The Last Thing I'll Ever Write (Part One)

9780999724736.jpg
53rd State Press
Adam Lauver
Buy Book

You feel The Spiral unfurling within you. You're moving carefully, carelessly (take your pick), past a window or a tree or a person, and in the back of your head suddenly you hear the voice of the Spiral wheeze:

"Onward and upward and outward, this is growth, this is evolution. You are in this city and I am here too, with you and without you. I'm here to connect you with the outside, with what's been trying to get in, trying to get you on and up and out. Take my hand and you can be as elastic and as flexible as me. I'll stretch your insides thinner and thinner until finally you'll be able to expand, extend, expend yourself onward and upward and outward, and you'll escape this city, you'll escape that window and that tree and that person, every person that you feel such love/hate/indifference for (take your pick) and you'll grow thinner and paler and ever more transparent, but you'll be taller and longer and your eyes will be clearer and your imaginary embrace will encompass not only this city but all cities, all worlds, and your compassion will exceed even that of God's by virtue of your complete, utter, perfect inability to act on it, to spend it, to waste it on anyone at all. You'll finally be able to keep your love to yourself, untouched, untapped, pure and deep and preserved by your own inevitable valueless hate. And together we'll continue to unfurl, carefully, carelessly (take your pick), until we cover so much space that regardless of what we look like to others we'll know that we've discovered something we can finally un-call Truth."

And you say:

"Fuck off Spiral, I have shit to do."

 will lovingly reach down your throat and pull out a series of vaguely Jurassic noises you can't quite identify as a laugh or a sob.

9780999724736.jpg
Contributor Bio

Adam Lauver is an actor, comedian, and PhD dropout living in Pittsburgh, PA. His work includes practicing harm reduction and trauma informed care, researching and facilitating dialogic communication across difference, and humiliating himself in front of audiences to get laughs. As of this writing he is the top Google image search result for "man falls in tub gif." He is prouder of that than you might think.

9780999724736.jpg
9780999724736.jpg