For whatever reason, recently I’ve been thinking about the wound that has defined me the most. The majority of the stories I genuinely need to produce come back to that wound in one echo or another. Maybe it’s related to me having become forty-years-old. I would say middle-aged, but there’s no way in hell I’m living to eighty. Anyway, my fatal wound happened back when I was seven years old, when my mother asked me, as if you could ask a child to make such a decision, whether I wanted to move in with my older brother to free up my room so they could have another child.

My memory is abysmal, which I suspect is a blessing. Most of my forty years of living has been reduced to a bunch of photographs or sequences of frames that barely seem to cover anything. It’s like trying to reconstruct an epoch from the few fossils you come across. But I recall that until I was seven, I lived entangled to my subconscious. Like I was married to it. Daydreaming all day long. Making what my subconscious told me to create. Some adults that came across the stuff from those years were surprised. As in “a child that age doesn’t create stuff like this.” Unfortunately, it also included narratives that would make A Clockwork Orange blush; not for nothing I’ve always felt that I had darkness deep in me from birth. But the point is that I peaked back then, at about six or seven. When I truly communed with myself, and was whole.

From the moment I was put as an unwanted guest in my older brother’s room, until I turned eighteen and nearly beat him to a pulp, I was, a then-undiagnosed autistic kid with Pure O OCD, subjected to having the TV and radio on virtually always, including nights, because apparently enduring the silence was unbearable. I won’t get into my brother’s issues, but they’re plenty and complex in a way that anyone who has ever met him is surprised that such stuff even happens. I had been stripped of my safe space, of my solitude, of any corner purely for myself in which I could grow. I was like a plant forgotten under the stairs.

Looking back, the extreme to which I dissociated from my subconscious from then on is terrifying to think about. I genuinely came to believe that my natural instincts and impulses, everything that came from my brain without my conscious permission, was monstrous. I ceased knowing myself. I depersonalized. Throughout my teens I experienced something that only those who have endured the same thing will know I’m not exaggerating about: as I walked outside, I felt like I was commanding a puppet that I could barely coordinate, while I saw myself from the outside looking down, the edges of my vision constraining into a blurry tunnel. I slipped in and out of psychosis. The stuff I wrote back then was so incoherent that years later I threw it away because I feared that reading it again would contaminate me. And that included a novel about seven hundred pages long, which I rewrote again and again for years. I was sure I was going to die before I turned eighteen. I did pray to some eldritch god to come down and kill me. But I survived.

Shortly after my first job started, I saw how the rest of my life was going to be: enduring humiliation after humiliation, unbearable anxiety, under constant scrutiny as if every day was an exam I was sure to fail. Thankfully, I’ve never experienced a job like that again, but added to the despair I was already feeling, led me the closest I’ve ever been to erasing myself from this Earth. I’ve lost the memories of the aftermath, other than the fact that somehow I ended in the library, where my parents, who had been called by my job because I hadn’t shown up, found me. From then on, until my late twenties, with breaks of more unpaid internships than paid work, I basically lived as a hikikomori. In my late twenties, I thought that the only way I could make something out of my life was by selling my writings, of which I had done little since I was a child (somewhat counting the comics I drew in middle school). I wrote two books with a total of six novellas. They didn’t sell for shit, and mostly disturbed the people who read them. That discouraged me entirely, and I never wrote in Spanish again. However, writing those books helped me to slowly, laboriously, reconnect with my subconscious. Learn to recognize its desires and commands.

Early in my thirties, I started working in IT for a hospital. Terrible job that fought against my nature, and that I had to leave about seven to eight years later. But by then, now diagnosed and medicated for some other issues, I started producing fiction in English. This was by far my most prolific period. From seven to about twenty-seven years old, I identified with my conscious mind to a sickly degree, and believed that anything I couldn’t rationalize, any conclusion I didn’t reach through reason, was suspect, if not straight monstrous. But from my thirties onward, I no longer care, unless I’m forced to for the sake of money, about my conscious mind. It’s merely a tool to interpret and obey whatever my subconscious produces. The conscious mind also needs to be reigned in, because it acts as a lawyer, confusing and justifying what the subconscious has already decided, and often getting it completely wrong. I have learned that there are indeed monsters in me. I’ve also learned that I prefer the company of monsters.

That fatal wound in my past won’t heal. It broke my brain during development in ways that can never mend. I have to do the best I can with what I have. I don’t feel like interacting with humans, and those who have interacted with me for sustained periods of time (mostly at work), soon enough sense that there’s nobody “there.” In public, I’m a simulacrum of a human being. Left to my own devices, I’m some creature that doesn’t need definition nor to justify itself to anyone.

I also thought recently about something I witnessed when I was a teenager. I was returning home when I heard a commotion from four young people in their twenties who had parked in front of my parents’ apartment building. It was almost the same spot, if not the same, where my father parked the day I saw a UFO, when I looked up from the window only to find out it was right there. I wrote about it on this post, so I’m not going to repeat myself. Anyway, those young people in the car seemed freaked out, confused, out of it, but not in a “they’re drugged” way. They flagged down a passerby, and asked him if they were close to Barcelona. These weren’t foreigners; their plates were from Spain. The passerby, more disturbed than amused, scoffed and said, “Barcelona? You’re about seven hundred kilometers away! This is Irún, near the border with France.” The young people in the car, panicked, looked around frantically as if incapable of understanding how they had ended up there.

I haven’t made that up. I just don’t think about it often because it makes no sense. That day, I walked away, but I’ve imagined myself approaching them and asking, “What is the last thing you remember?” “Did you see any lights?” I imagine myself telling them that if anyone did this to them, they could have easily killed them but didn’t, so they should just try to relax and get on with their lives.

I don’t know what it means. That could be applied to the entirety of what I’ve lived through. Trying to understand myself is like spelunking with a dim light through passages that keep changing. And I’m still here because I just happen to be. I suspect that when I finally realize I’m breathing my last, a smile will be on my lips. Then, I will tend my hand inwards to the love of my life, who was there for me as a child when I didn’t have anyone else, and who waited patiently for years until I went down into that darkness to find her again.

I’ve woken up at three in the morning. Although I tried to fall asleep again, my brain started doing the rounds with sequences of intrusive thoughts which would have had me rolling around for hours, tangled with painful stuff, so I figured I could get to the computer and write some words about things that have crossed my mind recently.

It’s December, and temperatures have naturally gone down to the extent that most days I can’t sit outside to play the guitar, which I need to do for emotional regulation. I’m not comfortable doing it at home because it feels like I’m bothering the neighbors. Whenever we get a good enough day weather-wise, I take advantage of it to head to some nearby wooded area to play for about an hour and a half. I did that yesterday: went to one of the most deserted wooded paths I know and that I can be bothered to head to on foot, then sat down to play through my usual songs. A few people passed by, mostly folks with their dogs or running.

As I was playing, an old couple passed by, and the old man went out of his way to talk to me. He gestured to the surroundings and to the sky and said something like “We’re in nature.” I didn’t have much time to think about what this fool was on about as I played, so I just nodded at him so he would leave me alone. There’s something inherently wrong with people who interrupt someone while they’re playing an instrument. He must have taken the hint that I didn’t want to engage, but as he left, he said something like “Cheer up.” His quiet wife followed him.

What the fuck? I was objectively playing a sad song (Iron & Wine’s “Passing Afternoon”), but still. Do I look so sad that some random old idiot would go out of his way to comment on it? Perhaps I do look like that. I have lived with what feels like low-level depression ever since I was a child, which cyclically spikes into full-blown depression. It seems obvious from basic observation of other people that they don’t seem as down as I do on a daily basis. They must get some enjoyment out of being alive that completely escapes me. Most of my drive behind the complicated endeavors I engage with on a daily basis involves distracting myself from the feeling that life is an unbearable burden.

The objectively most positive reaction I’ve had to my playing the guitar (even though it bothered me) happened perhaps a couple of months ago, when I was playing at a park. I don’t play in the middle of it, but off the path, seated on my portable stool in front of a tree. Some woman in maybe her late twenties, maybe Central or South American (can’t tell easily these days), carrying a book, went out of her way to figure out where the guitar music was coming from, then she walked off the path and sat with her back against the nearest tree to read. That tree was at a distance of about what you would naturally place a bench from the next one. People don’t do this on this park.

She was clearly listening to my playing, which she did for the next full hour or so. Because I’m a maniac, I kept playing even though it was so dark I could no longer see the strings properly, but she was still sitting there. Once I finished, she also stood up and walked up to the path. I thought she was gone, but after I gathered my things and took to the path again, she was sitting on a bench. As I passed, she turned toward me smiling, and said “Thank you for your music.”

As usual, my instinctive reactions to people talking to me aren’t the kinds I can use; my instinct is either to stay quiet or to say something that wouldn’t be appropriate. In this case, what came to my mind was saying “It’s not my music.” Instead, I scrambled to figure out something fitting to say to someone who had gone out of their way to listen to me play. I said “Thank you… for liking it.” She laughed softly and said, “Yes, yes.” I turned around and followed the path heading out of the park, while I contained the creepy-crawly feeling I get on my skin half of the time that I interact with a member of this species.

I don’t know if the following is related, but it’s what my mind pivoted to: as I was lying in bed forty minutes ago, a vivid scene that years ago I used to play through regularly reappeared. It always started with sitting at the waiting room of a driving school only to find out that beside you sat the love of your life, the sole person in the world who understood how it felt to be born cursed by both your circumstances and your impulses. I’m talking about Oyasumi Punpun, which may be my favorite work of fiction in any medium. I daydream daily to survive psychologically, and years ago I used to revisit that connection over and over, giving it a more deserving outcome. Well, I don’t know if “more deserving,” but a better outcome.

That got me thinking that it feels like I’ve read through every single affecting manga that exists. Inio Asano, the author of Punpun, is clearly done: he’s only created jaded, bitter, and cynical shit for the last few years. It’s as if he no longer believes in honest meaning. While the aforementioned series is my favorite, my overall favorite author is Minoru Furuya (I wrote about his works on here). I immediately connected with the peculiar way his mind works in a manner that suggests to me that he’s also autistic and has OCD. Sadly, he seems to have retired back in 2016. Beyond manga, I can’t bring myself to read novels these days; the sole author I respected was Cormac McCarthy, but he’s dead. And it somewhat disheartened me to find out that McCarthy himself barely did anything new in the last twenty to thirty years of his life; his extremely-affecting last two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, were conceived back in the seventies and eighties, when he actually lived through some of the experiences those narratives refer to.

I find myself, as a forty year old, feeling that I have nothing to do with this culture and this world in general, which seems achingly obvious the moment I leave my apartment. It feels like I’ve already experienced all the works that could affect me meaningfully. All the artists whose works I genuinely loved have lost it, retired, or died. Talking to actual human beings does close to nothing for me (I’m lucky if it does anything positive for me, even temporarily), so I can’t rely on that either. I wonder if this is what happens to people in the last stage of their lives: they feel so completely detached from the world that there’s no point engaging with it in any way. I recall the last image I had of my maternal grandfather, being pushed around on a wheelchair after his wife’s funeral, his head down, not having said a word the entire day that I recall. Never saw him again.

I do get those regularly, too: sudden images of people from my past I’ll never see again. That girl from middle school whom I’ve talked about a few times, who received a nasty scar that bisected her forehead. That basketball player with whom I was involved very briefly when I was seventeen or so; I’ve never liked someone I knew personally more than I liked her. A different teenage girl I met while I was hanging out with people I shouldn’t have been involved with; she was extremely self-conscious about scars on her face she got as a baby because the family dog attacked her. I dated her for merely a week before my craziness convinced her to stay away. Curiously, I have to go out of my way to remember the woman I dated for the longest time. The regret I feel for that relationship isn’t the “I wish I could have done better for her” that I get for those other people. I’m glad I haven’t seen that last one in about twenty years.

I guess that’s enough. Half past five in the morning. I’m going back to bed, back to the daydreams that will hopefully slide me back to sleep and therefore save me temporarily from this absurd nightmare of being conscious.

Yesterday, when I went out for groceries, I tried to change it up a bit, heading to a different neighborhood than usual so I could feel more alive than merely repeating the usual routines. Really cold November morning, about 4ºC. It seeped through my jeans, making me wish I had worn some leg warmers. For someone who recently wants to return to bed the moment he climbs out of it, I wished I could go back home and not leave again until spring. The experience of navigating through that supermarket, of listening to the people in it (customers, employees), felt surreal, as if I were exploring a snapshot from another era. I felt detached, simultaneously feeling invisible yet suspecting that others realized I didn’t belong, not just in the supermarket but in this world.

I had known that losing my beloved cat would hurt like a motherfucker, but I hadn’t realized that she was my emotional link to reality. In my teens, I was sure that I wouldn’t survive until adulthood. My first paying job ended with me having a panic attack, ditching the bus to work and instead intending to jump from somewhere high enough. I hadn’t planned anything from beyond that point, as I believed I wouldn’t be around anymore, so I hadn’t considered that my job would call the available phone numbers. That led to my parents finding me in the local library after I chickened out from killing myself. I retain very little in terms of memories from those moments, but I recall that sinking feeling of realizing that I was going to stick around for consequences even though I didn’t want to be here anymore.

Throughout these last twenty years, having endured many periods of suicidal ideation, what kept me moored was the notion that I didn’t want my cats to miss me. I couldn’t care to that extent about my parents or my siblings (I had to go back and add “or my siblings” there, as I had suddenly remembered they exist). Now, as a forty year old, about twenty years older than I thought I would live, I find myself out of a job, with no interested in rejoining society, with an inability to care for human beings mainly due to my high-functioning autism and a generous dose of bad experiences, and a sense of detachment that I thought I had left behind in my teens. Even regular sounds seem strange now. Forming sentences feels awkward and unnatural. I recall that while I was browsing in that supermarket, I wondered if something was physically wrong with my brain, as I had trouble registering what was going on around me and even understanding what I was looking at.

Obviously I’m going through a crisis, which has found me ill-suited to navigate it. The only comfortable moments I’ve had recently had been evading myself in my usual daydreams involving a certain blonde American who died in 1972, but I also enjoyed watching Vince Gilligan’s new show Pluribus, somewhat against myself, as I don’t find the concept that interesting. I feel that I can’t do anything about the crisis itself or what’s going on in my brain other than distract myself to the best of my abilities until I settle into a new angle of repose. I’ve gone through many such fundamental changes. I’m not remotely the same person who wrote my novel My Own Desert Places, I’m not the same person who wrote We’re Fucked, neither the one who mourned for his long-dead girlfriend in Motocross Legend, Love of My Life. I don’t know where those people went. Ultimately I can only do whatever my mercurial subconscious tasks me with doing, as I don’t get any emotional rewards out of doing anything else.

I suspect there’s plenty more to be said, but I intend to distract myself with my programming project. This afternoon I’ll try to leave the apartment for a while, solely to retain the sense that I’m still alive. One foot after the other.