All Of The Worst Things I Can Imagine
obsessive anxieties from a neurodivergent human
Some **very pleasant thoughts** that occupy much of my brain space…
I am in a comedy show but I don’t know it. My whole life is depressing—TV dinners and 9-5 bullshit that leaves me exhausted. The only thing I live for is my daughter. But, eventually, we all learn—all of us—that this is merely a show. People comment that my love for my “fake” daughter is “the funniest part of the season.”
I am a working-class human in the future. I save enough money to enter one of the many simulations curbside; they are common in the future. Indeed, the cheap ones are on every corner, where other working-class folks hustle dreams. “Want to escape?” the hustlers ask. “Experience joy momentarily?” I am in the simulation, and I am a sex worker there. In the simulation, I fall deeply in love with my simulated daughter. She is everything. And then, I am violently pulled away from the simulation—my money runs out— and I am forced to live in the “real world.” In the “real world,” I once again become a sex worker just so I can afford to enter the simulation again, just to see my daughter.
My daughter becomes a Nazi and works to “neutralize” me.
I will learn, somehow, that my daughter’s father is a sexual predator.
I am sitting at home alone and I hear an ambulance in the distance. I feel relatively sober and composed, but the ambulance comes to collect me. I insist that I am OK. They state otherwise. “What do you mean, your daughter?” they ask. “Your daughter died a decade ago.”
My mother dies, and I feel nothing.
I think obsessively about the nature of consciousness and decide that all living things are equal. As a response, I let my home get taken over by rats and ants and when I die, I am featured in some horribly depressing documentary about hoarders and other people who are unwell.
I drink myself into something of a coma and my child has to live the rest of her life knowing this dark truth about me.
My daughter dies and her father and I trauma bond over it and fuck each other in the shitty house we bought together when I was 29 years old.
I am in the car of some innocuous kidnappers, and they tell me they will only let me go if I fuck my own father.
I die. I decompose. And I come back as one of the ants I’ve squashed, alive for just days before I run from a (my) bloated thumb.
I die and I am forced to watch—nay, *feel*—all the moments in which I believed I could truly be something. My purgatory is to bear witness to every hope and dream that I’m too cowardly to see through.
My daughter is too smart for her own good and so she takes up heroin because it’s all so heavy. I try to intervene. I take her in. I kick her out. I work a third job to send her to rehab. I resign eventually, sitting with her on the curb of downtown Omaha, shooting up with her, if only to exist in her orbit for a moment.
I am on a plane that creaks and moans. Turbulence is natural, I tell myself. But there is something wrong. I remind myself that I am not special, that every human that’s ever lived has died. And then I realize that my unnamable sadness really comes from the knowledge that some people are lucky and some people aren’t; some people die in a fit of fear and others get to just sleep into infinity. I know that this is patently unfair. I know that those who die in war—wars created by men who don’t even know how to shoot an arrow or a gun—are simply unlucky. And in the recesses of my ill mind, I wonder, “Why did they [forever, *they*] code us to be afraid of death?” The plane nosedives and I am clearheaded, I embrace my daughter and tell her that I love her in every timeline. I am calm because I know that one truth.
My daughter reads everything I’ve ever written and determines that I am a sexual predator.
My daughter dates an older man, wants to be a sex worker, drops acid, drinks absinthe and contemplates jumping off the Eiffel bridge in Hungary, lives off of peanuts, etc, so she can see the world; I cannot tell her, explicitly, that all of this is both empty and essential.
I get drunk and fall down the stairs and my limbs are all twisted above my head while my blood pools out and my daughter finds me.
My daughter wins an Academy Award and in her acceptance speech, she says that she overcame all manner of adversity, including having a hooker mother. She does not speak to me because being a hooker is akin to a mortal sin in her (valid) philosophy. And I live out my days attempting to accept this.
My dog is somehow connected to me on a cellular level and all the cigarettes I’ve smoked, all the vapes I’ve hit, all these chemicals inside me move from my lungs to hers. My dog dies of some crazy kind of canine lung cancer. I act like I don’t know… but I know.
I find out, once and for all, that my mother really doesn’t love me. It is an undeniable knowing, solid and real; but that doesn’t change the hurt. I take that hurt into the afterlife with me.
I am pregnant for the first time, and I live in a warehouse where I shower in a mop bucket; I cut my hair in front of broken glass. Donald Duck looks at me while I snort cocaine and make bangs. The man who knocks me up leaves my daughter and me everything when he dies because he has no one else. His house is a mess because he has a disease. I am aware of my body in this moment, a girl easily convinced.
It’s a sad memory.
How many sad memories will my daughter accrue?
Wow!