Steal and Die.

I am writing this book inside my head all day and all night. Right now
it is an unintelligible mass of fiction, reality, and something far
beyond. The characters which have emerged are tormented and disfigured
representations of people I have known. It borders on obscene so far
and murmurs a nearly silent sadness that is usually only noticed in
sideways glances and nervous gestures. I'm not sure if it is any good
but that's okay. Writing a coherent story start to finish will surely
be my challenge, though I am assured that I have plenty of material.
And it was not until I conglomerated all of those terrible memories
into one part of my brain that I did realize life can be unrelenting
and people can be inexplicably evil. The sad part is of course not
realizing it until much later and just watching it happen. But that is
why I am writing this, to find the strength to recognize reality, to
acknowledge it instead of to ignore it.

I don't know that I'll sell it, but I do know I will give it to the
people that saved me, those who prevented the outcome of the book from
becoming my reality. Many of the stories, the real ones at least, have
never been told. They instead have been neatly packaged and tied with
pretty bows to obscure the gruesome contents and preserved in
compartments scattered throughout my memory. Every day they are there
and I am sometimes afraid that someone might see them sitting around
up there and just know. At times, little pieces manage to break away
and find their way to open ears. But I never know if they are
listening. Now they will have to, streams of tragedies will flood into
their brains and I will know that they know. And maybe that is the
hard part, that the image which others perceive is no longer in my
control. At least I have the guise of fiction to hide behind.

The story begins like this.

This is not a love story. It is a hate story, which is really the same
kind of thing. Not really opposites, but equals. Hate and love were
born of the same parent's anyhow. They are both passionate,
unrelenting, and pure. I am in hate with someone and he is in hate
with me. We are both deeply committed to our hatred, in fact our lives
revolve around hating each other.

We live in this perfect little town with an ancient downtown full of
little shops selling ancient crap that nobody wants. There is an old
ice cream store whose peeling lead paint sometimes falls into my ice
cream and I eat it anyway. And that is the only good part of this
entire place. Our house looks like every other little lovely house on
the street which looks like every other street in the neighborhood
which is just like every cute suburban outcrop across the Midwest
where dreams are born and die very quickly. This kind of place is not
real. I knew that the second me moved here. We live in that house in
that town with his wife and his three daughters and two dogs.

My room is at the top of the stairs and has red splattered on its
walls and on parts of the ceiling where we went a little crazy the day
I skipped school because I didn't finish my math homework and my
favorite shirt was still dirty. You can't go to school like that. I
told her my favorite color was red, and it was but not because it was
pretty, it reminded me of a thousand murders that I would never
commit, but would really want to. And so I spent long days and nights
shut between those walls murdering people in my head. Usually with a
kitchen knife, but sometimes with other objects in my room like the
glass paper weight sitting on my desk with Canadian coins suspended
helplessly in its clear insides. Sometimes I would stare out the
window watching other kids my age ride their bikes endlessly around
the cul-de-sac and I would make them my new victims. They had to die
because they believed this lie their parents were making them live.

They are in love with the white mailboxes mandated by the neighborhood
association, the three identical trees planted in each yard by the
mass producing builder, and the perfectly glistening green lawns their
fathers loved more than their mothers.

When the other kids went inside and there was no one left to murder
since they were already dead, their rotting bodies stacked high behind
the white closed doors of my closet, I would stare at the house where
this one boy lived. He was older than me, probably much older than me.
My mother told me his family was Jewish, she said it like an
accusation or maybe a warning. He had a girlfriend, at least a girl
that was a friend who would walk to his house every day around the
same time and knock carefully on the front door. I don't know where
she came from but I thought she was perfect. She wore jeans, a white
t-shirt, and clunky brown sandals like it was an official uniform of
coolness. Her hair shined a million golden colors when the sun hit it
just right. I wanted to touch it, to pet her like a dog. Most of all
though, I wanted to be her.

She would go inside for sometimes an hour, other times more, only to
emerge later through the garage followed by soft billows of smoke
whose burning wafts would meet my mothers nose and she would say that
she knew that smell with a knowing grin splayed on her face.The girl
would nervously look around and disappear into the darkness of the
street. I would watch her walk away, trying to memorize her movements
and quirks so I might emulate them later. She was different than the
others.