The Bug in My Ear by Logan Rapp
The bug in my ear hates me; this much I know is true.
When I’m tired the bug in my ear demands another hour, so I give it two and pass out.
The bug in my ear hates it when I’m productive. It tells me the effort won’t amount to much. Maybe a paycheck, and a shitty one at that.
It takes most of my energy to ignore it, and so I have to balance placating it with achieving something real, and I never get either completely right.
It’s my choice, going to a bar, but it’s the bug in my ear’s choice to make me drink until I can’t, and then drink some more. I have a low tolerance still and I routinely throw up. I’m moving to Los Angeles and people already think I’m bulimic. I just can’t stop listening.
I’m worried what will happen when I’m face-to-face with a mirror of blow and the bug in my ear has the upper hand. I am the poster child for potential fallen angels and should I relent at the wrong time the bug in my ear will kill me dead. And I can’t die, yet. I haven’t even done anything. I have only consumed resources better suited for better people and that’s why the bug says I have to die.
The bug in my ear would not allow me to fit in during high school. It said I was too good for that place but it’s deceptive, you see. This was early in the bug’s career and it had to isolate me so that I would listen only to it.
Lately I’ve gained some ground but I couldn’t possibly say I was winning.
The bug in my ear says there is no god, there is no truth, there is only the bug in my ear.
It tells me to stay home, so I do. Go check your profile. Do a search. Send a message. Keep trying. Keep failing. But be doggedly persistent in this because you are gaining weight and soon the considerations will die out and you will have been out of the game long enough to lose what little confidence you had, and you will find no point in regaining your earlier fitness.
The bug in my ear is a crafty sleeper agent. I know I have to kill it, so I got to the store and I buy a can of Raid but the warning labels seem to suggest this might be mutually assured destruction which is what it wants anyway. If I die, it dies but it’s been ready for that its whole life. I’m only just barely entertaining the idea.
I try going out. I try saying hello. The responses seem favorable so I think about getting a number. I do and later find out the number had a boyfriend. The bug in my ear says, I told you so.
The bug in my ear says, go back home.
So I do. I check my profile. I fire off a message. They are on my friends list but they are strangers and my actual friends rarely hear from me. I ask the strangers to come over and how this doesn’t seem creepy to me frightens me when I wake up in the morning and realize, sober then and sober now, what I was doing.
And it works just enough to make me feel used.
The bug in my ear loves this shit.
But it’s only a few more days before the background check clears.
Logan Rapp is a student at California State University, Fresno. His blog can be found at halfacrecreative.com/logan.
