Time Capsule: I Am Made of Chalk gathers a body of writing created between 2009 and 2013—before its author had language for awakening, before departure became irreversible, and before the world he thought he lived in quietly collapsed.
These pieces were written in bedrooms, classrooms, cities, and altered states—during high school, college, and the months following a one-way departure to Mexico that would ultimately lead into Guatemala, ceremony, and initiation. Long withheld, the work resurfaces now as a living record of becoming.
Purchase the short collection here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GFG6L6TW
Stay tuned for Part II tomorrow
Digital Pre-order Available ~ January 20 Release
One
The very earliest hours of the morning can have a very odd effect on you, especially if you’ve been up the night before, and the night before that too. I couldn’t tell you how many days I’d been up, but I’d left my “home” and I’d lost my mind and I anxiously wandered through the streets, muttering dissociated nothings for perhaps half a week.
That particular morning, the world seemed to apologize that it even existed. I could hear it in the lazy serene quiet of the streets. I could see it brown leaves on the sidewalk and half barren November trees, and I could see it in the airy pink pre-sunrise tint that glossed over the world. I could smell and taste it in the aroma of the sewage, and I could feel it in the way the homeless people far more strung out than I gazed right through me and saw nothing but themselves, and in the way all the serious people, all those technologically advanced self-centered monkeys dressed in suits and ties making their way to their serious seven AM appointments, seemed to look at me as if I too should apologize for being there in that moment.
But I was already sorry for every second I was in the sprawl. All I had at that point was a pouch of rolling tobacco and tiny plastic bits of broken pens I would stick in my mouth and chew on. I wanted no one to see me. I wanted to melt away. Luckily, that morning I was completely alone. But my solitude only lasted momentarily.
I had to find my daytime hiding spot before the city really woke up. I noticed a discreet alleyway that seemed to be inviting me for some reason unknown to me at the time. As I walked past it, through the left edge of my peripheral gaze I noticed the tiniest movement and it was almost as if that jittery calm feeling that starts in your empty stomach and travels up through your body before it sits in the apex of your brow hit me suddenly and somehow I just knew that something that shouldn’t normally have been there came out of nowhere.
I began walking down the alley until I reached a dead end and saw something jet black in my path. I walked up close to examine it and it seemed to be a tiny, completely two dimensional black triangle. I searched my mind for something to compare it to, but never before had I seen or even heard of anything similar. The closer I got to it the deeper the feeling in my stomach grew and the more I knew that I was perceiving something not to be sensed by sentient beings and it startled me. Its appearance, the sensations that took hold of me, and the place that it took me cannot, perhaps should not, be described in words. But these days I have nothing else to do but write and I need to make sense of this. The very fact that decent paper and a working pen have stumbled into my possession seems to suggest that I must at least try to describe it.
It looked completely flat, as if it were an incredibly thin black poster clinging to some sort of invisible wall. I put my right eye up to it and gazed inside to see a completely empty void. I walked around to the other side of it, and as I passed it there was a moment that it seemed to completely vanish until I reached its other side. I looked inside of it again and noted the same completely empty space before I backed off for a brief moment.
I put my index finger near it and when it was about an inch away, the tip of my finger looked as if it were being stretched out and sucked into the hole, though I felt not a thing. I stuck my finger inside of it and looked to the other side. Though I could feel around inside, when I looked to the other side, my finger seemed to completely vanish. I took it out quickly and put my eye back up to it.
Then the void seemed to appear as a tunnel. In the center, there seemed to be an invisible point miles into the void which emanated some gravitational pull. As I stared into it, the sounds of the outside world slowly began to disappear until all I could hear was silence. I continued to gaze into the void as the silence got louder and louder until it became a faint humming. I heard it not with my ears but inside the top of my head. The invisible point in the center of the void seemed to be projecting silence itself. In the vast emptiness there were sparkle-like dim lights and flashes floating around in chaotic yet perfect patterns and vibrational ripples that would start at the edges and then float in and out and in and out towards the center like luminous bubbles.
For a moment, I felt the urge to leave that alleyway and never return. I was terrified, yet in awe and incredibly curious. Perhaps the combination of apathy, ennui, sleep deprivation, and under nutrition put me into such a state of carelessness that I could stay there and stare into it, but I think it’s more likely that the black nothing forced me to stay there. I feel as if it sucked in a part of me. Call it what you will… some would call it a soul but my mind is so lost I’m not fit to make any metaphysical claims. Whatever it was, my consciousness went somewhere else. I can’t say when it happened, but as I stood there that feeling that began in my stomach grew to such intensity that I couldn’t really feel that I had a body. My consciousness seemed to slowly drift out through the very tip of the crown of my head and float into that unknowing not-place inside of the black triangle. I completely disappeared. I saw nothing. I thought nothing. I felt nothing. I sensed nothing. I knew nothing. There was no time. There was no space. I forgot I was a person. I merely floated around in the endless void. And to tell you the truth, it was utterly peaceful—it was pure bliss. Well, it was until I had to come back.
At this point I’ve finally determined that I was gone for two entire months. When I first returned, my sense of time and space was so utterly skewed that it felt like not months but years. As soon as I retuned the bliss suddenly became sheer terror as I feared I completely lost my mind. For the most part those feelings of shock and terror have stuck with me, and at this point I’m now developing an utter disdain for this thing we call “reality.” How I came out of the black space was just as odd as how I fell into it, but in comparison it seems much more ordinary.
When I first returned it felt like a great drop, as if I’d fallen from a great height back into my body. The first thing I felt was a someone’s hand on the back of my body, and from my chest awareness spread to the rest of my body, which suddenly felt incredibly heavy as I fell on the ground with a sudden jolt.
I heard a man say “Whoa, are you okay there girl?” but I was too stunned to get off of the ground. I sat on my shins and forced my eyes shut, pressing my forehead against the concrete.
“Hey there, what’s wrong? Do you need help my lady?” the voice said.
I said no words. I simply sat upon the ground blinking my eyes shut in existential shock. The man kneeled down next to me and put his hand upon my back. “Breathe,” he said. “Breathe deeply, in and out, and in and out.” I tried but my breaths were quick and exasperated. After several minutes I managed to calm myself down enough to at least get up. I opened my eyes softly and looked over at him. He was a few feet shorter than I with dark black hair in long dreadlocks and a beard coming to the top of his chest. His skin was a deep tan and he looked Chinese in origin, but I couldn’t quite tell. His expression was compassionate and concerned, but as I glanced at his eyes I noticed that his pupils had expanded to cover all the color in his eyes. I stared into his eyes and they transfixed my gaze. I blinked my eyes and when I opened them the rest of my vision had blurred over and taken to fractal-like patterns while those dilated black spheres floating in his head remained in perfect focus, and my stomach again dropped and my mind again flickered and deep inside his eyes I again saw the vast nothingness.
I shut my eyes suddenly and shouted “stop!” as loud as I could.
“Miss, miss,” he said. “Calm yourself. I’m not here to hurt you. I stood behind you for half an hour as you just stood like a zombie staring off into space. I put my hand on your back and breathed, trying to push energy into you for at least ten minutes before you even moved. What happened to you?”
I stared at the dead flowers peeking through the cracked concrete for a moment until I shifted my gaze back to him. “I don’t fucking know. All I can tell you is I disappeared,” I said. “Who are you?”
“Who am I?” he said. “No, no, no, who are you?”
“Why should I tell you? Look, I can take care of myself now. Just get away from me,” I said. I covered my eyes from his and clenched my jaw.
“Hah! I doubt you can even answer that question for yourself,” he said. “But think about it. It’s the most important question you can ever ask. Who are you. Think about it.”
I forced my eyes shut and my forehead hardened with frustration. I sat in silence for a few minutes, hoping he would leave but he kept whispering, “who are you… who are you…”
“I…am…nothing,” I finally burst out.
He quietly laughed with a humble superiority that made me feel ashamed and frustrated, safe yet incredibly afraid. “You’re on the right track,” he said. “But you’ll need to work on your attitude. Who are you? Be right here. Be right now. Try and find yourself. Who are you? What is it that you call you, and where is it located? Find out for yourself, and don’t tell me that you don’t know.”
I couldn’t take it anymore. I got up and looked him in his eyes, which had seemed to return to normal. I glanced over to where the black triangle had once been and it was completely gone. I looked back at him and he raised his eyebrows expectantly.
“Look,” I began. “I don’t really want to play your games. My…” It was hard to talk. It was hard to formulate thoughts, and when I did formulate thoughts it was even harder to determine if they were in any way valid or rational. A thought would come, a thought would go, but nothing seemed right or real. What was reality? Who was I? Who was he? What was anything? “My notion of reality has just been completely obliterated and it’s really annoying for you to keep asking me for answers about anything, because I have none,” I continued. “Now please leave me alone and let me be. I’ll be fine. Thank you.”
“I think I know what happened to you,” he said. “You saw a tiny little nothing, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know. The last thing I remember I hadn’t slept in a while and I saw something… something incredibly bizarre. And now I’m here.”
“Ah, I understand then. You most certainly saw a tiny little nothing. Or should I say… the tiny little nothing. Think about it. I think you know what I’m talking about.
So I thought about it. I thought about the two-dimensional triangle and the void it contained. I thought about what I saw in his eyes and the feelings it gave me. I thought hard enough and told myself it didn’t happen. They were all tiny little nothings. What I saw was absolutely nothing. Nothing is easier than something, and the presence was clearly not a thing. Nothing is easier than anything, really. That’s why all I wanted to do then was sleep.
“You’re right,” I said. “It was absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. Now, tell me, who are you?”
He chucked again. “My friend, you’ll have to answer that question yourself first before I tell you a thing about myself. But you seem to have been gone quite some time, so perhaps we should get you somewhere safe where you can have something to eat.”
“I don’t need food,” I said. “If I eat I’ll only have to do it again. What’s the point?”
“Ah, so reckless, my friend,” he said. “But you really must take care of yourself a little bit. Smoke some cannabis. Then you’ll calm down a bit and you’ll realize how hungry you are.”
“You mean weed?”
“Yes, weed.”
“There’s fake stuff at this place I used to stay,” I said. “But they never have real weed. That’s too hard to find and no one likes it anyway.”
“Oh, so it’s one of those places,” he said.
“What kind of place?”
“The kind where they sit around in the dark watching flashing screens doing synthetic drugs,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s one of those places.”
“Great,” he said. “I have no home myself, but you need to go somewhere where people will take care of you. Why don’t you take me there, but first, let’s get you food.”
Two
We went behind a dumpster and found some half stale bread and after a few bites I was full. He got me several cups of water from a restaurant and I took him to the commune I’d abandoned two months prior.
The winter sun peeked over the red horizon as we walked. After I calmed down I realized how cold it was outside and we walked quickly to retain body heat. The setting sun tinted the desolate ghetto sprawl dark orange. I gazed up at the moon, a tiny waning crescent shimmering in the deep blue. It struck me as peculiar how such a disgusting world can sometimes appear so beautiful, even in the darkest of hours.
After perhaps three miles we’d arrived in the northern part of the city at the commune. Nearing the narrow block, I could hear the evening’s party already beginning.
“This is the place,” I said to him.
“Wonderful,” he replied.
I knocked hard on the door and waited. A few seconds later a skinny man with bloodshot eyes I’d never met before opened the door. “Who are you?” he asked.
“I used to live here,” I said. “I’m back now, and this guy I found—“
“I found her,” he said.
“This guy who found me wants to come in too. It’s cold outside. Just let us in.”
“Uh… all right,” he said.
As soon as I entered I tasted the familiar aroma of such a large number of dirty people sharing such a dirty space and noted how little things had changed. I suppose I must diverge from my story for a bit to fill you in on my living situation… The house didn’t have a name. In the house, you were lucky if you had a name. But everyone knew Allan and Crystal, and they claimed that we were all a family.
It’s really not hard to become a family member. All you have to do is walk in the door. Allan and Crystal bring food and drugs every night, what more could you possibly want? At least that’s what they would say.
Allan and Crystal are chemists. Have an issue? A feeling you want to change? An emptiness that needs to be filled? Allan and Crystal will tell you what to swallow. Except all their drugs are synthetic. Synthetic, euphoric, and highly addictive.
The scheme is simple. We sell their drugs. They buy us food. They give us drugs. We watch HyperVision.
Selling the drugs isn’t that hard. If someone tries them once, they’ll want to try them again. The area we live in is incredibly poor and there’re many good customers. We live near a big public university and kids are easy to get hooked. A typical day might go like this: wake up with some Super Smile Pancakes (the most popular manufactured toaster pastry, packed with lots of sugar and caffeine to start the day) and a few amphetamines, receive your daily pack of A&C “cignature” cigarettes, then make your sales for the day (we have a $300 quota—it’s easy to hit before the sun sets), come home to smoke some Major Dank Budz (synthetic “marijuana” produced by Allan and Crystal). Then, you can sit on the floor, on the couch, or basically anywhere that isn’t too dirty, wet, or cluttered, put on the HyperGlasses and stare at one of the many walls displaying HyperVision. Later that night, there’re a few different possibilities, depending on the night. Allan and Crystal have many different drug cocktails from homemade malt liquor with “special ingredients,” highly addictive stimulants or narcotics, powerful aphrodisiacs, and also hallucinogenic cocktails. When it’s just something dopey we sit around and talk about… basically nothing at all. If we do the sex drugs there’s an orgy. But if we do something trippy we watch HyperVision and do nothing but stare in awe until we start to giggle and drool. Then we take the anti-anxieties or sleeping pills, pass out (or in my case, lay there a few hours) and repeat the process when the sun rises. If someone overdoses we carry them in a random direction for a few blocks and lay them on the sidewalk. Body patrol picks them up the next day.
I cannot begin to tell you how I ended up in this situation, but that story is longer than the one I have to tell. What has been happening to me since I saw the tiny nothing has made everything that happened before seem incredibly insignificant. I can tell you this much: I’ve been more or less fucked up my entire life, partially due to circumstances out of my control, but partly by choice and poor decisions. But I am not stupid. Currently I have a very thin grip on reality but I swear I’m not stupid. At one point in my life I could have proven that to you.
I left Allan and Crystal’s because I wanted to think my own thoughts for once, but living homeless in the fall in this endless city sprawl with withdrawals from such a numerous array of chemicals proved that I am incapable of surviving on my own. The only things I put into my body during my time alone were cigarettes and water— which are better than powerful synthetic opiates, but still I could not survive. But deep inside of me, I really didn’t want to survive. I still don’t really want to be alive but I’m too much of an insecure coward to do a thing about it. So I had to show my face again in this trap of a building which so many pathetic nobodies call a home. Since returning three days ago, I have not consumed anything but Super Smile Pancakes, peanut butter, water, or cigarettes, and my head still feels funny. The only way to cover up my constant sense of anxiety and bereave myself of this horrible weight inside of my chest is to continue writing. I apologize. Let me continue.
The night I returned to the house it seemed to be a booze night. No one even noticed me and the mysterious friendly stranger I brought with me.
I told him that this was the place and asked if it was what he had expected and he silently nodded in dismay, scratching at his beard. I scanned the crowd and noticed many dirty familiar faces. And that’s when I saw, and remembered, the one person I wanted to see the least.
I called Bruno my boyfriend but we both knew we only wanted the sex. The truth is that I wanted nothing to do with him unless I was fucked up, and I only fucked him when we were drunk or had one of the sex pills Allan and Crystal made. He would always finish before me and I had to get off on my own afterward. But it was better that way, trust me. The few times I came first, having to keep fucking him so he could get his fix too was both painful and torturous. I’d rather not have had sex at all than dealt with it. Once we were both finished, we’d turn the other way and pass out wherever we were. Of course this doesn’t make it any better, but I tend to believe every relationship in the house went kind of like ours. “Relationship” just meant preferred fuck buddy, but no one was anything close to monogamous.
The day I returned, Bruno looked at me in a drunken stupor and turned his head as if he were a confused dog. “Babe? Babe, oh babe is that you? Where the FUCK have you been babe?”
I didn’t say a word. The very presence of the man who found me in the alley was filling me with such shame that I couldn’t bear to interact with Bruno, yet he was persistent. I bowed my head and forced my eyes shut. I was beginning to develop an incredible headache.
“This fellow is trying to talk to you, miss,” said the man. “It’s rather rude to ignore someone, no?”
“He’s a tiny little nothing,” I said. “I think it’s okay to ignore him,”
“But you’re a tiny little nothing too, no?” he said. “And so am I. If you won’t talk to him, then I may as well.”
I told him he’d regret it but he didn’t seem to mind and the two began chatting. I forced myself onto a dirty bean bag bed behind them and curled into the fetal position. I heard Bruno continually asking the man “Is that my girlfriend?” in a drunken stupor.
From across the room, Allan’s voice bellowed “Nitrous! Nitrous! Get your nitrous while it lasts.” Everyone stopped what they were doing and began lining up. Allan filled up balloons from a gigantic canister and people began grabbing them and sucking them in. One by one they began laughing hysterically in stupor and splendor. Bruno immediately stopped talking to the man and got a balloon, forgetting almost instantaneously that I was even there.
The man walked over to me, and said, “So, this is what goes on in this place, huh?” I nodded disdainfully. Across the room Allan got tired of distributing the nitrous so he gave the canister to some random family member who continued his duty. Ten minutes later, someone who had one too many balloons fell onto the floor and started convulsing uncontrollably.
“This dude needs help! Help him! Quick!” someone shouted. The family crowded around him anxiously. “Kick him,” she said, “maybe that will get him to stop.” So one of his friends began kicking him in the chest spastically.
“Yo, dude! Knock it off man, you’re killing the vibes!” he said. But the guy on the floor continued shaking. The man with the nitrous put the canister up to his mouth and sprayed. “Maybe this will help him,” he said.
The man who found me in the alley looked over to me again. “Some life, eh? While you do nothing, perhaps I’ll go and help these fools.”
“You can try,” I told him. “But there’s no helping us. There’s no helping any of us.”
But he walked over, cool and collected, and parted the crowd without a word. He put his hand on the convulsing man’s forehead and breathed deeply as the crowd surrounding them became silent. After a few minutes the man on the floor blinked open his eyes and looked at the stranger.
“Whoa, bro… bro… are you… are you Jesus?” he asked.
The stranger chuckled his signature chuckle before softly saying, “No, not quite. But you certainly may need Him.”
The family around him suddenly began a whisper that slowly grew louder and confused.
“Who are you?” people asked the stranger. “How did you get here?”
Suddenly Crystal appeared and parted the crowd. She asked the same questions, but in her smooth yet condescending voice.
The stranger looked her up and down. Her pale skin. Her jet black hair. The vast amount of expensive jewelry that weighed her down. “Who are you?” he asked.
“My name is Crystal, and I run this home,” she said. “You are now a member of our family. Welcome. Please tell me, who brought you here.”
“It’s not up to me to tell you that,” he said. “She must first present herself.” The crowd became silent for a moment and they all looked around at each other in a stupor.
“All right folks!” Crystal shrieked. “Someone fess up! Who the fuck brought this… this black magic sorceress here?!” No one said a word. Soon after they began chattering amongst themselves trying to figure out what was going on.
After maybe a minute their idiotic clamor I couldn’t quite take it anymore. “I brought him,” I said, but no one could hear over everyone else. “I did, I found him,” I repeated, “but I guess it makes more sense to say he found me.”
Crystal hurried over and looked at me in astonishment. “You? Where have you been, child? We thought you died months ago?”
“No,” I said. “I got lost, and this man found me. He saved me from… I can’t even begin to tell you. From this. From this pathetic mess of yours.”
“From what, deary? You had all you ever needed here. You had a family. You had happiness. We all have happiness here. That’s what we do. We make people happy. This fellow on the ground was perhaps too happy and your friend ruined it for him,” she said. “Why would he do that?”
“How in hell is that happiness?!” I yelled. The crowd around us again clamored.
“Silence!” Crystal shouted. She and Allan had command over the family. I’ve always known it and in that moment I knew it more than ever. Crystal, the stranger, and I stood forming a triangle, and around us the crowd gathered in their constant chemical daze. I forced my eyes shut and my entire body began to sweat. The chattering in the crowd around us elevated to screams and shouts. “Kick her out!” someone said. “Give her the black pill!” another suggested.
“Girl,” Crystal said to me, whispering in my ear, “listen to me closely… This man is a sorcerer. He’s trying to turn you against us to use you for his purpose. Please listen to me and take this because I do not know how long you’ve been under his spell. You need this pill. It will make you feel better.”
I looked at the tiny black capsule in her hand and then I looked back over at the stranger. The stress of it all had become far too much for me to handle. Looking into the stranger’s eyes I saw them again dilate and my mind flickered like it did when I saw the tiny nothing and fear filled my heart. What if she was right? What if he was that tiny nothing that sucked me in and he wanted to destroy me? I couldn’t tell if my thoughts belonged to me. The more I thought the more I realized that it was all futile anyway and things would be easier for me if I just took the pill. The family around me began to get angry and a mob mentality was forming.
“He’s evil!” Crystal shouted. “A demon has entered our home, family! Do something!”
People began swinging fists at the stranger but he dodged them. He looked at me and smiled. “This moment, like every other moment, will change the rest of your life… forever.”
I glanced to the ground, then to Crystal and grabbed her black pill. I tilted my head back and swallowed it and by the time I looked back towards the man he’d completely vanished.
An eerie silence took hold of the crowd. People looked left and right, up and down, but the stranger was gone. He had completely disappeared.
“Where’d he go?” Crystal asked.
I looked towards her and grinned, feeling a stupor already take hold of me. “He was nothing,” I said. “He was nothing at all.”
“That’s perfectly right, deary…” she said. “He was nothing at all.”
That was the last thing I remember from that night. Several moments later I blacked out completely and I awoke upstairs earlier this morning in a room filled with other passed out family. I went downstairs and I tried talking to a girl sitting on the couch but she acknowledged not a word I said. I could tell she was perfectly cognizant and I grew frustrated enough that I slapped her across the face. She screamed for Allan and soon enough he came running towards us and pinned me against a wall.
“Girl, girl, girl…” he muttered. “You’re only going to make things worse for yourself. Don’t you remember? You’re on the blacklist now. You’ve done very bad things and we cannot let you bring our family any more pain. You may not communicate with other members of the family who aren’t blacklisted. It’s that simple. After you prove your loyalty once more, you’ll be taken off the blacklist. But until then, you may live here, but please remain with your fellow whack jobs. We can’t let you people slow us down.”
And so that was that. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it. Now I’m stuck in the very place I tried to escape, yet I can speak to no one but those deemed as insane as I. What is sanity anyway? I don’t think I met anyone truly sane in my life. If the people I live with are sane, I can’t imagine what the people on the “blacklist” are like.
I feel stuck and miserable and incredibly alone. I’ve spent most of the day staring at the carpet and trying to block out the hum of the HyperVision projector. It doesn’t work. I’d try to escape again if it weren’t so damn cold but the idea of freezing to death is starting to seem more appealing than suffering through this. Whatever. I have to shut up now because I’ve been writing since I found this paper.
Leave a Reply