I rely on taking breaks from the world to endure it,
Whether through sleeping (despite my insomnia),
Writing, or through the wonders of virtual reality;
Today, a Saturday, I woke up so exhausted,
And mentally drained from a long week at work
(I’ll never get used to returning home at night),
That after eating I only wanted to take a nap;
My mind remained foggy and sluggish,
So I knew I wouldn’t write anything of value,
But I didn’t want to sleep through the day,
So I returned to my comfort game in VR,
Which consists on driving virtual trucks around

Due to how my brain works from birth,
I’ve never learned to drive;
My mind takes flight by itself,
And when it returns to reality,
I have to reacquaint myself
With whatever I was doing

I’ve talked with other autistic people,
And some understand what I mean,
But others are driving safely to this day
(Then again, autism seems to be caused
By atypical pruning of neuron connections
In babies’ brains as they develop,
Producing different overall configurations)

(There was this guy who crashed many times,
And who got his driver’s license revoked,
But he had taken so many drugs in his youth
That he now suffers from epileptic seizures)

My point is that my wiring is all fucked up,
And I rarely know how much I care about things,
Except maybe for food and shelter and sex
(And VR also helps with one of those things)

My mind takes flight even when I try to focus;
I don’t think anybody has noticed at work,
Although I keep being absent in conversations,
But my inability to stick to reality
Constantly ends up with me rear-ending
The poor bastard who was driving in front of me

Thankfully this only happens in video games,
Such as when I’m driving a virtual truck,
But if I was able to drive my own vehicle,
I’m sure I would crash in less than a week,
Or maybe I would obey my nagging thoughts
About driving straight, full speed, into a wall

(Besides, I’ve never had a stable job;
I rarely know if enough money will come in,
So I can hardly justify buying a vehicle
When the public transport is so good here)

Learning to endure my lot in life
Has depended on me facing the reality
That I’m equipped with two different brains:
One the analytical, slower one on top,
And the other the primordial, bestial brain
Which takes most of the decisions for us
While the analytical brain makes up a story
(So it can keep telling itself that it’s in charge)

Immersing myself in VR is a constant reminder
That although my PC is producing the world,
My primitive brain is deceived easily,
So I get to escape for a while from my life
Because my stupid brain is convinced
That I’m a trucker driving through Europe
While listening to popular tunes
(From annoying modern music
To the rock classics from decades ago,
But all of them feel good while driving)

When you’re trapped inside a truck cab,
You stop thinking about your problems,
And if the right song ends up playing,
It’ll make you feel like you’re on the road
With the wind blowing through the windows,
As you drive across the plains of France
While the sun shines in the sky,
And the beautiful landscapes never end

(But the VR journeys always end,
Because I have to return to my real life,
And I need to remember to eat and sleep
If I want to continue driving a truck
In the virtual reality, where I am king
Of the highway, and my trucks rule the land)

Driving a virtual truck fills me with nostalgia
About a world I haven’t experienced in reality,
That involves sitting inside a huge metal box
Which would explode into mush any human
Who was stupid enough to walk in front of it

My virtual trucks make me feel powerful and free,
And like I could drive to the ends of the Earth,
If I could afford all the gasoline it would take
And if my trucks wouldn’t break down so often

Being a trucker sounds like a blissful life,
But many things sound good when imagined;
In reality, you need to sleep at fixed times,
At random rest areas frequented by weirdoes
Who may decide to break into your truck,
And I doubt that the deliveries pay enough,
Or else most truckers would be filthy rich;
They don’t seem to have much luck at making
A living off their trucks, although they are kings

Still, I want to drive through the desert
While listening to radio stations,
And singing along to the music,
And worrying about being abducted by aliens,
(And coming across ghost hitchhikers,
Or sasquatches that crossed the road)

My mind would keep drifting away from reality
While I thought about the important stuff,
Like how to repair my truck’s engine,
Or when I should pick up the next prostitute,
Or whether I should become a serial killer

When my mind would return to reality,
I would have crashed into a telephone pole,
And there would be suspicious splatters,
Huge and red ones, dirtying my windshield,
But luckily I wouldn’t have died,
So I would keep driving around town
Till my truck started to smoke;
Then I’d find a motel room
Where I could spend the night

(I would be woken up by a loud alarm clock,
And I’d start my day with a cup of coffee,
Then I’d drive my truck back to the shop
For repairs, or to get a new one)

I never became a trucker,
I will never drive a big rig,
And those are my biggest regrets in life,
But maybe there’s time to move to Brazil,
Where I could rent a truck and drive straight
Into that goddamn Amazon jungle,
To be the first to cut it through
With my huge metal box I’d sit in,
While I listened to the radio
And failed to see another person
For days at a time
(Unless I drove into them)

My brain feels like shit today,
But I’m a failure if I don’t produce a text,
So I wrote these words that I hope you enjoyed;
Now I can return to my virtual trucks
And my virtual life, which is just as real
As the one I live in (although it’s not)

‘I Will Never Drive a Big Rig’ by Jon Ureña

Years ago I stored a permanent memory:
My latest relationship had ended badly,
And I was standing in a random street
While I looked down at my two feet;
I suddenly felt that the tethers
I had allowed that person to attach to my skin,
And that tied me to another human being
Wherever in the world she happened to be,
Had been forcefully severed,
And I found myself like a stranded astronaut
Drifting through the black void,
Unable even to radio back home

Ever since, I’ve refused to let anyone
Tether themselves to my sensitive skin;
All I’ve learned from my intimate relationships
Is that I wasn’t born for any of it
They were just there as an excuse for me to live,
To enjoy life while pretending to love them

(Besides, what a romantic relationship provides
Isn’t worth the demands and the humiliations)

Real human beings are far too complicated
For someone like me, who’s only ever loved
Either the broken or the monsters
(Most of them fictional, some I made up)

Human beings are bound to bother you,
And if you lack the instinct to interact with them,
They only steal your time and energy
That could have gone into writing,
Or anything better than dealing with them,
Such as idly browsing the internet;
I only want people when I want them,
Otherwise they should go away

(I still fantasize about fucking
The many attractive women
That I come across any given day,
But that’s the hormones speaking,
And VR is very good at solving
That age-old problem)

This week I’ve been working afternoons;
By one and a half PM I want to take a nap,
But I have to traverse my city
(Which has become merely a container
Where dozens of nationalities push each other),
Get on a train, and later on take a bus,
So I can work at an office doing shit
That I couldn’t care less about

At the end of the month I get angry
Because the government steals
Hundreds of euros I need for myself,
So it can fund my country’s suicide
(Or more appropriately, its murder)

And I only care because I have to live here
(I couldn’t begin to figure out how to leave);
I’ve already had people trying to break in,
And a woman almost got raped nearby
(The neighbors beat the culprit up);
Just two things on top of the usual shit

I make my way back home
At eleven PM at night,
And I usually just stare up ahead
So I don’t despair at the chaos,
And the hopelessness of our future

I guess it’s different for those people
Who look around and feel connected,
But wherever I look, I see flat images,
Ones that don’t elicit any feelings
(Any positive ones, at least)

Walking through my workspace,
Or any of the streets I pass through,
They remind me of movie sets
Where important movies had been filmed,
But that have been abandoned to rot,
And the people who remain around
Keep cleaning and repairing the sets
Without knowing why,
And without a single clue about
What it all means

At work, I keep looking at the time
As the hours tick by;
The years have gone by so fast,
And I’ve wasted my youth,
My entire life,
Waiting for a phone call or email
From people who never contacted me

I’m working through the second full-length revision
Of that novel I wrote in May, about the ghost woman,
But it advances slowly, and the process is painful;
Those scenes feel like memories from a past life,
Moments that I’ve seared in my brain
Because nothing in reality makes any sense to me

I wish I could delude myself into going back,
To live vicariously through their fictional lives;
I’ve never cared about my own,
For as long as I remember, I’ve wanted to disappear

(I’m just waiting to be shot down
By an army of soldiers and policemen,
And when they finally find me,
I’ll probably get the same treatment I gave others)

Why go on living if you know
How pointless your life truly is?
How much pain and suffering
Are worth enduring?

(You’re just a pawn in someone else’s game,
A piece that no one cares about,
An object to use and discard,
A tool to satisfy the needs of the powerful)

I only have days in which such questions burn me,
Or those in which nothing manages to matter;
That’s unless I can distract myself
Through writing my way out of hell

None of the stuff I’ve written
Has ever amounted to anything,
But I can be proud that I tried my best,
Even though I knew I would fail

I have no choice but to continue on
To try and escape from my misery
And the future I don’t want,
Which will surely come true
(I hope I die before that happens)

And I do all of this shit
Because I may as well

‘An Untethered Life’ by Jon Ureña

My broken brain has forced me to endure
Another one of many sleepless nights.
For hours I’ve rolled in bed drenched in sweat,
Assailed by dredged up memories
And painful thoughts brought back to life.

Only in such moments I recall this one girl
I briefly hung out with during middle school.
She was lanky, always wore her hair short
(Whenever it grew to chin length, it got wild),
Her eyes were too big for her face,
Her mouth puckered up awkwardly,
And her voice often sounded weird,
As if she swallowed air before speaking.

Maybe because she sensed we were similar,
She attempted to become friends with me,
But she struggled to hold conversations;
She rambled in circles like an excited toddler,
And the little I recall came out like gibberish.
Her speech reminded me of the sound
An old cassette tape makes when scratched.

She would act all cool around me,
Spouting smart talk that rang false.
I could tell she was miserable,
But she kept pretending otherwise
To fool others into thinking she was fine.

There was something desperate
About her smell,
And it annoyed me.

This awkward girl, like me,
Was never able to fit in,
So she hid her pain behind fake smiles.
She couldn’t stand how she looked,
Or how she sounded or smelled,
Or how terrible her mind made her feel.

Maybe to explain herself,
She wrote me letters on notebook pages,
To which she added elaborate drawings
That she colored carefully
With her toxic-smelling ink pens.

I’m not sure if I ever read those letters
With the care that she maybe deserved.
During those times I struggled
To even hold on to my sanity,
As an undiagnosed autistic teen
Who had to ditch plenty of classes
Due to anxiety, paranoia, bullying,
And a depression built into my brain,
As well as issues with auditory processing.
I felt like a wild beast trapped in a cage.

I was the classic autistic case
Of a kid who does great in school
(Mainly because I spent my spare time
Either reading books or writing stories)
Until his peers begin developing socially.
The autistic kid’s grades quickly collapse;
His energies are squandered on processing
The rabble of rowdy, savage barbarians
With whom he’s forced to share his space.

My shy, silent, anxious self
Used to sit alone in a corner
By a window, to scribble away
On notebooks that I hid from view.
‘Autistic Ghost’ would have been
My perfect superhero name.

I’ve retained three memories of that girl,
But I’m forced to doubt the accuracy
Of any of the echoes I’ve stored.
I once read that our brains rewrite
Details of every memory
Whenever we access them,
So the best way to keep them pure
Is to never remember them at all.

In the first memory, we are sitting on a bench
And I listen as the girl rambles awkwardly.

In the second memory, I’m loitering
Near the entrance of our school,
Likely after I ditched some useless class,
When that girl comes out bleeding
From a gash in her forehead
Which had bathed her face in blood.
Two female, pale-faced classmates
Were dragging her by the armpits.

The following day I learned
That during Arts and Crafts class,
A popular, delinquent stoner
Had been twirling around
The handle of a paper guillotine,
Which ended up flying off
Until the blade of the steel cutter
Pierced the girl’s forehead vertically
From the hairline to the brow ridge.

In one of the years I wasted at that school,
A different girl from an adjoined classroom
Had been taking a shower after gym class
When the shower floor collapsed,
Impaling the soles of her feet
With ceramic shards.
I was also loitering near the entrance
When they dragged this poor girl out
While her feet left a trail of blood,
So who knows how many times
Such unlikely disasters happened there.

We attended a working-class middle school
That would produce the next generation
Of retail clerks, civil servants, druggies and suicides.
A year after I graduated, a riot broke out
Because some guys’ pot was confiscated.
Desks were hurled out of windows,
The principal was beaten up,
And plenty of students got arrested.
I imagined the police shooting round after round
At panicked teens in the playground.

The stoner who disfigured that girl
Was the voguish, bad boy kind
That many teens were swooning over,
But I remember that he stank of pot,
That he got arrested during a skiing trip
Because he tried to sell hashish to the locals,
And that as an adult, he ripped my ticket
Whenever I ventured out to watch a movie.
This guy always hung his head low,
But I considered him lucky;
I had never been able to keep a job.

In my third and last memory of the girl,
I’m glancing at her from a distance.
Her forehead was bisected
By a wide, purplish scar,
Like the one left by a major operation
Where they had to lacerate the flesh
To implant metal in a broken bone.

(In an attempt to hide the scar,
I imagine her tracing it with a black pen,
Which produces the unhealthiest smile,
Before she turns to me and says,
“See, you’re not alone.”)

I doubt I ever saw that girl again,
And I have forgotten her words.
I had suffered so much during those years
That I gave up every memento of them:
Stories, drawings, photos, letters.
Whatever this girl had shared with me
Ended up ripped in pieces
And thrown away into a trash bin.

Soon enough I forgot her name,
But whenever my brain dredges her up,
Usually during my many sleepless nights,
I picture her awkwardness and her scars,
Her desperate attempts to connect with others.
When her face appears in my mind, the pain
Reminds me of how my own life ended
The same way hers did.

I wish I could figure out how to google her,
To at least confirm what I always assumed,
That I would come across her obituary,
Which would have been the last time
That any stranger wrote her name.
One day someone I have never met
Will do the same for me.

(Her letters have surfaced again,
Generated by my broken mind.
I recognize that anxious handwriting,
Which haunts me like a ghost.

Her last letter went like this:
You can forget about me already.
I have long ceased to exist.
You are keeping me from what I wanted,
To disappear as if I had never existed.

But like so many others,
I’m forced to remember her
For the rest of my life.)

In hindsight, I wish I could have sat
Side by side with this girl on benches
Even just to share some silence.
I think that our pains were similar,
That we would have understood each other
If we hadn’t felt the need to hide.

Now that I’ve gotten this old,
I’ve come to understand myself.
I know that if I could go back
And spend time in her presence,
I would yearn to regain my solitude,
Because no amount of goodwill
Has ever been able to change
What this monster demands of me.
I regret having missed many issues,
And about others, that I couldn’t care.

Every experience nicks the surface
Of this clinically-depressed brain,
And the memory decays into a scar.
After these few decades I’ve endured,
I’m left with a mesh of crisscrossing cuts,
So I can roll around in bed, drenched in sweat,
While my brain reopens some scars
To make them bleed again.

I had forgotten the last time I played guitar.
After I became unemployed in late April,
I had focused on writing frantically
Until I finished the novel I’m still revising,
And my new contract for the entire summer
Caught me as I was trying my hand at poetry,
But creative people should play instruments
As often as they can, to keep their minds free,
And to widen the breach into the subconscious,
So its insights flow as unimpeded as possible.

On this sunny July Saturday afternoon,
I sauntered again to my favorite spot,
A couple of kilometers into a trail
Which runs among grassy, hilly fields,
And tranquil cottages still as if deserted.

The sun shone warmly down on me.
The sky was clear blue above,
The air clean and fresh.
I reached an isolated bench,
Where I put down my guitar bag,
Then sat myself down beside it.

My calluses had softened after a few months,
So I played the songs with sore fingertips.
I had forgotten how good it felt to play,
Like swimming in the ocean on a hot day.

I lost myself again in the feeling
Of being captured in the song
That my hands and voice are making.
For as long as it lasts, I have never held a job,
Nor aged, nor suffered defeats or any pains,
Or felt anything except the pleasure of music.
In other words, I was like a young child
Who has no worries or cares about tomorrow.

(A group of tweens passed by, yammering
As they played reggaeton on speakers.)

A rough cement path leads uphill
From the bench where I usually play
Through the narrow space between fields,
And disappears behind old, tall trees.
I had never followed it before,
But for whatever reason, yesterday I did.

As I walked up the steep path,
Soon I ceased to hear the city noise.
I only heard the birds and the breeze,
And the quiet rustling of leaves overhead,
While to my left, in a fenced, wavy field,
A group of horses chewed some grass,
Their muzzles deep in green clover.

The blue sky above me,
The green leaves around me,
The smell of fresh grasses
And flowers and trees,
All these things were communicating
Something deep inside me,
Some message from the depths,
One so important and profound
That it cannot be expressed.

I passed by large, hedged estates
From which came echoed barking,
Past old telephone poles standing tall,
And upon reaching a plateau,
I walked through a farmyard
Where chickens wandered around.

I trudged further uphill
With this old body I have to drag,
Until I felt like stopping to look behind.
A chain of mountains hid the horizon.
Despite the isolated houses
Built on the gentler slopes,
I would have faced the same view
A hundred, or five hundred years ago,
No matter how much the city changed,
And all the progress they think they do.

There’s so much beauty left
In these hills and mountains.
Having been born here,
I must be fortunate.

Goats were grazing on the garden
Of a farmhouse passed down for generations.
So high up on this rise, wherever I looked
I was surrounded by mountains and hills,
And a silence so deep it made me shiver.

Tomorrow, I will have to traverse
A city made out of dozens of nationalities,
People who fight to assert their rights
Caring nothing about what came before
(An engineered reality we are told to support),
So I can return to my anxiety-inducing job
Where loads of people will call with problems
That I’ll have to squeeze my mind to solve
Until I get to return home drained,
When all I ever needed in this wretched world
Is a chair, a notebook and a pen, a guitar,
And hopefully music and some books.

As I passed by a large estate
Where cows were grazing peacefully,
A pair of old dogs were lying motionless
In the shade of a tall, lonely tree.
One of them was awake, and looked up
At the seagulls circling overhead.

I thought about those dogs’ lives,
With their drooping faces and greying fur,
And how they had spent their years
In the peace of nature,
With little to worry about
Besides yearning for a spot to loll in.
How much better their lives had been
Than the one I’ve had to lead.

A family was working in an elevated field,
Probably located in front of their estate.
Their tractor’s engine rumbled:
It was ploughing, sowing or harvesting
(I know close to nothing about farming)
While other people followed on foot
As they worked with rakes or pitchforks.

One of the people was a shirtless, hairy man,
And the others two young women in T-shirts
(Both of the women looked quite fit).
I passed them by as I worked on my ebook
(I’m still revising the latest novel I wrote).
I wished I could stroll around in nature
While as invisible as a ghost.

I didn’t venture much further,
Because a hundred meters up ahead,
A big tractor was blocking the path.
Its driver was busy chatting away,
So I turned around to return home.

The two women on the elevated field
Were silhouetted against the hills
As they held their rakes across their shoulders.
A bit further ahead, the rough man
Burped loudly as I passed by,
Which left a sour taste in my mouth.

This guy said goodbye to me with a tone
Between embarrassment and annoyance,
As if he was used to burping at people
And them considering it charming behavior,
But I was more disturbed
By a stranger telling me goodbye.

I stopped absentmindedly
To check something on my ebook,
And I heard lazy growling
Coming from the estate to my right;
I had stopped in front of the old dogs,
And the second one, now awake,
Had gone back to doing his own job.

As I walked away, I wanted to apologize.
I was intruding upon a world
Where I didn’t belong.

I ended up walking down another path
That I didn’t know if it would lead home,
While my heart got squeezed by sorrow.
I felt something had been stolen from me
When I was a child. A whole life
That I can never get back.

I should have lived somewhere else,
Surrounded by nature and animals,
Focusing on stuff that truly mattered,
Instead of trying to find my own place
Among thousands of human beings.

If someone proved to me that people
Had been placed here by aliens
So they would make a mess of this world
And destroy it if given the chance,
For no other reason than their desire
To create chaos and confusion,
Our existences would have made sense.

I am a dog in an old age
That has not yet begun.
I want to escape from it all.
I’ve had more than enough
Of this rotten civilization.

As I descended the cement path,
I noticed an opening in the vegetation
Of the forest to my left, an archway
Into a narrow trail in the cool shade
Of the many old, untended trees.

I sat down on the trunk of a fallen birch.
I pulled out my guitar and played a song
For the squirrels and the birds.

When I returned to the streets
That I have seen thousands of times,
They looked different;
I had spent time in a landscape
I never knew before,
And it made me feel like I’d become
A person slightly different
Than the one of who I’m sick.

This Sunday is running out,
And my head feels heavy,
Like a leaden weight tied to me
By a rope around my neck.

Tomorrow I will return to work,
To start a whole new week
Filled with anxiety and dread,
Having to solve everyone’s problems
When I’m unable to solve my own.

‘A Pair of Old Dogs’ by Jon Ureña

I entered my thirties as someone
Who had failed to get a stable job,
Who had worked for minimum wage
Programming corporate websites,
Which involved typing away non-stop,
Being pressured into working overtime,
And leaving the office at around five PM.

As I waited for the train to come,
I daydreamed about walking forward
And dropping onto the train tracks below
(Why not? Why was I alive at all?).
When I finally got home
At about half past six PM,
Often I went to sleep immediately,
Or passed out after I sat down,
So I could wake up the next morning
For a new workday to drain me dry.

I quit one of those jobs;
I couldn’t tolerate the stress
And exhaustion of its work hours.
I was fired from another one
While I was on medical leave
Due to anxiety and depression.
The others either let me go
Or didn’t hire me after the trial period,
All of them offering a creative version
Of ‘you can’t work well in a team’,
Which would be fair and all
If working there had involved teamwork,
Instead of me sitting alone at a desk
Programming whatever they told me to.

(I’m a terrible worker, I admit it,
Unless I’m interested in the subject;
I only care about my obsessions,
And I will work as little as possible
If I can get away with it.)

The last of those cases was back in 2015,
When my immediate boss argued angrily
With the supervisor that didn’t hire me
After a trial period I got through a center
For adults on the autistic spectrum.
That supervisor I hadn’t dealt with
Stated the cookie-cutter phrase
As the reason why she wouldn’t hire me:
‘You wouldn’t fit in with the team’.
A more accurate assessment of my abilities
Would have been ‘We’re better off hiring
Somebody else that has less problems’.

I had wasted six months of my life
Programming their intranet for free
So I could add that bullshit experience
To my curriculum vitae,
Although no employer who reads it
Would consider hiring me.

(Their HR person wanted me to be proud
That my effort reduced their work time.)

I gave up on ever making it
As a regular member of a society
In which I never felt I like belonged.
I spent most of my days reading,
Writing (very little those days),
Playing video games, playing guitar,
Or masturbating.

As I was busy hating my life,
I got called from a center that handles
Adults with severe disabilities,
To attend some half-assed, bullshit course
About developing social skills for work.

During the initial interview for the course,
One of the counselors offered me a job
At a workshop, in the assembly line.
Leaving aside that I didn’t want it
(I try to avoid working in the kind of jobs
That would make me want to kill myself),
The tremendous din of those workshops,
As well as how loud some workers are,
Would clash with my auditory disorder,
And my IBS would make me stop the line
Every forty minutes or so to take a shit,
So I decided to pass on that opportunity
(If you can call an opportunity a job
That wouldn’t pay me enough to live;
I hadn’t become that desperate yet).

They justified the government grants
By setting up a course that would teach us
How to talk politely and behave professionally,
To learn how to face life’s challenges
And become integrated into the workforce.

Modern society believes, and is forced to,
That everyone is equal in a fuzzy sense,
The same way a religious person believes
In a god that is just a construct
From which they derive their sense of meaning
Without the need to question or analyze it
(Such gods, secular or not, aren’t omnipotent,
So for the followers, if the rest refuse to believe,
Everything collapses into absurdity).

I’m not willing to accept a manufactured reality
In which different people must be treated equally;
People are born with or develop
Wildly incompatible needs and abilities.

The supposedly well-meaning idiots
In charge of organizing these courses
Put people with physical injuries,
Severe intellectual disabilities,
Severe “social” disabilities (autism),
And even a jihadist without disabilities
(Some shit about risking exclusion)
In the same fucking course,
Which made it utterly worthless.

We wasted half of every class
Hearing how our society was terrible
And we should think about converting
Into a more compassionate religion,
As if I didn’t already hate this civilization
For forcing us to tolerate this garbage.

Anyway, during one of the breaks,
I skedaddled as usual to read alone,
Sitting on an isolated bench
As my earphones played storm sounds.

But that day someone walked out
Of the nearby workshop,
Where a bunch of disabled people
Sat in front of an assembly line
To assemble machinery parts.

It was a beautiful woman
About twenty five years old,
Who wore a workshop uniform.
As she shuffled to the bench
Located right in front of me
(Maybe seven meters away),
She was sobbing like a child
As if nobody could hear her
Or nobody would care.

(I immediately thought that she cried
Because her life wasn’t worth living.)

When she sat down,
Her shoulders drooped
While the streams of tears
Dripped onto her lap.

She looked like those well-off women
Who carry shopping bags as they stroll
Through the fanciest neighborhoods.
I would believe her if she had revealed
That she was an actress preparing a role.

I sat there gawking at her
While I held my breath.
There was something epiphanic
In the sight of an incongruous woman
Sobbing like an abandoned puppy.

I wondered how broken she was,
And about her kind of brokenness
(Nobody would have ended up there,
In a facility up in the hills of Donostia,
If society hadn’t decided to hide them).

Someone else came out of the workshop.
It was a hirsute, ugly man in his forties
Who was missing most of the hair on top,
But I remember tufts of thick back hair
Peeping out of the collar of his uniform.

He hurried up to sit on the bench
Next to the beautiful, sobbing coworker.
I think he asked her what was wrong,
While she trembled and her chest convulsed.
Then I heard her thin, broken voice.
She was trying to cobble a sentence together
As if her brain was cleaved in two.
The words were incomprehensible.

(It made me feel again that life is a lie,
A farce that we’re forced to endure,
And I wished that all the pain
Trapped in the depths of my heart
Was so intense that it would kill me.)

It might have been cerebral palsy,
Or a myriad other disorders or diseases,
But whatever the cause, she was broken
To the extent that she knew
That she could freely sob in public
Like a ghost wailing in the night.

The hirsute coworker put his arms
Around the sobbing woman’s shoulders,
And as he cuddled up to her,
He spoke to the crying beauty
With tender words.

While she wept and wept,
He stroked her head
And kissed her temple,
Like a lover does
To comfort their beloved.

(That man was the ugliest I’d ever seen,
Because he was the one hugging her
When it should have been me.)

Was she aware of her limitations?
Was she was a bright woman
Trapped in a brain unable
To put together coherent sentences?
Or had she been blissfully spared
By her severe disabilities
That degree of sentience?

(I hope she was stupid,
As dumb as a wild animal,
So she wouldn’t understand
The kind of hell she lived in.)

I likely wouldn’t have given a shit
If she had been ugly.

What I learned from attending centers
For disabled people who rarely get hired,
Is that most human beings are spared
Having to come across the people
Who would disturb society
With their misery.

‘The Princess of the Gutter’ by Jon Ureña

This cleaning guy walks with a limp,
Has a useless arm, and curses loudly to himself
(On top of all that, he’s prematurely bald).
Like many other afternoons at the office,
Until this guy came in to do his job,
I was blissfully alone, sitting at my desk,
Watching YouTube, hoping to write stuff,
Wishing that nobody would call for an issue
Of the many I get paid to solve.

Every couple of weeks they send different cleaners,
But all of them are the kind that keep muttering,
Maybe hoping to start a conversation,
Maybe just to have their existence acknowledged,
Or maybe there’s a correlation between
Such verbal incontinence
And having to clean hospitals for a living.

“I can’t do this shit in thirty minutes.
Who the fuck does she think she is,”
The crippled guy grumbled
As he mopped the floor
With his remaining healthy arm.

Through his festering bitterness,
I imagined this guy’s entire life
As being filled with such complaints;
He never felt appreciated, loved nor happy,
Not for a single day since he was born.

I wondered if anyone ever told him
That muttering a series of curse words
Makes people want to listen even less.
I was a silent kid who opened his mouth
Just to curse when he couldn’t help it,
Until I realized that it sounded ugly,
So from then on I only cursed in my mind,
At the world and at myself.

Another cleaning worker came, a woman.
I don’t look them in the face if I can avoid it
(She likely wasn’t a model,
And if I wanted to stare at a tired, wrinkly face,
From lack of sleep and constant stress,
I would just look in the mirror instead),
But she sounded like she was in her forties.
Both started a loud, private conversation,
As I sat nearby trying to waste my time
By watching Korean videos on YouTube.

They ranted about another coworker.
“She said that my girlfriend would leave me,”
The crippled cleaning guy complained.
“You know that she won’t clean the fifth?
Because of the COVID patients, she says,
But those were moved to other floors.
I keep asking her why do I have to do her job,
And she just repeats that she won’t go there.”

The cleaning woman added to the conversation,
“You know that she used to work in the kitchen?
She came drunk often, and one day
She was stumbling as snot ran down her nose,
Until she dropped some pottage on the floor,
But instead of throwing it away,
She put the dirty food back in the pot.
Another coworker freaked out, and contacted me
Because she didn’t know how to stop her,
And they ended up calling security.”

The crippled cleaning guy cursed.
“That stupid bitch, she snooped on my phone
For just a few seconds, got to see my girlfriend,
And she said that she looked like a cheap whore.”
The cleaning woman shook her head.
“I don’t know how someone like that can exist.”

I heard every word as I sat at my workstation,
And in such cases I can never tell
Whether people like these want to be heard
(Some people just need to be listened to),
Or if their minds don’t allow them to realize
That they are cleaning someone else’s office,
Where someone is trying to do his job
(And at that moment, my job consisted
Of watching videos of a hot Korean model).

I didn’t stick around for them to finish.
My bowels were churning and burning,
As usual due to this IBS curse,
So I slipped away to take a shit.

When I returned, the cleaners were gone,
So I resumed my precious solitude,
This time for a new batch of prank videos
As I waited for the remaining time to pass
Until I could exit the hospital into the night,
To wait for my bus to come,
Then to wait for my train to come,
Then to walk through my shitty city,
Until I could finally hide between my walls,
So tomorrow I can do it all over again,
And pull off a few hours of real work
While I try to ignore the sound of cursing
Inside my own brain.

In such days I feel that no one
Wants to live in this world,
That there isn’t a single person
Who would choose to stay,
Yet we all do it anyway
(Until the day when we don’t).

We spend our whole lives
Doing what others ask us to,
While always hoping
That someone will appreciate it
And love us for who we are,
But nobody ever does.

It’s just a futile game
That you can’t win,
Yet you have to play it anyway,
So today I did it too:
I wrote an ugly poem
About those who keep cursing
Because their lives
Are not worth living.

‘The Cleaning Crew’ by Jon Ureña

A realization that most children are spared
Is the stark epiphany that others are wildly different.
More accurately, I was the odd one out.
I felt different from everyone else on Earth
(No wonder I loved UFOs from an early age).

My mind doesn’t process information like theirs do.
I couldn’t understand what made them laugh or cry,
They giggled over things that caused no reaction in me,
And they welcomed behaviors that caused me anxiety.

As a child I felt a pressure to hide my inner self,
Because if anyone knew how unusual I was,
The world would think less of me.

Being close to people is a way to feel alienated,
Since I don’t need to respond how they expect.
They all seem so similar to each other,
While I have always remained a stranger.

It usually takes them opening their mouths
To voice an opinion, or share their interests,
Or just reacting naturally to normal stimuli,
For me to think, “These people aren’t like me”.
Discovering someone who can relate
Is like finding a whole new planet in space.

The only place where I felt like I belonged
Was in the darkness of the universe
(If anything, I wanted to exist
In a parallel universe where I could live
Free of the expectations of society).

When a child’s parents realize
That the kid is different than the rest,
They can go two different routes:
The first explores what makes the kid unique,
And the other insists on him becoming normal,
Which involves smothering his natural instincts
And him learning to behave in normal ways.

I was told the latter, to wear a mask,
Because eventually it would become natural.
It only helped me develop a severe self-hate,
As I kept flagellating myself with stuff like:
“Maybe if I try harder I’ll fit in better.”
“When will these feelings go away?”
“When will I become normal?”
“I must be completely stupid.”

My mind split into two: the conscious brain
(The one that deliberately chose what to do),
And the monster, what dwelt deep inside,
That only spat out unacceptable reactions
And emotions, many of them troublesome
(Or at least made some people uncomfortable).

When I visited one of my first therapists,
My reason for going was, “I can’t feel anything.”
I had come to believe I didn’t experience emotions,
Because for all my life I had to train myself
To discard the products of my subconscious mind,
So I could live like a normal person.

I only identified with my conscious self,
Which barely kept its head above the water
(Opaque, mercurial waters, filled with monsters).
I felt that if I lessened the tight grip on my mind,
My self would literally disappear, swallowed
By the unacceptable, monstrous forces
That I was taught to repudiate and suppress.

This may be why I developed a strong tendency
To view the world as a dangerous place full of threats
(Except that it is such a dangerous place;
Most people don’t care to connect the dots).
A terrifying world full of treacherous people,
Where even many of the benevolent ones are evil.

The very nature of the universe is a conspiracy,
A vast, hostile, and ultimately undefeatable enemy.
I am afraid, terrified, and deeply concerned
About the future of humanity.

Acting like a normal person isn’t a solution,
Because other people behave naturally,
And acting is mostly a conscious action
Sustained in time through mental efforts.
Every day I ended up exhausted,
And some days I even passed out
(I recall one time I took the train
In the opposite direction by mistake,
And then immediately fell asleep).
Worst of all, acting didn’t even work,
Because people realize someone is fake,
Or least they get creeped out enough.

Wearing a mask also damages your dignity.
The mask has to be perfect, unblemished;
Otherwise, the whole facade will crumble.
Also, you’re forced to wear it constantly.

Your brain can’t keep up. You stay on guard
While you’re trying to maintain an act
With no room for error, or slipups,
Because if something triggers a response
That normal people consider inappropriate,
Then everyone will think you’re strange
(The monster can never be seen).

Unless you feel an impulse to murder people,
Just be yourself, and those who dislike you
Weren’t meant to stick around anyway
(And if you want to murder people,
Join the military, I guess).

It took me many years and self-searching
For me to allow my subconscious mind to be,
Which involved learning to listen to it,
Its likes, dislikes, and all kinds of impulses
That I had proscribed for my entire life.
And it took even more to identify with it,
To let it come forth without resistance,
For me to accept the monster inside.

Ever since, I only feel like myself when I’m lost,
When the subconscious mind does its thing,
For example writing or playing the guitar,
Completely unshackled and uncontrolled,
Running too fast for the conscious brain.

People lie to themselves about their choices,
About why they hold certain beliefs,
About the myriad of tiny decisions they make.
Most are decided by the primordial monster,
And the conscious mind takes credit for them.

That self-important conscious brain
Is like a tenant being pelted with objects
In his house during a violent poltergeist;
It’s not a trick, dude: the house is haunted
(I’m not sure if the analogy works,
But my point is that there are forces there,
Down in the ancient depths of our brain,
That we can’t even begin to understand.
Just let it do its thing, throw a few plates).

I recall a moment during a writing class
When everyone burst into laughing
Within milliseconds of the comment made,
But I was the only one sitting there stone faced;
The comment had failed to affect my brain.
The others stared at me as if I was killing their vibe.
None of the people involved chose their reactions.

Curiously, whenever a normal person finds out
That one of us (usually autistic) reacts differently,
They get disturbed, feel off, deflated.
They think that we lack intelligence of empathy.
The empathy accusations always kill me;
They come from people that surround themselves
With like-minded people who react the same way,
And they feel that the accused person should adjust
His mindset and reactions to suit their needs.

I eventually also realized that most people
Don’t walk around in tight circles,
Nor flap their hands to dissipate anxiety.

One of my fondest memories
Involves me waking up from an operation
While I was still high on morphine;
For the first time in my life
I wasn’t besieged by anxiety.
Most people don’t suffer such assaults,
Which explains many of their opinions.

My thoughts also walk in circles,
Caring little about reaching a destination.
My brain forces me to ponder the same stuff
Almost every day, or else it bombards me
With everything that has ever gone wrong,
Or what could go wrong, and the consequences.

I’m one of those autistic people, very common,
With a full-blown auditory processing disorder;
Repetitive noises or sudden, loudish ones
Make me feel as if I have been literally slapped
(It makes me want to get angry at the culprit),
Or else it feels like getting nudged repeatedly
By someone who insists on bothering me.

I’ve never learned to control those reactions;
They come from the depths of the brain.
It gets as bad as losing my train of thought
Each time I hear a meow somewhere around
(Although I love cats, particularly cat girls),
And then I can’t concentrate for life
Until the noise stops and the feeling goes away.

I tend to wear earbuds, or play loud music,
Or white noise of choice, like storm sounds,
Because it helps to block out the world,
The myriad of invading sounds and voices
That circle around inside my head all day long.

I had to learn about prosopagnosia,
Because most people don’t experience it
(It’s more common in autistic people):
Every face looks familiar, but not enough,
And I can hardly recognize people outside
Of the familiar places where they belong.
It even happens with my family members.

As an example of how shitty it gets:
What now feels like a lifetime ago,
I made out with this cute basketball player,
(She was a girl, though, maybe sixteen),
And I fucked up a relationship as I do,
By being a coward and hating myself.
I’m quite sure that I lost her email address.
She lived nearby, but I didn’t dare to go.
As far as I know, I never saw her again;
I assume that I came across her,
But I failed to recognize her face.
The poor girl likely believed I was a shithead
Because I completely ignored her existence.

Sorry, sweetie, I was fucked from birth
With a broken brain.
You dodged a nuclear missile, though
(What I’d do to fondle that ass again).

When I went for my disability assessment,
The guy working there said I should be fine
Regarding the autism with which I was born,
Because it’s called a developmental disorder
(Meaning that such disorders affect growing kids);
For society, adults with Asperger’s don’t exist,
Or else it gets its information from Hollywood
(Hoffman based his Rain Man on Kim Peek,
But that guy wasn’t even autistic).

According to the Spanish government,
I’m fifty two percent disabled,
But I think it should be higher:
I can barely get through a workday
Because of the constant anxiety,
The variety of physical pains,
The need to get away from the noises,
The social adjustments I need to make
To avoid making others uncomfortable,
My difficulties to communicate verbally,
And the lack of trust that comes from it.

And I was born with other afflictions
That factor into that high percentage,
But that have little to do with autism;
Ironically, these cursed irritable bowels,
Which cause me to feel bloated constantly
And to sneak away to the bathroom very often
(That alone incapacitates me for several jobs)
Weren’t considered bad enough to factor in.

I’m exhausted and miserable most days,
Like most autistic people are, I guess.

Anyway, I wrote this poem
(Or however I could name this thing)
Because there are still too many people
Who believe that everyone’s brain
Pretty much works the same way.

‘I Was Born a Unicorn’ by Jon Ureña