Do you know why I beat down Andy Cullen 6 years ago? I was playing this video game. You were like dating ghosts or something. And I was really into it. Played it like 24-7. Until this one afternoon, and suddenly, like, something broke. It was just like... pixels. the characters onscreen… I felt like I knew them; they weren't people anymore. They were just shapes. And their lines were just things someone had written: they never existed, they never had feelings. They never would exist, either. And it felt so sad, like I’d just lost these real people, and this whole thing we had, it was just… me. Alone. And like that realization like dumped out of the screen and into real life went outside and the tree out front, I looked at it every day, it was like a friend outside the window. Now it was just a thing... just a thing that was there, growing and eating and just being there, like all the stuff I felt about the tree was just in my head, and there was some guy walking by, and he was just shapes, just like this moving bulk of... stuff. And I cried, because nothing was there for me anymore. It was all just stuff. Stuff in the universe, just... dead.
...
And the next day was that softball game, and Andy was the pitcher when I was up, and he was just shapes too; just lines someone wrote, like nothing in there. And I was so scared and angry and just... I dunno. Before I knew it I was on top of him, smashing his face in with the bat; just shapes, red shapes all over the grass. After it happened they made me go to therapy, with Dr. Hank, and he made me start a journal... he kinda just said it would help to be able to get my thoughts down. But since this whole thing happened, when I'm alone in a new place, it's all shapes, like back at the softball game. I was doing fine at college for a while, but I couldn't make friends, I was just afraid of being outside or around people alone. And there was this statue of like the founder of something. A really shitty statue, like all rusty metal, and it was these shapes, and he was pointing down at me, and I was so... scared... I didn't leave my dorm room, I either didn't eat or I ate entire pizzas at once. I downed cough syrup just to sleep all the time, and finally I got up the courage to leave. And I came home. Where everything was fine. Where I knew everyone, and it wasn't just... dead shapes. Watching me. Something broke. In my head. In my life.
