Numb.

When you spend a year locked away from everyone, you eventually just start living inside your head. Social situations become awkward and you become claustrophobic. You don’t know how to interact with society anymore. People think you’re crazy, and the truth it, they’re not completely wrong. You’re living in a modified reality where none of your interests are ever looked down on because no one else is there to you otherwise.

Suddenly when you are forced to go back to the repetitive life style you lead before you dropped off the face of the world, you realize you can’t handle it. All those people that were your friends seem to think the relationship can pick back up without missing a beat, but it can’t.

You’ve changed too much. Your reality is something that could never be real anymore.

Then you realize you can take one of those past friends down with you. Convince then the world you’re living in is better than anything they’d ever get out of real life. It’d take some time, but eventually the two of you would be so dependent on one another to support this world you’re playing out between two equally twisted minds that it seem like an honest attempt at a friendship.

The panic attacks when you’re forced to step out of your head and into social situations again. They wouldn’t seem so horrible anymore. The times you can fake an excuse so you can carry on with your closed-in life without a third opinion. They’d seem even more beautiful. Why? Because you know someone else feels and thinks the same way as you.

When you talk to this victim you’ve enslaved, hardly any words need to be exchanged. The conversations are either so repetitive that it’s a script imprinted in your mind, or so out there you can’t help but know exactly what’s being created before it’s even mentioned.

What you’ve managed to create is a Folie à Deux.

You and your victim are so intertwined with this madness at this point that you can’t stand even being by yourself anymore. Those times when you loved excluding yourself from any social situations now require your other half. You two haven’t even spoken a word in weeks, but instead have been drawing pictures with such deep meanings that only the two of you could see without hours of explanation.

Anyone that even gets a single glimpse at can tell you’re insane. And it’s not that you have too much pride to admit it, it’s that you’ve been inside your head for too long to know any better. Between you and your madness victim, you’re perfectly sane, and everyone else is being infected by a social disease.

This continues to progress for months, and eventually you’re living with one another in an apartment you can only pay for by stealing money. It’s got 3 rooms and a bathroom, but only one room is used.

All the windows in that room are boarded up with plywood. In one corner, there’s a ripped up and rusted barber chair. In a different corner, there’s a mattress with no sheets or blankets. There’s a few lamps plugged in to light sockets, but only one has a light bulb.
The walls re covered in papers, holes, and writing making sure it’s no mistake a maddened duo was occupying the space. The floor is littered and stained with art supplies and a small pile of trash near the doorway, which happens to be missing a door. In its place is a tarp nailed to the wall.

By this point in your downward spiral, there are drugs heavily involved in the situation. You and your toxic twin spend days on end awake just staring at one another and watching the many versions of what the other does.

You’re so antisocial now that the only person you’re talked to is the dealer that sells you and your companion the drugs. He doesn’t know it, but he and the many strange characters that constantly follow him like a lost puppy are the ones you’re stealing money from. They should have noticed by now, but apparently they haven’t.

It only took about 3 years to turn into this much of a social misfit. This never even had to happen in the first place. You never had to take anyone else down with you. But you knew what you were getting in to. In a sick fucking way, you wanted to fuck yourself up so badly that you became considered dead to the world. What’s even worse is you couldn’t stand to do it alone. As much a loner as you are, you’re deathly afraid of having no one to hit rock bottom with you.

This had to happen though. Everyone becomes what they’re afraid of eventually. You had to push everything you were afraid of until you felt nothing at all. And truthfully, your toxic twin was never a victim. This person wanted this just as much as you did.

This reality you constructed leaves you with no feelings at all.
You’re completely numb.
Say it. Does it hurt your mouth?
Emotionless and numb.

Isn’t it everything you (n)ever wanted?