Talent is as made up a notion as luck. Discuss. The class turns in their seats, exchanging weary glances. Batshit teacher is at it again. I mean to say obviously people have dispositions. But really these terms are the shackles by which you choose to stay bound.
Chance is real, so are things like, attaining glory (or so I’ve heard). But most of our description words and heralded ‘paths’ are fluff without much substance. The correct explanation is typically the simplest. Many such cases. The problem is that human minds are not hardwired for the simplest answers, actually frequently straying away in favor of complicated superfluous rhetoric. (Many such cases).
I was not paying attention when finishing the last few pages of a paper about tragic princes and grief. I was thinking about something else. My hands, bless them—knew what to say better than my own mind which had been painfully quiet, as I looked down and found lengthy prose arguing how Aeschylus and Shakespeare were geniuses, really, to use grief as a tool with such subtlety. Why are Orestes and Hamlet so similar yet glaringly different? While you can pit traits against each other, rage vs. melancholia and action vs. inaction being the most obvious, every contradictory personality trait that they mirror each other with is permeated by a thick layer of grief. Orestes’ debilitating anger and forceful qualities come from his sadness. Hamlet’s inability to make a choice, inability to do much of anything but wail very obviously stem from woe as well. Their individual predispositions created an internal environment in which grief would stew and become destructive. Grief is the tie that binds, the red thread running through every single bad move either of them made. I’m hunched over looking at my hands. I know that somehow this applies to me, but I’m not sure where.
(Speaking of bad moves). The timing is always perfect somehow. Like that night I kicked my laptop off the bed right before I had a paper due. Or running into someone outside the grocery store right after successfully forgetting the shape of their face. It’s been so long since I’ve done drugs that I had nearly forgotten what a comedown felt like, but when I woke up yesterday morning with my neck bent backwards and my hands clenched around my elbows I knew that this would be just as bad. I spent the morning with my head between my knees and a wet rag on the back of my neck. This was all for the nausea but it only made it worse. The day before I had gotten drunk by myself and sat outside for two hours conducting thorough analyses. I need it to be logical, right—I need it to be neatly categorized in red and green so that I can optimize my decision making and forward steps, like a robot. Like a mathematical algorithm. I do not trust what I myself want the most right now. And I don’t trust it to even be possible. But I got drunk by myself and then I fell asleep on a naked duvet and woke up just in time to go to a meeting with my jaw wired sideways and clacking away like a ventriloquist doll. I was talking about bullshit but I was thinking about Prague, and his old argyle sweaters, and of course it would happen this way. I was talking about bullshit but I was thinking about when I was in the car for thirteen hours last summer straining this whole thing over in my head, and even back then I kind of figured that I’d never be able to do it but it was nice to think about. But I remember being very sad about this. I was blotting tears in the back seat rereading his letter while mom and dad argued over directions to Dairy Queen. Jesus Christ, the letter. I was in a borrowed dress and my hair was too poofy when I tripped down the stairs and my dad pulled it out of his backpack and watched me read it, and you can’t really hide a reaction like that. We were going to a wedding and my heart was peeling and blistering like a bad sunburn. I missed him so much but I didn’t know how to say it, and I didn’t want to because I didn’t want what would surely happen next. What is surely happening right now.
Nothing is going to offer any more clarity than this stupid bedroom and that spider in the corner. Trying to find clarity through actions and tasks is a cop out because it completely ignores the fact that typically (for me, at least) you always know immediately what it is you want but then it’s painted over in thick layers of subconscious and guilt and fear, making it opaque and difficult to discern. But you always kind of know. I went to the bar and I was not paying attention to the story, I was thinking about how much I needed to throw up. I felt like I had my secret carved into my forehead. I did something very bad. And someone is going to get very hurt because of my gross negligence and my punishment will be that I have to be the one hurting them. People say to be selfish and not dwell but that’s just what you’re supposed to say. No one ever wants to be on the receiving end of this.
I have 11 days. Am I strong enough to pull the trigger. Am I strong enough to pull the trigger on Chekov’s gun, introduced three years ago with a blindfold to match, introduced three years ago with the tssss of carbon monoxide following me everywhere, gradually incapacitating me. Am I strong enough to pull the trigger on Chekov’s gun and commence Occam’s firing squad, that the heaviest gun has the least amount of bullets? The one that will hurt you the least seems like they will hurt you the most? Occam’s roulette where the simplest answer might kill you and it’s up to chance? Russian’s razor where you sit in a circle with a clenched fist on the table and whoever gives the shortest confession gets the girl? Chekov’s gun turned out to be a white dove and Occam’s razor is slitting its throat and all I can do is sit and watch. The three of us are sitting at a table with a loaded handgun sitting encased in a box. Shrodinger’s gun, Shrodinger’s broken heart—the answer sits rolled into the bullet. The answer is yes and no if we don’t open the box. The answer is both and neither if we don’t empty the gun. The answer is spray painted on the wall behind them but they’re both staring at me. I reach into the box, grab the gun, and shoot myself twice.
Samantha Backlund-Clapp is a graduate of the University of Amsterdam, writing on napkin scraps in her spare time. The lead on her chain is planted in rural middle America, where she learned the love language of desolate wastelands and dried corn husks. She has been printed in Notch Magazine, Pacific Review, and Dakota Warren’s Nowhere Girl, among others. She is presently, and always, in search of Las Vegas and precocious realism.