The Id Couple

By Samuel Paul Carty

 

I had been procrastinating again. I spent an hour doing inconsequential tasks, like perfecting the clip of my toenails and figuring out which mix of Aqualung was better for writing to; the original or the Steven Wilson remix. The mug of instant coffee was starting to get cold but I couldn’t reheat it because of the gold foiling on the mug, so I would have to wait until the dishwasher was finished to get another mug to reheat it in. But was granule coffee ever worth reheating? It had barely any taste to it and the microwave would only make it searing hot, it wasn’t a miracle machine. I needed chemical aid. I was thinking with a horse & cart, not a train, and all the intrusive busywork was starting to make the cartwheels sink into the mud of bad analogy.

 

I could have spent the entire afternoon formulating ideas, completing an immaculately presented plan with colour coding and annotations to boot. I was now kicking myself for spending it… well… not doing that. Whoever wrote and voiced my inner monologue was, is an egregious cunt. The type of egregious cunt who gave themself shit for using words like egregious, believing any outside party would interpret it as pretension rather than using my vocabulary.

 

You could have just said ‘terrible cunt’ or even ‘infuriating bastard’. You don’t want to have another story you can’t show your mum, do you?

 

I like the word egregious. The added effort of spelling it correctly shows how much I fucking hate working with you, Voice.

 

My mum always told me that I could start a fight in an empty house. I didn’t know what she meant until I started spending time alone. Getting along with yourself is a god-forsaken task, no wonder the pubs were packed on a Saturday night. What the fuck else was there to do apart from drink yourself into oblivion, snort a line of cheap cocaine in the toilets then vomit on, in, and outside of the taxi home? Writing would be cheaper but it involves facing up to your own ugliness. Okay, maybe there were a few other things to do but I didn’t fancy my chances as a cokehead in a small town, I was better off putting a pump of fabric conditioner in my morning coffee. The weed here was weaker than an old man’s piss stream, the ecstasy was at least 50% dishwasher tab, and any powders were 90% liable to kill you, if not now then later in the week. Even the booze was watered down. That’s why I stopped going to the pub. There must be more fun ways to kill yourself than liver failure and shit drugs.

 

Why are you still writing? You have fuck all to write about.

 

Shut up, Voice.

 

Voice regularly piped up to tell me their thoughts. It was shit sharing a pair of eyes with them but short of blinding myself, there wasn’t much I could do about it. So why complain? I just call them an egregious cunt and move on. Voice was like phantom pain. I just had to live with not being able to scratch the itch and a lobotomy, although effective and could be easily performed with a sharp pencil, would be overkill. Akin to washing clothes, distracting Voice was a grueling task but one I had become used to. It was all a matter of occupying at least 3 of my senses at once. For example, as I’m writing, I would also be reading what I wrote, however, Voice would be on the other 3 frequencies, tuning in for weaknesses or areas to critique. I would simply play music to drown their incessant whining out. Sometimes I would also chew the gum I kept spare for if I decided to buy tobacco again and needed to get the taste of burnt rubber out of my mouth after a cigarette. Then I was occupying all 5 senses and Voice would be run ragged trying to be noticed, so to speak.

 

As I thought those thoughts and laid them onto the page, paranoia set in. Was Voice watching me reveal my secrets? Was I under scrutiny like a slightly liberal journalist in East Germany? A field mouse in a barn owls territory? Maybe I was just paranoid. After all, Voice was only an unwanted part of me. They would be sabotaging themself if they attacked. Was I creating the monster by ignoring them?

 

I spat my gum into the cold cup of coffee. The lack of coffee scent from the cup told me that it wasn’t worth reheating anyway, I’d had tea that smelled stronger than that diluted sewage.

 

I paused Kraftwerks Autobahn.

 

Crawling back?

 

Not necessarily. I’m sorry for calling you an egregious cunt. You’re more of an irritating loudmouth, anyway.

 

Thank you. Anything else, you infuriating bastard?

 

I need your opinion on one of the earlier paragraphs. Does it read well?

 

I’ll have a look. Don’t shit in your cereal if you don’t like what I have to say.

 

No promises.

 

The End.