How To End It All

“I see you haven’t changed much.”

               After a long day, Penn came home tired not only of work, but his entire existence, and hoping to find something to look forward to he opened his refrigerator and had only this thought as he looked upon the half pie from the night before, the rotting orange and a few condiments he had bought in hopes of starting to pack his lunches. This lasted for about a week until he ran out of the other ingredients necessary for a deserving sandwich; that was when Penn realized just how quickly he would tire of such regular persistence as well as the funds needed for such a venture. Thus, he decided to keep himself occupied with as much water as he could handle so as to refrain from his desire to eat. He figured so long as he had a protein bar every morning and sporadically had a snack in the afternoons, he would be okay.

Penn’s appetite had been waning lately anyway, due to the overall lack of color in his life; tones of green and yellow surround him as he sit back in his usual chair, losing himself in any dispassionate propaganda he can find on the telly. This was his pattern, keeping his mind so occupied with the empty void of whatever his boss, the television, or even his friends wanted him to preoccupy until the next day when he would do it all over again.

Penn had had an average life, growing up with a mother and a father who cared for his needs; they fed him, clothed him, and even hugged him on his graduation day. One pointed hug lasting exactly 3.1 seconds from each of them, the average hug from a parent lasting 3.2 seconds as studies show. Although studies show a steady decline in this category since the year 1946 thereby proving that Penn, feeling no comfort from this fact, is not alone and could thus find comfort in his own mindless escapades guilt free.

However, it would be many years before Penn, being only 37, would accept this fact.

“What was that?” Penn asked.

The lights twitched at the silence after he seemingly asked this question to thin air. Air which he refused to breathe at this time, thinking about the voice he had just heard which also seemed to come out of thin air, or nothing, which is what he was, seeing as how I am writing about him as the narrator.

“Narrator? Nothing? I am not nothing!”

Penn seemed to be fighting back at me with his own words which I am typing.

“Who the hell are you and why are you in my head?!”

I am not in your head, Penn. I am writing you. I’m unsure how you are able to communicate with me, but it seems as though you’ve come to life by the point of my pen.

“Wait so you’re telling me that I’m not even a real human?”

Penn laughed. For as recently as a second ago he had begun to indulge his own conscience in a conversation about whether he was a real human or if he was in fact the result of the imagination of some guy and he did not exist as a 3 dimensional being at all but rather was a 2 dimensional character on the page of a journal being carried around as you would the lint in your pocket.

Why yes, that is exactly what you are, Penn.

Penn’s eyes opened wide as he once again heard the voice and he ran into the bathroom to splash his face with cold water.

“It’s just a dream Penn. You are going to wake up and everything is going to be normal.”

Penn went to bed determined that he would awake a new man without this damned voice in his head. It did take some time to get to sleep with this outlook, however. Being filled with adrenaline, Penn felt a waterfall of blood rushing throughout his body. He was trembling. He focused on his hands, watching them shake as the moonlight illuminated them and he listened to the creak of his bones slowly closing his fingers into fists, and then opening them again.

When he awoke his hands were in the same position he had last seen them; the voice still echoing his every move. He did his best to ignore it because that was easier than confronting it. He got up as he normally did and brushed his teeth, having forgotten to last night the taste of pizza still on his tongue and his teeth saturated in grime and bacteria.

It was only Wednesday and the next few days for Penn would feel like a blur. He could barely hear his own voice let alone the sound of Melany asking to borrow a few staples or Karl telling him he had to stay overtime and many other details I have put into a book titled ‘Needless Info on the Life of Penn’. Before he knew it, it was Friday night and he was getting in bed again after long hours of late night talk shows and that Ramen dinner alone. He fell asleep quickly, for he had all but turned his brain off having to deal with some stranger’s voice in his head all week. The weekend would give him time to unwind, and get this damned voice out of his head.

I made my coffee as I ate my protein bar. The day ahead looked like an arduous journey through the plains of Antarctica.

“Wait, why did you just say I?”

Why, I’m not really sure, in completing these mundane tasks day after day you must have gotten so used to my voice narrating your life that you accepted it as your own which I’ve got to say is a relief because do you know how difficult it is for me to write about a guy who wants to fight me at every letter and word?

I can imagine so… Wait what am I saying I don’t care how difficult it is do you know how hard it is for me to live with your voice in my head? I can hardly think!

Well that’s because you’re a figment of my imagination and you can’t think for yourself.

I don’t care if you say I’m a fig tree, you’re not going to dictate the way I live my life. That’s the last of you and your narrators voice I’m done!

Henceforth, Penn would listen no longer to the details I would assign him and his life. He got up every day and lived his mundane life and ate his mundane food and associated with his mundane friends and prolonged his mundane existence, every moment a blur, just as the last. The green and yellow tones became less and less pronounced. His feelings for Melany thinned, his dislike for Karl turned to apathy, and his childhood became less than a memory. Most importantly, the voice became a simple suggestion for his rebellious nature.

“It’s not my fault you’re in my head all the time.”

Little did he know, it was his fault

“Why in the world would it be my fault?”

Think about it, how much do you actually know about Melany?

“Well I know I have feelings for her, and she’s always coming to me to borrow things at the office.”

And Karl?

“He’s my boss, sort of a bully too.”

That’s because I told you those things. I gave you small details, and you filled in the way you felt because I created you that way, I wanted you to feel those things. Otherwise you would be a dull character and no one would read you.

“So you’re trying to control me.”

No, that’s not what I’m saying, what I mean is that you’re in my head, not the other way around.

“Right. But why would you want to write about me?”

Well that’s a good question, I thought to myself.

“Was that in the third person?”

The two of them paused for a long time, afraid of what might come next. Afraid of the endless possibilities of what this could mean, for Penn, for the narrator, for the narrator’s narrator? When did it end? Why was this happening? Could it be made to end? Or was this just a series of different perspectives told from different persons perspectives only to wind up with Penn, and his job, his feelings for Melany and her lack thereof, and his splitting headache from this now second voice in his head. Doubling over, Penn had a revelation. He had that thought that only a person in his circumstance (one that of desperation and hopelessness) would have. He thought of a way to end it, to end it all. Without saying one more word, he left the office he’d worked at for so many years and went to the nearest store to buy the necessary equipment to complete this task, the one that would end it all. He arrived at home and went straight to that chair he had grown so fond of, the one with the loose string in the arm where he had pulled at the cloth all too many times, he took the item he had bought, held it, and (whether it be to appease himself, that voice in his head, or me) he began to write.