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What makes someone do something like this?
We drive back home and then part ways on the second floor of our apartment building. I go to sit
on my couch and I grab the television remote and press the power button. The television won't turn
on, so I press it again but I get the same result. I press it three more times but the damn thing is
broken and it makes me so angry that I throw the remote at the wall and it shatters.
I know that I'm not mad at the remote or the television, I know that I'm mad at my life. Some kind
of passive aggression that if I don't find a way to cope with, will end up causing me to do
something I will regret.
I know that I fear that the clock is ticking away until I finally make my way around the entire circle
and reach the dot again and completely lose my mind. I know that I fear that they will give me
those pills again that affect my memory and cause me to forget my dreams. I know that I fear if I go
back there again a switch might turn on and I may not be able to turn it off.
I try to sleep, but I never really fall asleep. I wake up even more tired than when I laid down my
head. Later on in the day the delivery men deliver my new shelf; they say they tried calling to let
me know that they were coming but they received no answer. I tell them the power went out in the
building yesterday. After they leave, I move the shelf from the living room to the room that stores
the notebooks, and I somehow end up getting a small superficial cut on my right thumb. I wipe the
minimal blood on my shirt and begin to place the already categorized composition notebooks onto
the shelf.
While I'm putting one of them up, it falls out of my hand and lands open on the ground and I see a
page titled "Calm The Devil's Grin." I read a sentence about how giving something freewill will
allow it to end its own existence, but before I can read anymore I hear a loud knock at my door. It's
definitely not Lynne.
I open the door and standing in the doorway is a man who thinks that he is everyone's best friend.
That he is so likeable and lovable that he can do and say as he pleases, and that is exactly what he
does. He shows himself into my apartment and at the same time begins to talk about his trip to the
other side of the world. His name is Tao and had been visiting his relatives in China for about six
months, and now he's returned. It wouldn't be so bad if he didn't live right under me and was
always coming over. If the opportunity ever strikes in the right place at the right time I will kill
him.
Tao makes a joke about how he comes back home at the wrong time, with the power being out and
all, and then he asks me how everyone in the building is doing, as if I were everyone's keeper. I tell
him that Joe had an accident and is in a coma, but that doesn't seem to jar him.
Right after he asks me about who the new woman is right across the hall, and I ask him if he means
the short lady with the two kids. He says yes, that one, but that he doesn't know about any kids. I
tell him that her name is Lynne and that she is pretty cool, although a bit strange, and he tells me
that he likes strange and then makes a facial expression that can't be expressed in words.