Night Shift Journal

Entry one

I got this job at a factory. Night shift.

It was stupid easy to get, since no one in their right mind would want this job. I gave them a drug test that was 100% positive for THC, and they didn't care.

I'm standing alone under bright fluorescent lights, with no windows anywhere. There is no one to talk to, no headphones allowed, just the droning of the assembly line and its machines. Sighing and whirring, ceaselessly. I don't even know what the hell I'm making. I was told to stamp a sticker onto a black box with a series of numbers, then press the red button to send it down.

My legs ache, and my eyes are full of snowy static; my back begins to give out on hour 10, but there is nothing to do. You have to keep stamping and pressing. I often feel myself slipping into the robotic nature of the assembly. When you enter the complex, which is shrouded in fog, its buildings fade in with the surrounding trees. As I enter this trance of perpetual motion, I imagine that I am the trees flanking the factory, and that the branches are tangled with wires. I see the veins in my hands as wires, and they crawl away from me, until whatever me is inside my skin is left behind, soaking in the foggy air.

People are around, sure, but they don't pay me any attention.

If I'm being truthful, I got the job for more than just the pay.

It isn't easy to explain, but I am trying to sink into myself.

This job is perfect for it. I can feel my thoughts getting slippery.

I'm running a sort of experiment on myself.

Sometimes I feel like my own life has abandoned me. I had a lot of potential in high school. A lot of people called me a prodigy because of my musical abilities, specifically with the piano. I can't even remember how to play half the shit I used to. I dropped out of music school after a couple of semesters. I had no support, no car, no money. I was in an unfamiliar city. I was also struggling with social anxiety. In high school, I was the best. Everyone just kinda expected me to do something great one day. But in college, it's a whole different story; every kid was the hero of their school. You're not special anymore.

So I wiped out and moved back in with my dad.

He is not happy about it, to say the least. He and I have a tense relationship.

He encouraged me to get on the night shift so he wouldn't have to see me. That's fine by me. Not to mention, I urgently had to take whatever work I could find, since he promised he'd kick me out if I was not working. I don't blame him, but after the shit he did to me as a kid, it's honestly the least he could do to repay me.

I do feel bad for him, though. He's schizophrenic.

There's nothing I can do since he refuses treatment. Most days he's hunched over a bottle like a grey creature, sticky traps hung like tinsel as flies buzz around our pallid kitchen. I try to tiptoe around him to make it out the door, because if he hears me, I will be stuck in some type of nonsensical conversation that ends with everything terrible happening to him being my fault.

My situation isn't as bleak as I write, however. In fact, I am strangely optimistic.

My room is a shed in the backyard. I like to think of it as the place I go to enter my larval state.

In other words, I self-medicate a lot. Mostly weed, sometimes shrooms, sometimes acid. Other stories for other days...

I guess I could cry about the way my life has turned out. But I honestly don't care. I don't care how little and invisible I am, because the world inside my head is vast.

I want to share that world with you, if you're reading this.

I imagine maybe one person is reading this.

Hello, what would you like me to call you?

What do you look like?

I hope you will come to understand your importance to me. I want to share my inner world not out of loneliness, but out of desperation.

It is the same feeling one might get when the moon is beautiful and full, and you turn to a lover or friend and say, "Hey! Look!" and you can only hope that they too will be filled with the same sense of wonder you are in, in that moment. The wonder of being able to notice, to know that your ability to see beauty makes you more than just sinew, blood, and calcium. My soul is like the steam whistling from a kettle; it wants out.

Can you hear it?