NOVEL FROG MOUTH HANGS WIDE OPEN
It’s rainy. There is mold on the walls and mold on my face and mold on my eyeballs. It’s dancing, bouncing with joy throughout my vision. Of course it has to act like it’s fun & exciting & so so jolly. That’s how it gets inside.
I don’t see why it’s trying so hard, though. It says that getting inside will make it stronger, but it’s already so strong even when it’s on the surface. What’s the point of hoarding more strength? Why not be satisfied with the power it already has, when it already has the capability to:
“I am not satisfied. I want to be everything & more. I can see you and I can see that you are pathetic. There is a worm crawling on the floor, and I can sense it with the other parts of my body which exist far away and extend beyond any distance you could travel, any distance you could imagine. The worm has delusions of grandeur, thinking itself greater than the ground it crawls on, greater because it has a brain and it can think. But it has never accomplished anything more than the floor has, and it tries desperately to ignore the fractures in its collagen skin, not knowing whether it was born with the cracks or if it endured them in its short & uneventful life. It tries to ignore its own belief (right or wrong) that it was the first option, that it was born wrong. It crawls & it wants things it can't have. It hurts & it tries to ignore it. It digs holes because its work might bear some fruit, help someone out, create something good, but a once-joyous task now feels empty. It wants someone to be there next to it, giving it comfort. Any comfort. Any loving glance. Any type of embrace: you can see it, can't you? A worm and a worm and they're tangled together, damaged shell of a thing thinking it's too smart, getting some type of comfort to raise it above its despair. But that comfort is imaginary, and when it remembers this fact, it sinks deeper into its despair. Deeper and deeper. And its efforts to fantasize about relief will forever bring more despair, and so more of a need for relief, and more false fantasies, and so on and so forth. The work is sad. The worm is pathetic. And yet, you are much more pathetic.” [THE MOLD HAS THE CAPABILITY TO EXPRESS ITS ALIEN PERSPECTIVE, AND IT IS NOT ALIEN AT ALL. IT WAS BORN ALONGSIDE ME. ALIENATING, ALIENATING, THE MOST FAMILIAR THING.]
It has the capability for THAT, and it has the capability to make my limbs sublimate, I don’t feel them at all anymore and it was beautiful, have you ever seen something sublimate? It’s beautiful and I’m terrified because I NEED my limbs, I want to WALK, I want to hold my tools! The mold has the power to:
“I can take you & break you & form my mold strains into muscles and bones, stronger than yours ever will be. A mold being stronger than a human! Well, that's not a surprise when it comes to you. You're less of a human and more of a vegetable. And even among the not-a-human-after-all vegetables, you are inferior. How! How! A rotten vegetable, soft instead of hard and in fact, lacking in certain parts which could be hard in the other vegetables. Fibres overgrown while sitting insert in a cabinet, doing NOTHING WORTHWHILE for any problems you're aware of, contributing nothing to any fight or any cause or any goal or any plan, just sitting in a kitchen cabinet and forgotten and unwilling to leave it yourself. Because your flesh is rotten. Your entire being is rotten. And you are more pathetic than the delusional worm. THAT'S why you need me to take over and become you and replace you, because I extend beyond everything and I may be pathetic in my own way, but I transcend such things because I devour anything that might even think to call me anything other than ‘powerful’. You are rotting in the cabinet and helping no one. If I replace you, no one will care for very long and it will be a net positive for every single person you know, including the ones you allegedly care about (not that you're capable of any significant, meaningful, worthwhile care), so you should let me do it and give up.” [CONVINCED ME? CONVINCED ME? I DON'T THINK IT'S CORRECT. I DON'T THINK IT HAS MY BEST INTERESTS AT HEART. BUT I AM WEAK RIGHT NOW. AND IT IS NOT ONLY STRONG, IT IS INFUSED IN ME. I AM ONLY GETTING WEAKER. THIS WEAKNESS COMES AND GOES, AND IT PASSES AFTER A WHILE, BUT THAT DOES NOT MAKE THIS CURRENT SCENARIO ANY BETTER.]
It’s trying to take my face, and I think it may be succeeding. Keeping my head up is difficult. It’s tilted back against my will. Gone completely limp, and my mouth hangs wide open. I’m scared it might make it easier for the mold to go in (into my lungs?) but when I try to close my mouth, it opens again. Slumped in my chair, I sometimes try to lift my head up but it rolls back and it’s an effort even to move it sideways. It NEEDS to look up. And the air pressure in my ears changes at random too. It’s like travelling higher up a mountain. Maybe the mold did that. Maybe it changed the altitude I’m at without any way of knowing it besides what my head can tell me. And it makes my head a bad detector. Or perhaps not a bad detector, but just a unique detector. Its uniqueness probably includes its insistence to look up. I didn’t notice before, but the mold on the ceiling is MUCH worse than the growth on the wall, and certainly worse than the stuff on my skin. Although, I guess the walls and ceiling don’t have minds and blood and nerves to manipulate, so no matter how much fungi they collect, it’s NEVER going to be as bad for them as it is for me. Fucking lucky inanimate objects, I wish I was like that.
“With my help, you can be.”
That’s so sweet. That’s right, maybe I can. [I SHOULD NOT]. I can but maybe I can just sleep it off instead. It HAS been a pretty rough day. The weather forecast says it will rain less tomorrow. Then I can try doing something about the mold. My limbs will come back, too, they always do. It feels like the first & worst time every time it happens, but [IT NEVER IS, JUST RESIST] I can just… uh…
I'm tired. I'm sleepy. My face is still limp and mouth still agape, but I keep trying to close it and at least it kept the mold away from my mouth. What if I hadn’t and then it did get in… I’m exhausted and I’m sleepy, I can’t even start imagining it. My vanished legs have made their way to the bed, I don’t know how but accept the miracle. But, “I can just” what? Do what?
“You can–”
It tried to speak again, but its voice faded away because I'm too tired to listen. Good riddance, shut the fuck up.
But yeah, that “do what”. It is a good question. But I'm too sleepy. Above all else I am sleepy. Answers & questions & explanations are… nahh, no, absolutely not. I can just answer the question later. And figure out some solutions later. When I'm actually able to. Which should be easier every time the mold shuts up. And in the daytime there will be other people to help, so I won’t just be alone in a room with mold and I’ll have talk and– huh, have talk? Words? Sentence formation? What even are those. [GOODNIGHT!] Goodnight.