Self Inflicted | Chapter 1

The life any of us wants to live is decidedly the one we are already living. It takes a lot of effort to live this life, to get up every day and choose at each moment to do what we have always done. One could just as easily make new choices. If a child wanted to, he could eschew the closet his mother picked out and instead stick to a rotating set of Nirvana and The Beatles T-shirts, branding himself with his uniform. Or a woman could never again eat solid food, preferring the easy to chew, and usually tastier, dishes made mainly of heavy cream and slathered in rich sauces. Perhaps one could stop using the word “I” and instead claim the illustrious title “this little piggy”. Alexi chuckled at the idea. He thought of his snooty, overbearing, and uppity grandma stooping to such a moniker: “This little piggy wouldn’t raise her kids like that; God knows what will become of them.” The insults she often hurled towards her son’s wife would be completely nullified by the silliness of her pronouns. His inward snort of laughter turned for a moment into pity for his mom, but Alexi shook it off quickly and continued down the dark sidewalk, speeding up as he stepped into the dead zones left between the overly distant street lamps.

“I guess it's not so easy,” Alexi thought, “to change fundamental things about ourselves. Like it would be hard for uncle Stowan to start to find puns and wordplay funny. He’s just so no-nonsense after all those years serving in Afghanistan. But maybe, if he wanted to, he could? He could learn to find the joy in it by coming up with his own puns, or studying the history of absurdism–or would Shakespeare be better?” Alexi once again jogged through the darkness, slowing only once the front of his sneakers reflected yellow instead of gray. “I guess it's damn hard to change, but it's definitely doable. Even taking on the endeavor of changing in such a deliberate way is a change in and of itself. Change is the definition of “different”. I could wake up tomorrow as a completely different person. Or well just different. I could wake up tomorrow and be different… Hell, I can just be different now.” He stopped and watched a pair of mosquitos spiral towards the lamppost above. He had read somewhere that bugs got confused trying to differentiate between artificial light sources and the glow of the moon. The bloodsuckers expected the light to come from super far away. It screwed with their navigation. Consider maintaining a constant orientation with something one hundred thousand miles away. Even as you move ten, twenty, or one hundred feet forward, the angles made by the straight line pointing up at the distant moon and the line pointing forward would be virtually identical. You would need to move miles before you might notice a degree change. But, if a false moon just so happened to be a few feet above you, a short flight forward would suddenly put the light way behind you. And so, went the unproven hypothesis Alexi read or heard at some point in his life, and which he nonetheless believed and told to others as truth, the mosquito tilts to keep the light source directly overhead. This process repeats again after the mosquito re-aligns and then moves forward. The bugger has to keep changing directions, so as to maintain a constant angle with the light, ultimately resulting in a circular flight path.

Alexi walked behind the lamppost unbothered by the wet grass from which the post sprouted. He looked around and saw the street was deserted. Back in elementary school, he recalled, he had a crush on one Jocelyn Chen who used to live in one of these houses. He took a deep breath. Alexi then did something that he never before ever even considered something a person could do. He clasped his hands around the pole and raised his foot onto the topmost screw, which bound the casing hiding all the internal wires at the lamp’s base to the lamp itself, and hoisted himself up. He balanced there for a moment and thought of what he should do next. There were no more screws. He moved his hands as far up as he could reach and pulled with all his strength. He wrapped his thin legs around the metal pole, using the friction of his skin, alongside a good squeeze, to hold him in place long enough to walk his hands further upwards. He climbed higher and higher ignoring his screaming thighs. He was determined to reach the top. To do something different. To be different than he was. He approached the bracket arm at the top which bent over to illuminate both the sidewalk and street below. Sensing the completion of his journey, and rest for his limbs, Alexi lurched at the horizontal part of the pole and was able to wrap his hands almost all the way around the bar. Only his torso had made it to this next phase of the lamp. He dangled there half-sideways unsure if he could hold on should he unwrap his legs from the vertical pole. It wasn’t up to him in the end.

The hair on his legs reduced the friction between his skin and the metal, or maybe he just ran out of squeezing power. His thighs jerked free. He caught the pole with the crook between his foot and shin and hung for a second in a perfect “L”. The shape was unsustainable. Tension, center of mass, and gravity all begged him to let go, either of his hands or his feet. The feet went. Controlling their swing, completely by instinct, Alexi pulled up hard, limiting the momentum change to his lower body. He was able to pull high enough to lean his chest over the bar and wrap his arms about it. He was stable. He caught his breath, but unfortunately the moment of peace gave him time to look down, and it looked a long way down. The dangling kid estimated that the distance was survivable… but not without injury. He was squarely over concrete now. Any back or head injury would be serious. “Well, a crippling injury counts as a different life,” Alexi morbidly joked to himself. His fear was not defeated by that distancing comment. It furiously fought back, showing him an image of himself flattened in a pool of blood with limbs bent into a swastika. To change is to take a risk. That’s what makes it so hard to attempt. It's safe to do things the same old way; Nothing happens that you don’t already expect, or so our intuition tells us. Being used to our route home from work, we question the idea of randomly taking another. It might take longer, or have more traffic, or more police speed traps. But, if we heard of a better route or if our GPS told us it was faster to go up I-95 rather than Clay Rd, we would consider it. We reassess the risk to reward ratio. Without that impetus, we assume that the decisions we have made so far are still fine to make again. But what if they are not? What if we need to reassess the risks far more often? What if the only way to find that amazing little taco truck with the mouthwatering mushroom “chorizo” breakfast tacos is to take a different route home? Our risk to reward ratios are all screwed up. We think we are living the lives we have to, but instead we are only living the lives we are willing to, given all the risks.

Sweat dripped from Alexi’s forehead. His chest and biceps burned for relief. He finally mustered the courage to re-open his eyes. He saw the black silhouette of the pole-arm stretch only two feet further before ending in a hooded light fixture. He steeled himself. He was already this far. Alexi grunted as he pushed down on the pole, sliding his chest a few inches towards the finish line. Again he pushed with his arms and shimmied closer to the edge. The entire lamp creaked and flexed as his weight got nearer the end. He crept in this manner, slowly advancing towards the bulb, pausing to find his resolve and weigh whether the bowing pole was sturdy enough to keep going or not. The shadowy figure obscuring part of the false moon became of sudden interest to the hovering mosquitos. There were far more up here than Alexi realized, and they, ravenous from their hours trapped in inescapable light, landed lightly onto his body. They landed on his T-shirt, on his shorts, and on the skin of his arms and legs. But Alexi did not traverse this dangerous path to feed the needy. The empathy that compelled him to action was much stronger than that. Standing below the lamp, watching the bugs draw infinity, Alexi remembered that mosquitoes live for only two to three weeks. He was struck by a sorrow from his depths and before he knew why went rushing to climb that pole. He would return to these blood soldiers something like two percent of their time on earth. If they might be released from this circular trance with the morning light six hours later, he would save them those hours. Each day for a mosquito is multiple years in human scales, and he had the power to do something about those wasted years. The idea that transformed his sorrow into action was a test against his nature. It asked, “Do I have the agency to execute any amongst my numerous wills? And even if I did, would I dare?”

The holy fool was no longer afraid, certain in the course he must take. He slipped one arm free and felt around the bottom of the lamp shade. It was hot and covered in a translucent plastic. He tried first to kind of sucker punch the plastic, but he couldn’t attack with much force given the instability from his dangling legs and the unstable position of his torso leaning over the rounded pole. He again hugged the lamp with both arms. His knee would have to do. He crunched hard and violently brought up his knee. With his knee the whole pole rose up, as though he had lifted it as well. His knee weakly crashed into the hard plastic and was ricocheted back down. The whole pole groaned and bent to oppose the distance it had shot upwards, almost knocking Alexi off. The Lamp arm continued to spring up and down like a diving board, but instead of tapering off into stillness, the pole began to croak and lean. Alexi felt himself sliding towards the light bulb as the once horizontal arm turned ever more diagonal. In a panic Alexi tried to clamber back towards the base, but it was impossible for him to pull himself upwards against gravity. The lamp continued to lean. It leant and leant and leant and leant until–SNAP–free fall.

With booming noise the pole was rent from the earth. It clanged against the trapezoidal metal box that should have kept it attached to the ground. The underground wires within the base snapped and the light was cut off. The entire street light, and all the unfortunate souls holding onto it, hurtled towards the ground.

As the pole arm leant ever more vertical, Alexi found himself unable to hold on. Instead of waiting to fall, where his limbs or even head might hit the ground funny, he let go and braced himself for impact. By that point the pole was leaning so far into the street, and Alexi was fully unfurled to his six foot plus the length of his arms height, that his sneakers were only a few feet off the ground. He yelled as he fell the short distance onto his feet and toppled over onto his tailbone. He tried to roll away and cover his head to protect it from the falling metal, but the loss of his weight ended the pole’s descent. The pole looked like a long dark bird bending into the street for a drink of water. In the darkness of the broken light, the mosquitos were free. Free to live, even if it meant flying directly into the prison waiting the next lamp over. Alexi too was free. He was alive, anyway. He stood up unsteadily and began running, but his lower back and ass were hurting too much. He hurriedly limped away from the scene of the crime. “If I want to be different than I am, then I must act differently, even at the cost of all of the risks it might bring,” the words started up in his head again. Some blocks away he saw a car’s headlights turn towards him. “That’s enough philosophy for one night,” he thought, and ran.