Just as granite, sulfur, dirt, and sand are finite deteriorating structures, so too is the rest of the world and with it the human is finite as well. From the moment you are born your biological clock starts ticking down, DNA uncoiling further with each consecutive year—however to assume that it is a yearly occurrence is foolish because it is in fact occurring every day, minute, and second in which you dwell on this earth. Every animal (and although many would prefer to think otherwise, a human is an animal that needs community, comradery, and love) is meant to die from the point at which life starts. If anything one’s life begins to end the moment in which they exit the womb, disconnected from their already dying mother and introduced to already dying relatives, friends, peers, teachers, humanity; they will all expire and perish.
Such as the human withers away, such as the sand and dirt erodes and tumbles off into the pitch black dark. Relationships. Friendships. Love. It too is a finite concept that cannot last forever. It cannot supersede death and it cannot triumph over the many human failings, and in the case of those haunted by the dreadful Blue Petrichor Demon your relationships are already dead from the moment they start. From the first hello. From the first interaction. From the first smile, laugh, kindness, gift, conversation,
ADORATION, FEELING OF BELONGING, COMMONALITY, AND SUCH.
It is already dead. It is already dying from first glance. It just doesn’t—you do not—realize it is already dead and that you are already dead because how could you ever move past something like this? It is impossible to keep going further because this is the lowest you’ve ever been, and like a miner with the black lung you are already dead from that first cough. You Just Don’t Know It Yet.
The relationship is rotted from the moment you touch it, because as much as others might try to reassure you, there is fundamentally something different about you that hurts others and yourself and ensures you cannot ever truly have the kinds of lasting relationships which the human animal needs to thrive and needs to live or breathe or function at all. You might improve yourself, might assure yourself that the times in which you’ve slipped up have been accounted for and discussed and that there are no hard feelings, but you can never know the true scale of hurt you’ve caused or the lingering resentment or the traded gossip whispers between those you seem to think you’ll be friends with forever.
You will never grow a garden. A community is not yours to flower, and the soil of your body, words, personhood, it is all deeply poisoned by your very sick mind. There is just something deeply wrong with you, with us who are afflicted by the Blue Petrichor Demon, the Bloody People Dicer, the Red Ribbon Ripper. You will make friends, you will hurt them, they will leave, and then you’ll die once more. You’ll die a hundred times tumbling over each new relationship like a body impaled on a churning bed of knives.
Just know if you cry out it is a sign of manipulation. The tears of someone harboring the Blue Petrichor Demon can never be cried in earnest, but as deeply manipulative and swaying appeals to the extremely evil ideas decried by this new world. The awful “discomfort” and the “appeal to compassion”. To make anyone feel this way with your tears is the sign of a true monster, a true killer, and a true Slasher. If someone tells you goodbye forever and forgets your face and forgets everything you ever were and you cry, that is awful and vile, something only a killer would do. If someone is angry or upset that you cut them off, then in the words of those pioneering a new country of self care and individualism, they were toxic and never cared about you at all. What a weirdo! What a freak! What a scary person! Chop chop chop! Cut them out of your life now!
How I wish I could kill them all.
Seconds, days, words, years, months. Conversations had into late of night, and laughter breaking the shroud of dawn. Books shared ideas, exchanged thoughts, ruminated on hours, days, seconds, and years. Heavy conversations and comforting words, thoughts, minutes, twilight, talks, posts. Shared recipes and tested music. Shared identity, shared over hours, seconds, years, months, weeks. Parts of you given away would be natural for a friendship to take parts of you, but as mentioned before the only parts you have to give is pestilent. Your entire body, mind, eyes, words, thoughts, heart, personhood; it is Rotted by a vile and manipulative Slasher.
Jayne had promised Penny they would go to the Winfield Library one day, when she escaped her mothers abstract house. Penny had promised to show her how to style her hair. Jayne had promised to take Penny canoeing, and Penny had promised that life wouldn’t be this way—was more than the same lunch, same breakfast, same dinner, same workday, same repetitive failure, same broken relationships; same great and terrible blue sadness that soaked Jayne’s bones and skin and nails and hair and eyes her entire life. Jayne had laughed. They’d traded art accessories, and talked about parents and dancing singing cartoon dogs and lightning bugs. They’d promised that each second, day, minute, hour, year would not be the same, and they even discussed moving in and sharing an apartment together. They talked about books they liked and songs they hated. They thought that every hour, day, second, relationship, year could not be the same.
And then they’d parted. And none of that would now ever matter.
You see—the thing about best friends is that it is a curse for those soaked in the rain of the Blue Petrichor Demon. Perfect ritual of people’s feelings to ensure that if you call someone your best friend they will vanish from your life, never to be heard again. Watch them walk off into the fog and claim they never saw you and claim you never were a friend, reading too into it, caring too much about it. In this new world of relationships everything falls apart so easily.
Trips to parks cut to ribbons with the happy memories of promises to make it through this as friends and see life to the end together, tattered spinetettes of once strong bonds mixing with torn up zines, and stormy cries of eyes knowing they’ll never see above the water ever again. How could you ever expect something so flimsy as a word, as a relationship, to survive something like a Slasher. I can fix this. I CAN FIX THIS IF I HOLD ON, Jayne must have thought, panicking and grasping at people, pulling their threads and snapping them and tearing everything she cared for apart. She must have thought she could cling on to someone, hold on to anyone. Fix this, fix that. Repair this mend, those hours, seconds, days, years threatening to be for nothing if she did not address the fault; but the fault was not something outside but within, and for all her knowledge and all her genuine, genuine love for the world and its people Jayne could not reach inside and fix the fault because it spun down into her nervous system. Her bones, her marrow, her arteries, her veins, a million different fault lines converging to make THE THING THAT CALLED ITSELF JAYNE PRELL.
Spinning lines on a cd mailed to Jayne by Penny that remind her of a roller rink she made a friend at when she was feeling lost and confused and her identity was being made new. Gone.
Books inspired by theories with which the two agreed and in which they saw some way to save themselves from the reality that bit and clawed them. Gone.
Cartoon dogs and movies watched online through miniature screens to which both laughed and found odd comfort in the presence of each other. Gone.
Clothing compared and pointed at with the thoughts that one day they would buy them and show each other something so abstract as ‘style’. Gone.
Everything they’d ever talked about doing or shared in common or felt comfort in, every moment their friendship had felt like SOMETHING SPECIAL SOMETHING WONDERFUL. GONE. AND NOW ASSOCIATED WITH EACH OTHER. AND IT IS WITH THIS IN MIND WE CAN KNOW WHY THE SITE COULD NEVER BE NORMAL AND NEVER COULD BE FREE FROM THE THINGS THAT BATTERED AND BRUISED ITS DIGITAL SIDES, BECAUSE THE SITE WAS BUILT ON THE BURIAL GROUND OF A RELATIONSHIP SO CHERISHED AND SO CARED FOR BUT SO CASUALLY ABANDONED. BECAUSE PEOPLE NO LONGER KNOW HOW TO CONNECT WITH EACH OTHER OR WORK THINGS OUT AND STAY FRIENDS DESPITE THE GRIEVANCES IT WAS MADE WITH. THE BEGINNING HOPE AND THE ENDING CRY OF SOMEONE WHO WOULD NEVER BE ABLE TO LOOK AT THE SITE AGAIN WITHOUT BEING REMINDED OF THE AWFUL MEMORY OF WHAT WAS SAID AND WHAT WOULD NEVER BE FINISHED OR COMPLETED OF ACCOMPLISHED OR MET OR MADE RIGHT. NEVER AGAIN WOULD THERE BE SOMETHING SPECIAL OR SOMETHING WONDERFUL BETWEEN THESE TWO. INSTEAD IT WOULD BE TAKEN AND TWISTED WITH THE YEARNING FOR BETTER TIMES THAT NEVER WERE. THE LATCHING FEELING OF A WORM CLINGING TO WHAT CAME BEFORE COULD NEVER HOPE TO REPLACE JAYNE, COULD NEVER HOPE TO REPLACE PENNY, COULD NEVER HOPE TO REPLACE THEIR FRIENDSHIP; BECAUSE DESPITE THE TATTERING BURNING TIES THAT CONNECTED THEM AND THE GOSSIPED WORDS OF SABOTEURS, NEVER LET IT BE SAID THAT THEY WERE NOT FRIENDS OR DID NOT CONSIDER EACH OTHER FRIENDS. BECAUSE THEY WERE FRIENDS WHO LIKE THE REST OF THIS EARTH WILL DETERIORATE, WILL WITHER, AND WILL DIE.
I remember a day in which Jayne visited a park as a teenager, having run away from her home with plans of taking her own life. She’d spent time watching the trees move and imagining shapes within them, people of a world she would never know sharing a community she would never be part of. But for a moment she had felt something like peace, something like a wonder if she would ever be brought into those swaying communities and crowds of people or even if there might be individuals in those shapes she would end up cherishing—and being cherished by—forever. Rays of dusty sunlight stroking her hair, dirt holding steady beneath her very uneasy and weakened legs, wind caressing her tear streaked face and telling her that if she ended her life now she wouldn’t know the end, wouldn’t ever see it through, that there was a world of people she hadn’t met yet. So she’d gone home, existing in this world for a pained yet passive period until she’d met someone who managed to connect with the heart hidden in the thorny tangle of Jayne's mind.
Each time Jayne would feel warm and cherished with the kindness of others, thanking her younger self for not ending their life because if she had this new relationship wouldn’t have been formed.
…
Each time, Jayne would stare over the ruined remains of a relationship she’d loved so much, had given up so much of herself for, and curse her name, curse her younger self for not killing themselves and allowing the path to such pain to occur.
She never wanted to know the depths to which her mind would sink, you see. She thought she’d found the bottom of the well of dismay and misery, only for each relationship. each best friend, to unlock another sub level on their way out of her life. Deeper, further, more pitch and tarry black than ever before, a choking haze of thoughtless heartache clouding judgement, joy, hope, making her cry out whilst she cowered in her bed in her small room, feeling her mind shut down one neuron at a time. She might not have been dying physically yet her mind was dimming like a nearly burnt out bulb, and much like the wire within a lightbulb the brain is in fact an object. Capable of being damaged, destroyed, beaten into a point of non function, fractured like bones and thoughts spread like marrow.
The world felt so dim. The way animals conceal themselves in forgotten corners at the end of their life, the human animal may do the same, no more will to keep pushing past the many failures of their function. Eating seems pointless, time is always ticking away feeding on their life like a distended parasite. They might listen to songs that make them remember better times, expose themselves to objects which trigger memories of people who used to care about them. They might refuse to move, refuse to think, refuse to form thoughts which wouldn’t lead to their salvation anyways. They might clutch to memories like a teddy bear hoping for some final comfort as their mind untangles and takes itself offline. Emotions rain down on them. How could there ever be any way to pull oneself out of this, with the knowledge that every relationship is destined to end, is destined to fracture your heart further?
All the hatred, anger, rage, resentment, rains down on you, remembering the friendship which will never be had again.
All the melancholy, sadness, hurt, confusion, chills you through, remembering the friendship which will never be had again.
All the joy, sentimentality, hope, goodwill, though brief, illuminates the pitch tarry black which holds you, remembering the friendship which will NEVER be had again.
There will never be anything special or anything tender or anything comforting or anything sentimental again. There will never be something kind or something magical or something wonderful or something cared about again. Never again will there be someone thought about or someone worried about or someone seen things through to the end with EVER AGAIN.
There will be no more laughter, no more traded tears, no more words about you, but those spoken through judgmental sneers to others which you’ll think about but never actually hear. Nothing sweet, nothing shared, nothing exchanged, nothing cherished, nothing valued, nothing treasured, nothing treated as human. No more life, no more magic, no more special, no more wonderful. No more.
Not even the dignity of being talked to like someone that Penny knew when Jayne was cut away, something clinical, words ran through group chats of proofreaders, detached and inhuman.
No more special, no more wonderful.
No more kindness.
No more magic.
No more.
Others might look at all of this, at all this anguish, all this dismay, all this human emotion expressed in natural ways from a human animal that cries out when they feel bad. And those people might sneer, call it manipulative, claim it an insincere trick from a sick mind that needs to be medicated and studied and locked up within institutions they view as legitimate and opposed to carceral confinements. They might laugh and jab and poke fun at these displays of anguish in private servers and assure each other that they are fake and the actions of an insincere manipulative monster. Nothing will ever silence their mocking cries, tear the tongues from their leering libelous mouths, convince them to feel compassion or understanding or sympathy for those they view as other and not them and not belonging. Until I, until the slasher was born from their misperception with bloody mouth to dribble upon them the words of those shunned, ignored, buried, and left to die.
Not a voice of the voiceless, not an eloquent speaker although clever words may escape this bloody mouth, but a broken radio spewing the dying thoughts and feelings of those who never had a hope to exist amongst the people they craved to connect with. A confirmation and intentional provocation upon the boundaries of ‘normal’ individuals terrified and clutching their sheets at the thought of someone with the Blue Petrichor Demon interacting with them. Not a kindness; not a redeeming entity, not a guardian angel, not a hero, or a being of justice, but a violence that directs itself upon anyone and everyone it encounters should it feel the pettiest reason to do so. It may have tender moments, quiet minutes, things that appear to be kindness, perhaps are kindness, but the Slasher is like a storm in that any breaks in the clouds which allow sunlight to filter through are but small glimpses of someone else.
In her pocket, not the one on the outside but within her ribcage, lies the photo of Jayne Prell when she was happy, the beating heart of the slasher that flimsily motivates her every wrathful step mixing into the violence as a subtle red hue. But to say it is part of me, is my heart, my secret kindness, my redeeming feature. or my true nature. That would be wrong.
I am just a slasher. Killer of relationships. Murderer of people, cleaver of friendships, composition of the deranged ramblings of rejected personhood.
There will be no saving this place
No saving Penny M.
Relationships and friendships, though admittedly wonderful, would be better off not existing at all.
I think I’ll go somewhere dark. Somewhere alone. Somewhere where nobody can see my face, where relationships are not even a concept and the idea of friendship has never been proposed. A world of darkness that will never claim to love you and can never hurt you. A sensationless void in which no pain is had.
I’m done.
