Day 191 - Graffiti Story

Graffiti Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Drew’s mind was junk. It was like a graffiti hodgepodge of overlaid ideas and images mixed together with a blender. It made no sense. He made no sense. He was paranoid and schizophrenic, but most of the time he was catatonic and reserved. He had moments of lucidity, followed by hours of yelling and screaming. Some people thought he had Asperger’s or Tourette’s syndrome. Really though, no one knew what he had. He had so many things, it seemed impossible to narrow it down.

When he was young he spoke of nightmares. He dreamed of himself living wildly different lives. At first his parents thought he was creative and encouraged him to write his dreams down. Perhaps they thought he would one day become a famous writer. But he only had the one subject matter – himself, in all his many different incarnations. He wrote hundreds of accounts of alternate dream self. But the dreams weren’t that creative and his alternate self was just living a similar, but slightly different life. His stories were boring, not that his parents could say that to their child. But he was clearly not destined for literary greatness.

His parents had hoped that by writing things down, there would be some sort of therapeutic response that would help the dreams to go away. But alas, that was not to be. The dreams got worse and more frequent.

Drew’s problems persisted and new symptoms mounted. He began to have visions while awake. He would see himself making choices, different choices than the ones he made. If he was at a street he could see himself waiting to cross, somewhere in the middle of the street, all the way across and anywhere in between. He could see himself safe and sound or hit by a car. He could see himself alive or dead. He saw every possible outcome. It wasn’t that he imagined them all; he had visions of them and could see them.

He tried to explain these things to his parents, but they just thought he had an overactive imagination and was afraid to cross the street. Their fear was that he might be developing agoraphobia. Their misguided attempt at a solution was to sign him up for more activities, thinking that he just needed to be forced out of his shell and become more socialized. This was just about the worst possible thing they could have done for him. Drew was confronted with hundreds of new options and outcomes on a daily basis. When he was playing little league baseball, he was constantly seeing one hundred different outcomes for every single play of the game. When he went to school he was confronted with a thousand options for how every assignment and every conversation could go.

It was too much sensory overload. It got to where he could not make a single choice. He could not handle knowing every possible choice and seeing how they would all play out. It was too much. His brain didn’t know how to process it, so he started to shut down. It seemed like a nervous breakdown, but Drew was only twelve.

Drew went though extensive therapy and very slowly it seemed as though he was assimilating back into an ordinary life. By the time Drew entered high school it seemed as if he was going to live a normal existence.

For most of his teen years he lived a very fulfilling and active life. He joined after-school clubs, played sports, acted in school plays, took on part-time work, volunteered on the weekends. Drew was confident and out-going and dated a wide variety of the girls at his school. It seemed as if he was trying to cram a thousand lifetimes into those four years. If there was something to be done, something to be tried, he tried it. It was an amazing time for him and he was an amazing person – intelligent, attractive, and successful. It seemed as if his future was wide open and full of limitless potential.

But everything was going to change.

Soon after graduation Drew changed. He became introverted and extremely pensive, possessed by a taciturn reticence. At first it seemed like extreme depression. He hardly said a word for a week after graduation and slept nearly all day, every day for a month. It was a complete crash. It was almost as if his body was trying to rest after having been so busy for four years.

Slowly he began sleeping less, but he never quite returned to being himself. That was when the true problems began. He had visions constantly. He saw himself as a young man again, then as an older man. He saw success and failure. He knew every way his life could turn out and every choice he would have to make in order to achieve it. He had limitless data regarding himself and all the possibilities he might ever face. His mind became cluttered with too many conflicting visions of himself.

It was a form of paralysis. It was a like an overloaded computer. His brain was scrambled and it left him with junk. No one understood what had happened to him. He somehow could see everything that could be, and that prevented him from ever having any of it be real. And yet somehow he was able to have a moment of clarity, and experience four perfect years where he was able to do everything exactly right. It was like a horrible Faustian trade-off – Drew was able to have a fleeting moment of perfection, but it cost him. It cost him everything else.