Cogito

          I sat so still I nearly petrified, frozen in my own filth and mundanity. Hours passed like bugs, laying eggs in the soft meat of my mind. I felt them hatch, I named a few. I caught them in a box, then gassed with raid spray.

          A time infestation in my home, gross.

          There's nothing to do but marinate in myself. In the hungry, hollow hum of a brain that won’t shut up. Thought after thought after thought, piling up like trash bags in summer heat. Bloating, melting, molding, mutating. Until it's too far changed from where it begun.

          I thought until my skull felt overstuffed, and the seams of my mentality started to split. I worried at the same ideas like a dog gnawing a bone down to splinters. Breathing in stagnation until it seeped into my pores.

          I sat there long enough that my shadow got bored and began to move without me. I sat long enough for my heartbeat to sound like footsteps outside my door. Long enough to realize I wasn’t thinking anymore, I was just staring.

          Staring at what? 

          At who?

          When?

          And somewhere, in that swamp-water quiet, something inside me slipped loose. A screw, or maybe a hinge, gone. I swear my mind just wriggled out of my skull and ran.

          I want to run too. I miss running. Running and running, barefoot through gravel roads. Not very fast, barely breathing, lungs like broken glass, but running nonetheless. Shards of glass and rock cutting open my feet, grown-ups yelling “Where are your parents?”

          I wish I knew, sir! But I couldn't say that. So, I just ran. Running and running. 

          Now sitting.

          Sitting and thinking. Am I thinking? I sure wish I wasn't. I don't want to think, I hate it. Where's the damn off-switch on this contraption? Cogito ergo sum. Cogito, ergo sum, ergo doleo. 

          I think, therefore... what? Therefore nothing. 

          Yet, being nothing is still a state of being, no? A state of anti-being still qualifies as a state, and a state must exist to be a state, so nonexistence is just existence.

          There I go thinking again. Sickening.