"I am inside a car driving far into the countryside with my father." "I am seven years old." "Exactly five weeks from now my father will burn to death in this very car after driving into a street divider." "The steering wheel will shatter and drive itself through his torso." "He will die in agony..." "burning... impaled his innards exposed and sizzling upon his lap." "Five weeks from now... but not now." "I will always remember him as he was on this day." "Repetition is ritual." "There is nothing for me to discover or understand." "I can only go through the motions of persistence." "Memories long faded return to me from out of the darkness." "Even now I disintegrate in their presence." "It turns my stomach into broken glass." "In the end, I'll find myself where I began." "And I shall start again." "At the moment of my cesarean birth the doctor's scalpel sliced clumsily against my inner thigh opening me as he had done to my mother." "From the stories I was told, I bled as profusely as she had." "Looking back now, I can see that it was a fitting introduction." "Whatever the case and in spite of my not remembering the incident I've lived my life with a fascination for bleeding fine cuts." "I can't say that I understand it but it is as much a part of me as my fingers, eyes and teeth." "Every now and then I pay for the company of a woman." "I have her stand over me as she bathes me in her warmth." "I breathe her taste... taste her smell, marinate in her essence." "I close my eyes and allow her to run through me." "Imagining her heat as a hot, white ocean of sanctifying purification." "She runs across my pores, cleansing them deeply... sweetly." "Erasing everything that I wish, wasn't there." "Soldering me back together." "But I know that it's my destiny to remain divided." "Not long after the death of my father I found my mother hanging from a light fixture in the kitchen." "There were tears still moist on her cheeks even though she'd already begun to turn blue." "I could never understand why she had chosen to die." "Perhaps the possibility of living without torment was so far removed from her realm of experience that she was more afraid of healing than she was of suffering." "Whatever the case, I was alone." "I waited several days before calling the police." "I watched her decompose in the kitchen." "For as long as I could remember, I felt like an old man." "Now, I am as I had always perceived myself to be." "I sometimes wonder if the man I was had ever really existed in the first place." "It all seems like a faint echo from a past life experience." "As if everyone I've ever known has left to live their lives in an alternate vortex that I will never find." "I've spent a lifetime working up the strength to speak to people who no longer exist." "What's left inside of me will never find its shape in articulation." "I now know that there will always be ghosts in me." "They have grown to become my very foundation." "If there is a God, my sole prayer is to never be reborn." "There is a crack in the center of me." "I've lost myself deep inside of it." "I can't stop my mind from haunting my soul." "And all the logic in the world will not save me." "I don't know how it is that I'd become what I am." "But my values are meaningless." "I'm cold in my warmth." "Warm in my absence." "I'm very, very afraid."