Six in the morning. I’ve barely slept two hours and a half. I have anguish sitting in my heart. At eight I have to take a shower, get ready, and leave for the other end of town, to take a bus that will bring me to my former place of employment, which is the Donostia hospital. I have a scheduled appointment with an Occupational Health doctor so I can explain to her that I can’t continue working as a technician there, as the stress sent me thrice to the ER, and that in truth, my neurological makeup with autism and OCD is just not compatible with that job. In addition, right now I feel incapable of doing anything.

The other day, my mother suggested I look into employment with one of the big programming companies in the area, whichever I’m “interested” in. But I’m not interested in interacting with this world anymore. It’s been a long time coming. For what seems like months if not years now, I’ve only gone outside for work, to buy stuff, or to play the guitar. Everything else is a mix of painful and hopeless.

Obviously I’m grieving. But the grief also exposes the raw wounds underneath. As I lay in bed trying to fall asleep, my mind kept rescuing memories of loss. Not just my cats, but also of seeing my dead girlfriend’s father stumbling down a street, a human wreck of regret due to having caused the chain of events that led to my girlfriend’s death. I see myself doubled over in the pavement in front of my apartment, knowing that I’ve lost the remaining mementos of my girlfriend because my wife threw them in the garbage. I see myself bringing my daughter to the memorial stone of my dead girlfriend, hoping that this grief that pins me to the ground would infect her too, so the memory of my girlfriend would survive me. I’ve never had children, I’ve never been married, I never had a girlfriend die. I’ve never even had a girlfriend that I truly loved. Everything is mixed up in this defective brain. The configuration locked from early development in a state incompatible with leading a normal life. With enduring the pain inherent to life.

Shortly after I woke up at three in the morning, I opened a document I wrote right after another cat of mine died back in 2019. I wrote that I would remember how his other family members regularly slapped him for no apparent reason, and how he found comfort sleeping on my lap. But I forgot, and it took reading those words to remember it. I don’t know if I want to keep remembering any of this. It’s nothing but accumulated pain.

The pressure in the chest, the tightness in the throat, the burning behind the eyes. Anguish with no purpose or solution other than letting it pass. Only to anticipate the next time something like this happens. My remaining cat. My mother. My father. Back when I was a teenager and regularly wished to die, I daydreamed about me coming back from the future and telling me that things vastly improved as an adult. I’m not the kind of miserable that my teen self was, but it’s misery nonetheless.

They’re all distractions: the writing, the programming, the guitar playing. The online videos, the music, other people’s stories. All temporary bandaids against the raw wound that tells me that life is not worth enduring, which I have felt for as long as I remember. As a lonely child, holding an umbrella in the rain, wondering for how much longer it would feel this cold. As a younger child, being dragged by the hand by my mother, my brother with cerebral palsy on her other hand, as she searched for a football that the neighborhood kids kicked down the sloped street as they bullied my brother for stuttering and drooling. That nine-year-old girl, whom I once saw getting hit hard by her father in the balcony of their apartment, telling me that we were now dating. Her approaching me the next day with a smile on her face, asking me if I had forgotten what we talked about, and me saying yes. She turning around and walking away.

So many things I want to tear out of my brain. Every scrape putting something in there that I don’t want to remember.