There were no words to my scream. It was human misery, pain, and anger all rolled up together and made real through the tortured straining of my vocal chords.

    I screamed long and loud. The interior of my car echoed with it, driving back upon itself, amplifying, intensifying. Across town, two people had heart attacks. Cars suddenly wrecked for no reason. Flowers wilted and died without warning.

    I screamed. When I got home, I found out I'd given myself a nosebleed. I put in my CD, the soundtrack of my life. I put on "Rape Me" by Nirvana. I sang along in my already ruined voice, and when it got to the final crescendo of tortured screaming at the end, I put a pillow over my face so my downstairs neighbor wouldn't bitch and moan about the noise.

    I screamed at the top of my lungs, larynx ready to shred in half. I didn't feel anything but hurt. I didn't care.

    There was a knock at the door. I was ready for murder, thinking it was my downstairs neighbor, there to bitch about the noise. But no; it was my friend Eric. He knew right away that something was wrong. When I told him what it was, he understood completely.

    We went to the mall later, my friend and I. In Barnes and Noble, I decided to relieve stress in a decidedly unconventional manner; I looked at him and said, "I'm going to keep a running tally of all the people I kill when we walk through the mall."

    "Okay," he nodded.

    And so it went, walking through the mall, me throwing out numbers left and right. Walking past people, looking them in the eye, and giving them a number. Two teenage girls outside of the Gap were 77 and 78. This belligerent fat guy in the video game store, I counted him three times.

    We went into this gift store kind of place. Suddenly for no reason I got all Ghandi. "Fucking people," I said. "When are they going to realize that there's room enough for all of us? That there's no need to kill one another anymore?" Then I saw some fat woman with her gaggle of kids trailing behind her like baby geese, and I said, "181."

    Eric lost it, laughing his ass off.

    I killed 222 people in the mall that day. At one point, Eric pointed out: "Dude, I know you say you're not really mad at women right now, but I've noticed that seventy percent of the people you've capped have been women."

    To which I replied: "Yeah, but seventy percent of the people in this place are women."

    "True enough," he admitted.

    What I didn't tell him was that I was in total Jack mode. I wanted to destroy something beautiful, all right. I wanted to take anything that had even the slightest hint of beauty and utterly wipe it from the face of the earth. But I didn't stop there, no. The ugly and warped were not beyond my notice either. I spoke to Eric of totally random criteria for the "killings," but it wasn't random at all. I took the most and the least beautiful among those I saw and did away with them, until all that was left was soulless mediocrity. Sameness, utilitarian commonality.

    I wanted the world to look as empty and as meaningless as I felt at that moment.

    Later on, after telling The Story to Dan, and after he left, and after I had time to mull things over . . . after I finally felt safe to let it all out . . . I cried. It started the way all men start crying, as if the tears literally had to be ripped from my body. I put my arms over my head and curled into a ball, and I cried. Somewhere in there, the sobs started to slowly metamorphosize into laughter . . . a sickening, desperate laughter. Not the laughter of joy or amusement, no. A new kind of laughter entirely, one that only happens in moments like this. Laughter at the ultimate irony of my life, the way the same thing can happen again and again, and I never, ever seem to learn my lesson.

    I laughed my ass off. In the process, I could hear a part of myself dying. It's always the same.

    I went to bed very, very early that night. When I woke up the next morning, I felt different. Not better, just different. Empty. All the love and the hope that I'd been sustaining myself upon for the past month was gone, as if it had never been. There was nothing in its place to fill the gap. Not anger, not fear, not disgust. Just a profound, echoing apathy toward everything. Nothing mattered. Nothing. Not hate, not love, not fear, not joy, nothing.

    It was moments like this that I felt as if I were already dead, and the rest of my life was nothing more than going through the motions of existence. The sad thing was, I had been through this so many times that it was a matter of course now. Find a woman, be intrigued by said woman, find out that said woman is everything you ever really wanted in a friend, companion, mate, whatever . . . fall in love with said woman . . . and then, wait. Wait for it all to end in a blinding flash of reality. Wait for the cold, uncaring hand of Fate to intervene and shatter everything.

    I looked inside myself that day, tried to see if there was anything left in me that I could give to someone else ever again. Tried to find out if I had any soul left to spare for another endeavor like this. Looked inside myself to see if I could ever possibly put myself through this again.

    I found one tiny sliver of myself remaining. Infinitesimal in size, a bare glimmer among all the darkness, one last patch of unscarred skin. And I knew that if I ever gave that last bit of myself away, I would have nothing left for myself. The last bit of me that I could afford to give away was already gone. It had taken only a month for the cycle to play out this time, from beginning to end . . . but I gave up almost everything I had left for that one, final try.

    No, I would never give up that last piece of myself. It was all I had left. If I lost that, there would be no point in going on.

    That was over a year ago.

    Now I'm sitting on the stage. It's open mike night at this coffee place in the U District. I don't drink coffee, even here in the coffee capital of the world. I only come here for the open mike night, so I can sit up here with my guitar and my voice and go through some serious stress relief.

    Life in Seattle hasn't been easy. Long ago there'd been plans for us all to get a house together, some great whatthefuck commune on the seashore . . . but, poverty-stricken as we all were, it never happened. Nobody could pull the money together, and so, sadly, we were all forced to go on living as we had been. Except for me, that is; instead of living in that "blast furnace, sand-blasted hellhole" that I used to live in, now I live on campus in the over-21 apartments. I hardly ever see my roommate, a Vietnamese grad student named Phong who can barely speak English.

    Money-wise, I get along real well. With no real bills, and no real expenses other than food, I have plenty to play with. When I'm not buried up to my ass in homework, I hang out with oZ and all the others on weekends, when I feel like being social.

    Usually, though, I just go to the park and write. It doesn't really matter what I write about, as long as I get something down on paper. I've long since abandoned the concept of writing a linear novel about one group of people going through the motions of a certain chain of events, building up to a climax at the end, with a neatly-packaged moral for everyone to ponder for two seconds before shrugging and turning the TV back on. Instead, like Henry Rollins or Chuck Palahniuk, I just write down random bits and later on see if I can try to tie them together somehow, if it even needs it.

    And then there's the open mike night here at the coffee place, and I'm sitting on the stage, and it's my turn. This is better than karaoke, because it's all about me. I'm not singing someone else's song while a badly recorded cover band plays the backup music. It's just me, and my guitar, and my rage. Or depression. Or loneliness. Or whatever emotion it is that's got me that day.

    Today, it's kind of a combination of the three. So I start to play, and I start to sing.

    "Inside my mind
    What do you know about the grind?
    Inside my head
    The music's over, I'm feeling dead
    It left me here
    Everything used to be so clear
    But now it's gone
    And once again I'm moving on

    I . . . don't wanna feel this way again
    I . . . don't wanna lose another friend
    You . . . promised life and love and hope and youth
    I . . . couldn't handle it when I learned the truth"

    And so on like that. I think it's absolute shit, but the crowd seems to like it. Whatever. The lyrics are secondary to the tune anyway, I think.

    I'm done. "Thank you," I say into the mike, and start to walk offstage.

    Some girl, can't be more than nineteen, walks up to me, starry-eyed awe plain in her face. "That was, wow. Incredible. Where did you learn to sing like that?"

    I look at her then, and I listen. Not to her, not to the crowd around me, the sound of the espresso machine, the October rain pelting the cars outside, no. I listen to that inner voice of intuition, the one that I used to ignore . . . the voice that, after so many years of finding out the hard way that it is always right, it's the voice that I've finally learned to trust and heed above all others.

    I listen inside, and this voice says, quite clearly, No.

    I smile at my would-be groupy. "Can you do me a favor?" I ask, all mock sweetness.

    "Sure!" she says bouncily.

    I keep smiling. "Could you get the hell out of my way, please?"

    Her smile goes away then, and she drifts off, dejected, into the crowd. Whatever. I'm twenty-six years old now. I'm not going to fritter away the last bit of soul that I have left on someone who's not even old enough to know who the fuck she is yet. Nope, nope.

    I put my guitar back in my case and take my usual spot in a darkened booth in the back. I'm usually one of the first people to go up, because hey, it takes nuts to put yourself on the spot like that. And unlike most people, I've got enough to spare that I don't need an icebreaker. At least not for something like this.

    I sip on one of the fruity concoctions that the place makes for the non-coffee initiated and watch the others go up. Very few actual musicians, mostly "poets." Lots of enviro-Nazis with their "We're fucking up the Earth, death to the oppressors, waaa waaa" poetry. I get a kick out of the beret-wearing combat booted college freshmen who think they've got it all figured out. And I remember when I was nineteen and had all the answers. Yeah.

    I've got a test tomorrow. Thermodynamics. Yee-haw. And I'm so worried about it, that all the studying that I'll do for it consists of sitting right here, drinking my fruity beverage, and watching these youngsters spit out occasional bits of poetic wisdom among all the inanity.

    School is too fucking easy. Still. I sigh to myself.

    I don't really hang out with people I go to school with. I'm a twenty-six year old college junior, for Christ's sake. Most of the people in my classes are six years younger than I am. I get called "sir" a lot. It makes me want to puke when people do that. But, you know, they'll find out. One day they'll be old and grizzled like me, and they'll find out that "sir" is a word on the same level with "asshole" when you're old on the outside but still young at heart. Or something.

    I don't know if young at heart is necessarily the right term, though. I still feel like I was there when God, or the All, or the Great Whatever threw the switch on the universe. I still feel like this life is just one of many millions that I've lived over the eons. But strangely, there's still a part of me that's still five years old and wonders why the sky is blue, why the grass is green, and why Mr. Fork and Mr. Electrical Outlet can't get along.

    In the middle of these pseudo-philosophical internal ravings, and while some lezzie Sarah Maclachan wannabe is yodeling her way through a ballad about salmon, of all things, I notice someone on the other end of the place, near the door. Some blond woman, just standing there, eyes closed, like she's taking it all in. I don't know why out of all the people in this place I should be drawn to this one, but there it is.

    She opens her eyes and looks right at me. And everything inside of me feels like it has caught fire. I feel as though I'm standing in the center of the sun.

    I've only felt this way two other times in my life. Once was at the end of a marathon sex session with my last serious girlfriend, over two years ago. The other time was during some kind of psychic communing session with a friend of mine about a year after that. And now, this. From across a crowded room, with no physical contact, and-

    She bolts out the door. That voice, the one I've learned to obey at all costs, does not issue its usual proclamation of NO. Instead, it screams, Go after her. Now!

    I start to head for the door, but I realize that I haven't paid for my drink. And even though my inner voice is screaming at the top of its lungs to fling myself out into the rain and run after her, common sense is telling me that I'd better fork over some cash if I want to be welcome here anymore. So, duty overrides intuition, and I impatiently wait for the girl behind the register to ring up my stuff.

    She tries to strike up a conversation. "You know, I really like your music. You should record something sometime. You'd be great."

    All I can say is "Uh-huh, uh-huh, thanks!" before I turn and run for the door.

    I'm outside in the rain, just me and my guitar case. The shit is really coming down. There's no sign of the blond girl. Too late, my inner voice says. You should have listened to me, it reproaches.

    "I know, I know. Shut the fuck up," I say to myself. Two people walking by under an umbrella stare at me. "Not you," I tell them.

    So, great. Some strange blond woman appears out of nowhere and sends a shock to my soul from that far away, and then she disappears into thin air. Yeah. Life is nothing if not intriguing with its weirdness.

    So I start the long walk back to campus. Almost everything I need is within walking distance of the University, luckily. Trying to find parking for my behemoth of a car in this city would be an impossible undertaking. So I walk, and the whole way home I can't get this girl out of my head.

    It's happening again, I realize. The first step on that road to Hell. For the first time in over a year, I've found a woman who intrigues me on a level that goes beyond the visceral. And once I've realized that, that's when the fear grips me. That's when Anxiety starts rattling off all the reasons that I shouldn't even try to get involved with this woman, whoever she is.

    Most of these reasons have names, names like Christy, Nikki, Ann, Melissa, Monica, Megan, Emily, and so forth, and so on. Names of people who I tried to connect with, and for one reason or another it always ended with me shy one more piece of my soul.

    The difference between then and now is unsettling in and of itself. Because all those other times, my inner voice of intuition was telling me the entire time that what I was doing was stupid and wrong, and I never had a chance in hell. With each and every one of them, I knew it would never work out. I knew. And yet hope always overrode realism, and I blindly strode into my doom each and every time, and then had the lack of sense to be surprised when things didn't go my way.

    The difference now is, I don't hear that voice. It's silent. I don't hear that refrain of no, no, NO you idiot this time. And I don't know what that means.

    These are the things I think about while the Seattle skies piss rain down on my head. I keep thinking about them when I get home and start writing in my online journal. I keep thinking about them when I make dinner for myself. When I watch Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on DVD for the umpteenth time, I'm still thinking about it. And when I go to sleep that night, for six hours all I do is dream about the one fleeting glimpse I got of that woman, and the five seconds of bliss that I knew, for whatever reason.

    Next morning, it's still playing in the back of my head, even as I'm playing around with equations on my Thermodynamics test. In Nuclear Physics, while the professor is rattling on and on about the different types and "colors" of quarks, my mind is still on an entirely different subject. And later on in Celestial Mechanics, I'm still obsessing over the same thing.

    I work out at the gym, eat lunch, do my homework, all the while with this same thing on my mind. And I keep wondering: why did she take off? What the hell was that about?

    I call up Dan, still in the Tri-Cities, and tell him what happened. His advice is simple and straightforward, as usual. "Go for it, dude. But be careful. You know women are all fucking evil."

    "Yeah, I know," I say. "Even this one, more than likely."

    oZ has the same advice for me. Everybody tells me the same thing. "Go for it," or a variation on those words.

    I keep waiting for a clue from my intuition, but it's still silent. I'm not getting a yes or a no, and that worries me. At least before I knew what I was doing was wrong . . . even though I always went ahead and did it anyway. Now, though, I don't have any answers.

    And so it goes, for days. Weeks. I don't see her anywhere, not at the coffee place, not at school, nowhere.

    It's late November, the week before Thanksgiving. I'm sitting in the cafeteria eating lunch when someone plops down at my table. I look up from my food. And I freeze. Because it's her, of course.

    "Hi," she says.

    I can't say anything.

    "You speak English?" she asks me. I'm still speechless.

    "Hablo español? Parlez vouz français? Sprechen sie deutsch? Govoreet russkiy? Come on, I'm running out of languages here."

    I just stare at her. That feeling is back, that feeling of standing on the sun, and I can't do anything but stare at her.

    She shrugs. "Okay, I guess I'm out of here then." She starts to get up to leave.

    Don't let her go, you dumbass, my intuition finally says.

    "Wait! Don't leave," I say.

    She smiles. "Oh, so you do speak English. That's good." She sits back down. "What's your name?"

    I tell her. She tells me hers.

    And you know what? Fuck this.

    I'd like to tell you all that it was all hearts, puppies, flowers, and slow-motion romps through the sun after that. Lying among freshly mown grass and just basking in one another's love, oh me, oh my. But that shit doesn't happen in real life, and it's not happening in this story, either. Even my dreams can't escape the reality of my situation: that this "one possible future" will never exist anywhere but inside my head, and inside the heads of those few of you brave enough to read it.

    I can't escape reality. And I'm done trying. Sorry to jar you out of the fantasy, dear reader, but it's better than going on with the lie. Trust me on this one.

    And they all lived miserably ever after. The End.