they are rarely of the self-loathing sort, but rather the massively unsettling yet still vaguely amusing "what would happen if" sort.

they are absurd, morbid, intricate and wholly consuming.

i can spend stretches of upwards of a half hour entertaining these thoughts. this might not sound like much, but think about how quickly a thought flashes through your head. it's rare that we hang on to them long enough to really be able to say we've ruminated on them.

a half hour, in thinking time, is an extraordinarily long amount of time.

at least for my attention deficit ridden mind it is.

so, when these thoughts come to me, i am absorbed, i am amused, but mostly, i am fascinated by how detailed and gory they become.

what would happen if, when going down the narrow somewhat rickety stairs from the kitchen to the basement, the steps gave way and i fell through, breaking my leg when i landed on the hard concrete below, far from where my hosts could hear me, without any way to get up out of the basement since, well, the only way in or out of the basement is laying around me in splintery bits and pieces.

what would i do then? could i pull myself, with a broken leg--no with a broken leg, part of which was poking through my skin, blood pouring out of me--over across the basement so that i could try to scream up through the floorboards and awake my (legendarily) hard sleeping companions above? i see the blood, i smell it. i look at my leg and see the twist and the cracked bone. i see the stairs around me, the blue light coming from the laundry room illuminating the peeling white paint of the wood.

what if i cracked my head upon impact? i feel the final smash on the concrete (i've actually fallen backwards onto the pavement using my skull to break the fall--first time skating, ask me to tell that story to you later), i feel the world spin and my eyes shake in my skull and the winking white gauzy quality of how things look after a hard blow to the head. i feel the blood wetness on the back of my cracked skull, i see things go black, i feel how my lips are losing their color. how would they get my body out of the basement? what would my parents say when they were told?

would they cremate me and throw me into the pacific as i wish, or will my parents bury me in a jewish cemetery, as i am sure is their wish?

what kind of funeral would i have? how would people like marcel or shane or ritchey or andrea find out?

i wrote a will once, as a joke, but now, i wonder, will it hold as a legal document? who would want my crap anyway?

i look at my small things, the boxes i've made with glue and paper, my cds, lighters, toy cars and papers that i have written.

i imagine them all in the trash, my brother laughing at the crap i have managed to bring with me even after the grand sweep of this last move.

what if one night, while i was down in the basement, headphones on, dvd playing loudly, smoke curling up into the red light, someone broke in? would i hear the ruckus upstairs? would i know something is wrong? or would it take seeing a shadowed figure out the corner of my eye, with no where for me to go because the basement has no exit? i don't imagine the very gory details of this kind of scene, but rather imagine it in still photos, something akin to the sex scenes in my own private idaho, or maybe the ones in fight club. very violent, but very unreal looking. i imagine this is not surprising, how many of us can really imagine such horrible things happening to ourselves? i imagine myself worrying for my hosts above, not wanting to think about what may or may not have happened to them, instead looking around my room for anything i could conceivably use as a weapon. i imagine trying to protect myself, i imagine the soft echoing of our voices and how the brick walls would look to me.

this thought i can never pull out too long, it's simply too brutal.

what if, one day, my hosts simply never came home? like, what if they went out one night and there was some terrible accident? how would i find out? what would i do? who could i call? how could i tell their families? how could i stay here without them? not in the "i have no home" sense, but in the "my best friend is gone" sense. the sense of loss i let wash over me when i think about this almost always makes me cry. i feel regret and hopelessness, and i always end up losing this thoughts quickly for ones that are less to do with others but more to do with only myself.

i imagine slipping and dying in the shower, random car accidents where i am on a road with only farms, the other person dead behind their steering wheel, myself thrown from the car and laying in a ditch. then it's the smell of the grass and rubber from the once screeching tires, it's the feel of gravel in my skin and the brightness of the sun, my glasses thrown feet away from me.

i imagine tripping down the front stairs and snapping my neck on my way out of the house on an interview, the last thing i see the lillies that line the window closest to my basement bed.

i see myself struck by lightening, smashed by the house collapsing during an earthquake (i know i am in iowa, but i grew up in california, i'll never be free of earthquake thoughts), electrocuted by light switches, choking on food, smashing through windows and having my jugular sliced open by broken glass.

i am hit by cars, destroyed by trains and drowned by flash floods.

i have died on highways to chicago, farm roads while sightseeing and on the sides of bridges while watching fountains too long. i have wrist veins accidently sliced open by the tops of newly opened canned foods (i've actually given myself an awesome cut on my finger this way--very good scar), a forehead cracked on bathroom countertops, ankles turned walking to the garage and spider bites poisoning me in my sleep.

the thing that i always come back to after immersing myself in these kinds of thoughts is that it's not as if they are engendered by any kind of desire to die. i have never been good at entertaining thoughts of suicide, and when i did i imagine they were of the normal "i'm a teenager, i'm goth, can i get my skin to look any paler?" variety. i think the thing is, i have no set support system here. at least, not like i did back home. i have no safe nest to retreat to if things really hit the fan. i am, even despite the astounding generosity of my kind hosts, really very much alone.

and certainly, other than the occassional brief flutter of such "what would happen if"s that i admit happened before i moved out here, i very rarely entertain these thoughts during the day.

but at night, in the basement, listening to music on my headphones, a cigarette in my left hand, the mouse of my computer in my right, i have them quite often. and it's not scary, and it's not crazy.