Chapter 1:

It takes the length of one ciggarette to regret a lifetime.

Tip to filter, around 79 seconds in my case.

You flick your cotton filter away and watch your whole world go with it.

The red embers explode on the sidewalk, they run away from the cotton filter and fade into
nothingness, gone with the breeze.

For whatever reason I constantly end up romantically involved with 15 year olds.

This morning I realized it's because I never aged past 15, I'm a 19 year old 15 year old.

I wasn't so far behind in life until I hit highschool, from there I hit the wall, all progression in life
stopped.

I stood on the edge of tomorow, for fourteen hundred and sixty days, a few thousand ciggarettes.

I have blue eyes and blonde hair, I'm six feet tall and weigh 145 pounds.

I wear a hat lined with tinfoil, that's not a metaphor or expression, as I type this I'm wearing a blue
Yankees hat with roughly a foot of tinfoil concealed inside it.

I don't believe in mind reading or thought control, but I also don't believe in taking chances.

I don't believe in God but I talk to him every night, again, I don't take chances.

I don't lead a sin-free life but I think my chats with god would keep me out of hell if it existed.

When I was seventeen I was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Part of living with Schizophrenia means questioning everything, it means planning things out days
in advance.

It means circling a store multiple times until the people begin to thin out and I can shop without
being too close to strangers.

Chapter 2:

I spend a large portion of my life thinking about how I'm going to defend myself against every
person I see.

I look for walls that seem bulletproof, I look for makeshift weapons in my surroundings.

I often picture myself pre-emptively bludgeoning an assailant to death with a broom or plunging
pens into my attackers throat just as he reaches for his pistol.

I don't see specific people as a threat, I see everyone as a threat.

We're all capable of evil, women, children, saints, most people don't kill in their lifetime, the longer
your lifespan the more likely you are to kill.

Even doctors kill when the moment calls for it.

An arch-angel still wears a halo.

Chapter 3:

I fall in love around 15 times a week.

I technically have a girlfriend right now, she's 15.

My last few girlfriends have been 15 too.

I don't really love this girl, I didn't love the one before her either.

My attraction to them was their attraction to me.

They give me a feeling of self-worth, self-beauty.

Having a 15 year old girl cling to me makes me feel like my life has meaning.

When a girl realizes she doesn't need me she leaves me.

This usually happens when she turns sixteen.

There's some magic in a 15 year old girl, the body of a woman with the mind of an infant.

Perfect for a social cripple like myself.

Chapter 4:

It's been a while since I've had a good hallucination.

I used to go hours without being able to understand english.

Everyone around me spoke another language.

Everyone around me spoke about me.

They laughed and scoffed and mocked.

They knew something that I didn't.

They knew a language that I didn't.

I was a shell-less turtle.

This was around the time I started to wear the tinfoil hat.

I originally began to wear it without the tinfoil, simply to protect myself.

I fantasized that my Yankees hat was a flak-helmet, protecting me from small arms fire and
debris.

I fantasized that my hoodies were made of a kevlar-lead hybrid, protecting me from nuclear
attacks as well as stopping bullets.

Kevleadvar?
I wore Keveleadvar hoodies and a fitted flak-helmet.

I grew long hair and a scruffy beard to mask my face.

Chapter 5:

This transcript has become completely chaotic.

I fear that I've lost you at this point, It's currently 6:36 am on Saturday November the 14th 2009.

I've officially been awake for 25 hours.

8 Diet-Pepsi cans sit on the desk beside me.

For whatever reason I'm in a spill-my-guts kind of mood, I feel like I should tell my story in this
state and worry about the chaotic nature later.

Sometimes I want to be homeless.

Actually, I want to have been homeless.

I want to have faced harsh winters without shelter.

I want to have suffered and survived.

I want to have a story to tell.

Chapter 6:

I began to hear voices in kindergarden.

I had a family living between my eyes.

They told me lies.

Hey that rhymed.

I digress, they would tell me lies which I would repeat to friends and family.

They got me in tons of trouble, for whatever reason I always believed their lies.

I've now been awake for 27 hours and 11 minutes.

Chapter 7:

Have you ever looked in the mirror and seen a person you didn't recognize?

Maybe this person was a little skinnier, fatter, uglier or prettier than the person you were
expecting to see?

It's amazing how mirrors can shape our state of mind.

Maybe you catch yourself at a good angle in the right light early in the morning.

All day you feel like hot shit, you're the most attractive you've ever been in your entire life.
Then maybe you step over a puddle and catch a glimpse of yourself looking hideous.

That's a one eighty, suddenly your confidence is gone.

You flip your hair over your face as much as you possibly can without obviously showing that
you're disgusted with yourself.

You zip up your jacket a little higher, somehow you gained 20 pounds between the mirror and
that puddle.

Chapter 8:

Today my life is a mess.

I feel guilty about the lack of guilt I feel.

I've never truly suffered.

I feel like I'm held back by a lack of suffering.

I spent a large portion of my life avoiding pain.

Now I tend to look for it.

I punch myself, I invite friends to hurt me in entertaining ways.

In August I flipped off three large Italian men, hoping they'd put me in the hospital.

All I got was a bloody nose, two black eyes and a broken phone.

My phone is currently held together with green tape.

It's a black phone, the green tape makes it obvious that it's suffered.

I want it to be obvious that I've suffered.

I want scars.

Chapter 9:

I mentioned guilt a few minutes ago, my lack of it.

My family takes care of me, I offer them little in return.

I feel like if it weren't for me being Schizophrenic they would have kicked me out by now.

I'm worried that If I apologize to them it will make them feel guilty.

I never learned how to act with people.

I'm turning 20 next month I still freeze up everytime I receive a compliment.

My throat makes a noise and I nod at the person.

Sometimes a "yep" is able to escape my seized up throat.

Chapter 10:

Sometime in September 2009 a 15 year old girl punched me in the face and stormed out of my
house.

Thirty minutes later her father punched me in the face, while standing in my driveway.

I called her a name that wasn't hers while undressing her.

I was drunk and genuinely got confused.

She assumed this was an admission of guilt, the crime being cheating of course.

I was too drunk to defend myself, she left my life forever.

Well, forever so far.

I don't feel guilty about it, part of me thinks I should.

I don't know If I ever apologized to her.

I wish I cared enough to try to make things right.

Chapter 11:

I don't want to sleep anymore.

I have bad dreams.

I remember a time where I struggled to remember my dreams.

I wanted to relive them,

Now I struggle to forget them.

I have the same dream over and over, everytime I sleep.

I dream that I'm riding in the back of a police car, I'm being driven to a murder trial.

The dream always starts with me in the car, yet somehow I have knowledge that I confessed to
killing seven people.

The entire dream is just the car ride, knowing that this car ride is the last thing I'll ever experience
as a free man.

Until my trial ends I'm still a free man.

Every inch the car rolls forward is brining me closer to the end of my freedom, life in a cell.

The dream always ends before I make it to the trial.

I always wake up from it feeling relieved that it was a dream.

I'm suprised every time I wake up, the dream feels so real.

I've been awake for 28 hours.

Chapter 12:

I'm a good actor I think.

I bet If i wrote myself a character I could become him.

All my talents tend to be worthless.

I could never play a character someone else came up with.

I could never actually write my own character either.

I can't even think of a similie that would help explain what I mean.

I hope you understand.

Chapter 13:

I told you earlier, when I was seventeen I was told I'm a schizophrenic.

There isn't really such thing as a Psychosis diagnosis, it's all shadow stabbing.

One Psychiatrist explained it in a way I liked.

"We assign patients illnesses, treat them for said ilness. If they get better we were right"

It's considered bad form to diagnose someone with a Psychotic illness before they're 18.

8 out of 10 psychiatrists agreed that I was Schizophrenic after interviewing me.

2 of them believed I had a severe case of Social anxiety disorder that made me seem psychotic.

Chapter 14:

Why am I writing this?

Why are you reading this?

Think about how this transcript made its way in front of your eyes.

It's interesting to look at this computer screen and wonder if anyone other than me will ever see it.

Probably not.

I dare to dream.

When I started writing this It was going to be a novel.

I don't think this is a novel.

I wonder if you're happy with you're life.

Now maybe you wonder the same thing.

You are now breathing manually.

You are now blinking manually.

Chapter 15:

I love change in small controlled doses.

I love rearanging my bedroom, knowing I have the option of changing it right back if I don't like the
new arrangement.

It gives me the exhileration of free-fall with the comfort of a visible safety net.

I might revisit this topic later, it's thrown off the rhythm I had so now I'm choosing to avoid it.

Chapter 16:

When I was seventeen I spent my first night in lockdown.

On the first day of school, September 8th 2007 I went to school with a knife.

My mind was extremely messed up at this point, it's hard to remember exactly what I was going to
do with said-knife.

Originally my parents were going to be out of town on this day, I was going to take my fathers rifle
with me and take hostages.

Fortunately for me their plans were changed and I was unable to steal the rifle.

I marched to school tightly clenching the knife in my Kevleadvar hoodie pocket.

My blue eyes squinted beneath my fitted flak-helmet, the combination of sun and wind on this day
made it hard to see.

I entered the school clenching my concealed knife.

I took a few steps towards the main office before turning around and leaving.

Chapter 17:

I'm not sure why I turned around, I think I'm glad I did though.

At this point I realized I wasn't completely insane but also couldn't function properly in society.

I made a snap decision that I was going to live in the woods for the rest of my days.

When my Schizophrenia had started to emerge the year before I didn't go to school very often.

I would walk around the local forests, finding places where I could truly be alone.

I never sucessfully found a place where I wasn't reminded of the humans who hated me.

God I hope this makes sense.

Chapter 18:

I marched to the most secluded spot I had ever come across, it was roughly 2 hours into the
woods.

It was a beautiful place, a rocky sandbar in the middle of a creek.

Batteaux Creek.

I set my backpack down beside me and decided to see what supplies I had, I was going to be
living in the woods for the rest of my life and obviously needed to make use of anything I could.

Upon looking in my bag I realized I hadn't packed a single school supply.

I had packed food, matches, lighters a blanket and bottled water.

To this day I don't have the slightest memory of putting any of those items in my bag.

At this point I realized that I was never going to harm anyone at my school, I realized that my plan
had been to go straight to the woods.

For whatever reason I got confused and walked to the school.

I guess humans are a creature of habit, and every September 8th as far back as I could
remember involved me entering a school.

Chapter 19:

I lasted around 8 hours laying on that sandbar.

I ran out of water quickly, I wasn't worried because I assumed I could use the creek as a fresh
water supply.

The creek had a sand bottom, attempting to drink the creekwater left me with a throat full of sand.

I had been defeated by the elements after 8 hours, I was ashamed of myself.

I realized I needed help.

Professional help, I didn't want to be alone anymore.

I wanted to be human.

Chapter 20:

The walk home was a lonely one.

For the first time in a long time I wanted to see another human being.

I wanted my mom.

My mother has always been my best friend, at many points during my life she was my only friend.

At this point she has spent nearly half her life taking care of me.

As I walked in the door my mother didn't need to ask if something was wrong, she only asked
what was wrong.

She knew me better than I knew myself at this point.

I spared her most of the details but gave her a general idea of what had happened that day.

She drove me to the hospital where I was born, I walked into the ER and told a nurse the whole
story, details and all.

I was amazed at how calmly she dictated it, most people tend to flinch when they hear something
like this.

I became aware that my story was nothing compared to the horrible things she must have seen
and heard as an ER nurse.

This made me feel a little better.

Chapter 21:

I was placed in a hospital holding cell for the night.

I was assigned a personal guard outside my cell, the inside was metal.

Everything was bolted to the floor, or the wall.

A camera shrouded in bulletproof glass watched my every move.

I felt very powerful knowing that a guard was assigned to me, my own personal guard.

I felt like a super villain.

That thought can't have been healthy.

I slept suprisingly well in my cell, when I woke up the next morning it took a while to figure out
where I was.

I think I had hoped that the prior days events were a dream.

Chapter 22:

On this day I was transfered to a mental institution.

I was taken by Ambulance, strapped down to a stretcher.

My face was itchy the entire time and I couldn't use my arms.

My personal guard Vince rode with me.

I guess to make sure I didn't chew through my restraints and escape.

I was a super-villain after all.

We arrived at my new home around noon I think.

I was wheeled in on my stretcher and unleashed once i was inside my new cell.

This was my new home.

It was very cold.

Chapter 23:

Having one guard made me feel powerful, being in this institution made me feel like a god.

Everyone feared me, doctors, nurses, guards, they were all on edge around me.

They knew I was in there for violent reasons, but nothing specific.

The guards especially, they knew absolutely nothing about me.

They didn't know if I was Hannibal Lector crazy or Willy Wonka crazy.

They had no right to know, they did have a right to kill me under certain circumstances however.

As I said before, everyone was afraid of me.

If a psychiatrist was going to enter my room he'd bring two guards with him.

They would instruct me to sit on the bed before they entered the room.

I was very compliant the entire time.

Chapter 24:

In total I underwent 10 mental evaluations.

All of them slightly different yet entirely the same.

Sometimes I would be asked if some med-students could sit in on the interviews, I always
allowed them to.

The guards, nurses and doctors were afraid of me, the students were fucking terrified of me.

Their eyes would roll around the room, always avoiding me.

As if they were pretending they weren't sitting 5 feet away from a could-be serial killer.

They would quietly take notes until I said something major.

I'd mention a violent thought I had and their pencils would go wild, their body language said "This
is some good shit"

I came to enjoy having the meek audience, sometimes I wish I always had students taking notes
on my life.

Chapter 25:

One strategy the staff would use to make me feel weak was offer me a wheelchair if I was going
to be travelling from one end of the facility to the other.

I had no trouble walking, however they wanted me to think I did.

They wanted me to feel like I wasn't physically strong enough to rebel.

It did work, I felt more and more helpless every time it was offered.
Chapter 26:

I'm going to try to explain what it's like to be on antipsychotic medicine.

The first night I took my pills was in 2006, at this time I was seeing a case-worker once a week
and my family-doctor monthly about my paranoid and dillusional thoughts.

The medicine did seem to help sometimes.

The first night i took my pills I passed out on the floor, I woke up 7 hours later by my mother who
helped me get to bed.

I slept for another 8 hours and woke up with the fiercest thirst I had ever felt.

I also woke up feeling like I hadn't slept even for a minute.

I didn't realize that I was going to be this tired for the next three years.

I saw things and heard things as if I were underwater.

Every muscle I moved was a chore, like I was engulfed in quicksand struggling for my life.

The best word to describe my waking hours would have to be "Groggy".

While it's definitely become more managable I've still been "Groggy" for the past 3 years.

If you've ever been woken up very early after a late night and known that you were going to be
mentally and physically useless the entire day, that's what I felt for the first year or so.

I've gradually gotten more used to them over time, I still miss the days before I put on my
chemical straight jacket.

Chapter 27:

Three days into my time at the institution I had a seizure while having some blood taken.

I didn't breathe for a few minutes and a Code-Blue was called.

I'm not sure if I actually turned blue for the sake of the story lets pretend I did.

I came back into conciousness and was completely embarassed.

I thought the needle had made me faint, I apologized to the blood taker and the RN.

I then realized that every one of my muscles was in horrific pain and I could barely move.

I had to laugh at the fact that I now actually needed a wheelchair to get around, it was no longer a
sedative device.

Chapter 28:

The RN never actually told me I had a seizure and almost died, she told my parents who then told
me.

I was suprised.
I think If I had known I almost died at that moment it might have been truly life changing.

I'm not sure if it would have been for the better or the worse so I'm a little relieved that the
moment was long gone when I finally found out what happened.

After 3 days in the wheelchair my muscles started working properly again and I went back to
walking around.

I refused the wheelchair from that point forward.

I had a new found appreciation for my legs.

Chapter 29:

I spent most of my days alone.

I would have blood taken, talk to a few doctors and eat meals with 2 other patients but other than
that my days were spent alone.

Laying on my bed in my cell.

I'm aware now that the isolation probably saved my life.

The isolation made me miss everybody.

To this day "The Catcher In The Rye" is the only book I've ever volountarily read.

To this day "The Catcher In The Rye" is the only book I've ever read, period.

The ending of Catcher made so much sense to me, it wasn't ambiguous or vague, I knew exactly
what Holden meant.

I even missed the people I hated.

I missed thieves and assholes and liars.

I missed the kids who bullied me in elementary school.

I missed Everyone.

Chapter 30:

After realizing that I wanted to be a part of society again I realized that I needed to either find a
way to cope with my schizophrenia or find a way to fake it.

I settled for a combo of both, I would stay on the meds, truly listen to every doctor I spoke with but
also bullshit my way out of that institution and try to reclaim the life I had lost over those 3 years.

"How are you feeling today Adam?", everyone would ask me that.

In my mind I always wanted to answer with a sigh or a groan, but I had to bullshit my way through
this.

I'd throw a big smile on and tell them how amazing I felt, how optimistic I felt about my whole life,
how I'd never felt so alive.
I would conveniently omit all the paranoid thoughts coursing through my brain.

On day 10 I had an interview with the head psychiatrist, big-daddy-shrink.

Dr.Boache was his name.

We talked for what seemed like an eternity, I kept a big smile up the whole time and layed the
bullshit on extra thick.

His final question was "You're not just saying this because you wanna go home are you?"

I speculated that he was a very weak psychic who couldn't quite decipher my thoughts entirely.

Ultimately I decided it was just a lucky guess.

Chapter 31:

I'll never forget the day of my release.

I was given the clothes I had been wearing on September 8th 2007, shoes and all.

When I looked inside the bag I saw a pair of pyjama pants and a Nirvana T-shirt.

I then realized that on the first day of school, when every other teenager was striving to look their
best to impress their new teachers and classmates, I didn't even get dressed.

What the fuck had happened to me?

When did I stop caring?

How did I fall so far?

My life was amazing until highschool started, I was a golden-god in the 8th grade.

My shiny blonde hair and sky-blue eyes had attracted swarms of girls to me, locally and from
surrounding towns.

Chapter 32:

I knew I had to start over, I had to reinvent myself.

I knew I needed to go back to school as soon as possible, that's where everything went wrong.

That's where I would try to fix everything.

I had gained a large amount of weight from being so lazy due to the meds.

I had to learn to fight the sedation if I was going to get back into the shape that I should have
been in.

Through running and some intense dieting I manage to lose 75 pounds, I shaved my horrible
beard and bought blue-jeans for the first time in a very long time.

Achieving my weight loss goal is still the only goal I've ever actually set and achieved for myself.
To put it bluntly I was now "Do-able", I wasn't good looking, but passable enough to make myself
noticed by females.

I had nothing in common with girls my own age, I needed to date younger girls if I was going to
have any kind of a relationship.

This was easy because I was in mostly 9th and 10th grade classes despite being much older than
the rest.

Chapter 33:

I got back in touch with my old friends, friends who I hadn't been very close with since 8th grade.

I managed to land a few casual girlfriends at school, always younger than myself by at least 3
years.

They never became real relationships, they would basically get boring after a week or two and we
would quietly part ways.

Chapter 34:

Having friends again was amazing, I would only see them once or twice a week but every time I
got to see them was so relieving.

It was difficult to still be mentally ill, I couldn't let them know which meant I had to stay quiet a lot.

I also had to avoid certain situations, I wasn't ready to attend partys or go into any socially
intensive situation.

Chapter 35:

Basically the next two years were pretty uneventful.

I gradually got better, I gradually developed a taste for alcohol.

I gradually got to be where I am now.

Where is that exactly?

Well, I'm a 19 year old man with a 15 year old girlfriend.

She's beautiful, but I certainly don't love her.

She adores me, she tells me how lucky she is to have me.

This gives me a high that I probably should have started feeling 5 years ago but simply missed
the boat.

For fourteen hundred and sixty days I stood on the edge of tomorow.

Over the past few months I jumped off the edge, I took the plunge and began to truly live my life.

I started working, I got hobbies, I got friends and more friends, I got laid, I got beat up, I had fun.

Chapter 36:
As I type this my life would best be summarized as a complete mess.

I could go to jail at any moment for the things I do with my girlfriend.

I purposely deprive myself of sleep to avoid nightmares, I abuse migraine pills and diet sodas to
stay up as long as my body will allow.

I go into most social situations thinking I'm going to die, I'm still a full blown schizophrenic living a
lie every day.

Yep, compared to the average person I'm a collossal loser.

Compared to the person I once I'm handsome, brave, strong, smart , well-sexed human being.

Most people would look at my life and look down on me, maybe even pity me.

I love my life.

All it took was for me to spend some time in a cell to learn how amazing life can be despite being
a schizophrenic who by rights should probably still be sitting on a bed bolted to a floor across
from a door bolted to a wall guarded by a man named Vince.

Life is what you make it, Life Is what I've made it.

Life is love, I love my life.

Chapter 37:

It took me 79 seconds to realize my life was broken, It took me 3 years to get it back into working
order.

Fourteen Hundred and Sixty Days to take the first step.