked up twenty steps off a sidewalk and served it in a hill park in the dark of the night.

Now, I am reading a book, and it is slowly drowning me. Some voice tells me things. I comply. The words advise me to kill somebody. I assume the author suggests myself. But I can’t kill who I am. Yet I can kill who I think I am. And I can kill him everyday; I have to because when you kill one, there’s always another to take its place.

One day, the panorama became wider. I don’t know how it happened. I could see more of the picture plane. I could see someone approaching me from what was once a blind spot. Soon, my vision will wrap around and complete the ring.