The Shards: A novel

I felt a profound disconnection for the first time that lightly touched everything I came into contact with. And I realized I was no longer the tangible participant in not only the life of Buckley but in the outside world as well. Nothing seemed to affect me. I had become numb.

I had to pull myself together and care more.

because movies were a religion in that moment, they could change you, alter your perception, you could rise toward the screen and share a moment of transcendence, all the disappointments and fears would be wiped away for a few hours in that church: movies acted like a drug for me. But they were also about control: you were a voyeur sitting in the d

He was just part of the overall erasure that I was enacting: the eradication of my real self into the tangible participant who saw everything as normal.

The basic reason why the weekend happened was, I realize in retrospect, sex, and the hope tied to the sex. It was about desire in its simplest form, and a purity that I would never experience again.

The day really became effortless once you faked it and it actually became more real because of your changed demeanor; the act became the reality and it affected everything in what seemed like a positive way. In fact, it was preferable to reality.

I made this connection and though it was tenuous I was haunted by it. And since I felt so alone that day it became a friend.

I’d checked out sometime during my junior year and was performing a pantomime in which I only noticed the edges of things,

And I wanted to write like this as well: numbness as a feeling, numbness as a motivation, numbness as the reason to exist, numbness as ecstasy.