They say that if you imagine doing something it gives you 80% of the effects of actually doing it, so if you were to practice something in your head for ten hours, it would be equivalent to actually doing it for eight. So if I imagined jumping off a bridge, would I die 80% of the way? And if I imagined again, would 80% of the 20% I have left be gone? And how long would I have to imagine jumping off a bridge before I actually died? Because Prof. Schirenbeck tells me that .999 repeating is 1 and 999 tells me that I CAN'T BREATHE. Maybe I'm wishing I imagined half of the things that happened so that they would hurt 80% of the way and not the whole 100%. For two years ago I wrote of a soldier, and now I say farewell to a soldier, neither of whom will likely ever read this poem. That will happen when one stops pretending to care, and when the other can't read.

      I had another panic attack in the hall today. I didn't know how to stop it.  I knew it was coming, I just didn't know how soon and you said those words and it rendered me useless. I may not be able to keep my eyes open but I can still see how you mimic the things you ridicule. You search for a boon, pursuing it in the easiest way that you can, all the while unknowing that those qualities were not what drew it in but what drove it away. 

      You pulled the wheel into oncoming traffic, or don’t you remember? I laughed as I flew through the window, the shattered glass slicing into my face, my arms, my legs, my chest. Shards stick out from my skull and from the ground in every direction. It’s a thirty-three car train wreck and I’m a crumpled heap in the center. Gasoline fills my nostrils, drowning me, and there’s fire all around me, above me, inside me most of all. And I’m rolling, rolling, rolling off this golden gate bridge into this endless, unquenchable blue . . .

      The concrete is soft beneath my hands, rough and scarred. The clock is warped, like my grandma’s old watch, peach in color. Its hands are almost as soft as the concrete. It’s ticking is the same. All is cloudy and gray, the warped clock wakes me from my coma. Time changes everything. There’s no door anymore; I locked it from the outside and shut it from within. It’s cold and it’s warm, it’s dark and bright and burning and freezing. The only other thing in the room is the clock, the one my grandma used to wear around her wrist. It’s her favorite color. 

      I don’t exist. I am in this concrete room and I don’t exist. Everything is in my head, it’s in my head, it’s in my head--that’s why they don’t see me, that’s why they don’t hear me. The real me is faceless and in a concrete room, or on the Golden Gate Bridge, or in an empty hallway, I AM NOT HERE; I AM NOT REAL. The only thing that is is my grandmother’s watch. It’s peach in color, you know. That was always her favorite. Peach and teal.

      No one's asked if I'm okay for a while. That's good, though. That way I don't have to lie. I don't have to fake a smile and say that I'm fine. I’m not real, anyway.

      "Everyone has their passions,” I write in my essay. What I don't write is that everyone has their addictions, too. Mine are those tiny little numbers, cascading down the page in eight tiny waterfalls. 10, 30, 50, 130, 1,010. Where your passions fail you, your addictions won't. They get you out of bed every morning, force you to keep going. It's been this way for as long as you can remember, and now it feels like it will never change. 

      I wake up. I follow the numbers. I panic and crash and I wake up again in my concrete box. I don’t exist. The only things that do are the numbers. The numbers and the concrete box.