Déjà vu do (Short Story)

Déjà vu do

I love…love doing enjoyable social things, especially with the involvement of women. However, I don’t like doing them alone. Its quite paradoxical, I love being sociable but am too scared to with some sort of confidant. My good friends have all moved away and my second string friends have a first team squad where they spend most of their time; therefore, I am spending most of my time in isolation. A get the since a majority of my life has been in isolation. Another paradoxical thing, it is only when I am isolated and crave other human beings, that I am most terrified one actually might be secretly present.

I hate telling the same story, but because I do so little, I have only a hand full of quality anecdotes. Inevitably I repeat them, so if I catch myself then I stop the story awkwardly and ask the person if I am repeating myself. Most of the time the other party was nice enough to not tell me, but when they respected my request of honesty it just really pissed me off. If I realize midway through an unprepared story is not as great as when it happened, I start to embellish. I typically get really giddy about telling an awesome story that stars me, but the giddiness gets reversed to angst when I realize I have told it or its lame.

I am with my friend Craig, who is in town from Transylvania. He is the one living an adventures life and I am telling him about my mundane existence as a substitute teacher. I become self aware of this horribly boring story detailing my life and ask him to tell me about the peace work he has been doing in Tanzania. As he is telling me, these two girls overhear and it just so happens they are also doing peace work and the really incredible part is they are also doing it in Tibet. I am typically rather horrid at talking with ladies, but tonight it is like there interest match up perfectly with mine. There is a weird...trippey quality to the whole experience. It feels like constant déjà vu, where I have been there before, but it’s like a Dali painting where all time is stopped.

This déjà vu is with really obvious things. Like at the restaurant a couple sat down and I felt a deja vu that the waiter was going to bring them food. However, I get the since that it was the same couple, ordering the same food, from the same waiter, in exactly the same circumstance, that engulfs my brain and makes the situation feel more then familiar. This new found deja vu is not something I hate, its actually kind of enjoyable from the monotony of the day to day. However, I have the sneaking suspension that it is driving me insane.

I digress, as I was saying this pretty beautiful girl invites me over to her apartment, which looks like mine, but it is somewhat more opaque. I am trying to stay positive, because this constant déjà vu is somehow brining me down, despite how badass this scenario is promising to be. I am directed to her computer and shown pictures of her in dimly let clubs being social and fun. After I view the fortieth or so picture, the déjà vu becomes intense. I am not sure if it is because I have seen her pictures before, or if it seems my whole life is sitting alone bitterly watching others live a segment of the life I wish I was living.

So, I guess I blacked out during the awesome part, but I am pretty sure it was awesome. I am really disappointed because I don’t know if I made out with her or we did more or hopefully not less. I am terribly sad I can not remember this total contrast from my usual routine.

As I am sitting in my room figuring out how to keep this bizarre scenario from turning in to something that is not uplifting. I decide to enhance it, so I got my buddy to buy me weed. This is the first time I have bought it and am worried about having a criminal record, but I am so bored and need something to enhance this déjà vu like day.

So as I am sitting in my room having smoked a good deal of the marijana, a rush of intense fear engulfs me. I am at first not sure why I am so scared and then I remember that the sense the déjà vu is giving me is that there are Pakistani terrorist in my basement waiting to film my beheading. I couldn’t move, nor did I want to, because I new with the lights on in my bed the element of surprise was removed from their plan and I was temporarily safe. I eventually desperately had to pee, but I could not get up because they were waiting to abduct me. Part of me realized I was acting like I god dang four year old, but I remembered through the déjà vu, that it was when I got up to pee that I got abducted by terrorist. Therefore, the only way to prevent it was to stay in bed. Eventually, I just decided that I could not hold it in any longer, so I just went for it and I pissed myself.

The previous night I kept repeating to myself, that I was flushing the weed down the toilet when this experience was over. I could not put myself through that insane paranoia again, so I simply could never ever smoke again. However, I hate wasting things. I figured I wouldn’t plan on smoking, but what if I girl came over, then it would be really fun to smoke with her. While, girls absolutely never come over, I recalled the Boy Scout motto of always be prepared.

A friend of mine who I hated was however coming over. We had been friends from high school because we both had in common but one thing, we both didn’t want to not have any friends. He was mean, loud, bossy and just generally terrible. However, despite me hating him, I was excited to have someone to go out with, since it was Halloween and felt obligated to go out to the bar. I figured with my parents out of town, we could have some drinks here, and then go out to the bar scene in Alexandria. He agreed to drive, so as I waiting for him I started drinking. He eventually called me to tell me that a better offer came up and he wasn’t going to hang out. I was only kind of drunk at this point, but figured that tonight would be a good night to just drink and smoke until I reached Nirvana. So I played video game guitar and I guess drank for a while. Then I felt if I really wanted to convince myself I was a rock star, so I considered smoking the weed. Since I wanted to done with it, I figured the best thing to do, would be to smoke all of it, which was a fucken insane amount for me. It was like a suitcase full, which somehow did not feel like what I purchased. However, I am pretty sure I did smoke it all. I played the game for a while until I kept feeling like there was someone coming down stairs to do harm to me. So I went up to my family room and turned on the television and watched Barack Obama give a speech on Cspan. I got depressed about how I was too smart to be trapped at my parent’s house and not working for the president and doing something altruistic. So I figured I would go all out tonight and then be done after tonight and start my life a fresh tomorrow. The weed made me super horny, so I figured I would walk to the bar that was about a mile or two down the road and use my drunk to pick up a girl. I took the back roads to progress down before I would cross the main road and hit the strip mall.

Oh nooooooo, what had I done.

In got lost in the woods. Though these woods were not like the woods seemed larger and more haunting then the neighborhood woods. How did this happen. Nothing bad happens when I don’t leave the house.

As the marijuana was starting to take affect, it dawned on me what an idiot I was for smoking so much. I recalled that pot: first, dulls reaction time, second it heightens your senses, and third, it also can make you paranoid. As soon as I recalled them happening they occurred. So, on top of my natural paranoia being heightened, there is also the added paranoia that just comes from smoking. I thought about what a truly a brilliant decision I made smoking the night after I wet the bed. Then I laughed at the even more brilliant decision walking in woods, a setting that fostered oh so many childhood nightmares of being chased with chain saw yielding serial killer. I new I was high, but I did not feel high, and I new these woods were going to be the end of me before it even happened.

This was the moment that I die! Oh yea, I am going to die. God, please don’t let me die tonight, I beg you! This is not when I am supposed to die! I want to write a book and be president and meet women I can marry. No I can’t die tonight! I am going to die. I started to laugh and then chanted that I am going to kill you before you kill me. I didn’t believe it but figured if he heard me it might scare him away. Then I thought it could be the cops that I heard and if they caught me I would be arrested for drugs. But sure one arrest would totally be worth not being abducted by Jeffrey Dahmer. The cops also probably wouldn’t be to found having my bullshit friend’s army knife on me. Then the thought what if he is a supernatural being, who can not be beat. What if I end up in hell and I am forever burning and in a pit of lava, and I am alive forever and underneath theit of lava I am being pulled apart and I am forever alone. There is nothing but pain. I cant deal with this, why I am going crazy. I work hard, I am cleaver and nice and yet somehow I am going to die tonight. They are gong to abduct me and its going and be tortured by way of jamming things in my orifices and sticking a sharp long needle in my eye. I am going to die the same way the guy they named vampires after killed his victims. I can’t let this happen, but what can I do. I am helpless against my minds own paranoia of the worst. Is this how my entire life has been, in this perpetual state of misery, is this deja vu. Then suddenly I heard a loud helicopter like rumble, that I thought might also be near by DC having a nuc be detonated. So I impulsively dove to the ground, handily recalling my school days of getting low in the instance of nuclear inhalation. Then suddenly I was hit, I was right to be paranoid they were after me. I had yellow blood all over my jacket. I thought if I was going to die, I had to get a hold of my life and fight both the real and imagined monsters. As I grabbed the knife I knew this was a turning point in my life.

As I awoke after briefly dozing off as I hid in leaves, I hoped that was the low point in my life. It was still dark and I was covered in wet leaves and again felt like I was reliving something. The fun of experiencing constant fake deja vu was gone. So I tried to overcome this disorder.

I am overcome by the emotions of fear, angst, and a feeling of disgust. I guess I can be at peace with myself.


Sitting in that rather comfortable chair the cloudy paranoid details of the dark period suddenly vanished in a moment of sublime relief. I funny thought occurred to me; the déjà vu very well might have been real. If so, it was quite the relief to realize that it was not the paranormal that was not what was driving me crazy. However, I still didn’t feel particularly good, especially physically. Then thanks to my amazing memory, I realized why. It was the rush of electric current that just so happened to run out of juice before it was supposed to kill me. Then two semi profound thought bobbed around in my head, which conveniently sum up my circumstances: what we project on the inside is inevitably what we project outwardly and coming to terms with ones mortality makes the time before we face it more relevant. I actually don’t really know if that is profound, because I was not an ideal state of mind. I then asked the executioner if I could get to a free pass on life since they fucked up my execution. To which he replied, no sorry and then got jolted back in to another sting of some more trippey deja vu.