GOLDEN excerpt from my novel in progress

Its pretty amazing how useless a mind can be. This alleged miracle of evolution just turns into a traitorous organ, capable of committing the ultimate treason. Isn’t biology designed to keep us alive? To make us copulate and procreate or some shit? So how can it be that this same brain that has evolved millions of years from a cluster of cells to this fleshy electrified blob that it is today in the year of 2025 can be such a marauder, that it could convince not just me but hundreds, thousands of us, that taking our own lives is a more viable option than actually just continuing to live?

It must be a defect in the programming.

I draw a bath. The water is just shy of scalding. I pop half a Klonopin and get in despite the pain. The water turns my olive skin red. Will it burn? I guess we’ll see.

It’s somewhat shocking that they put these huge porcelain bathtubs in these bathrooms of a glorified insane asylum. Luxury trauma jail. It’s then, that I notice, the camera in the corner of the room.

Is that legal? They could sell photos of me in the nude to TMZ, and that would be it for my dignity - although GOLDEN has basically shown off her tits - not mine, they’re not identical - in many a digital video. They even made her an OnlyFans. The disgusting stuff they’ve made us do - it’s hard to separate myself from her, because she looks so much like me. She is, truly, a part of me, a fragment of me, living a fragment of my life, like a copy of my soul, a quantum leap.

I wonder if somehow there’s a fragment of my dad still left living here too.

And then I wonder if that fragment is me.

Does any of this make him proud?

I suppose, at the end of the day, it’s less about him, and more about me, because I am the him that’s left, now. Just like in the lion king, he lives in me.

And if I kill myself, it means, killing him. Again.

And that won’t do. I can’t stand for that, as much pleasure or relief as it might bring me.

After 15 minutes of lessening heat, I flip the drain, and run frigid water instead. I force myself under the cold fountain. It takes my breath away, makes my cells shriek and dance, causes my flesh to peel back from the surface of my skin, and enliven me all at once. They say cold exposure is one of best things you can do for your body, for your mental and physical health. Something about hormones and adrenaline and neurotransmitters.

Suddenly I feel an almost robotic discipline in me - how can I change between frail, oscillating, indecisive, shy Talia, and then suddenly become this version - the version that is cold, heartless, calculating, ruthless. Like Golden. I wish I could be her all the time.

The other one is the one with the brain. The sad, faltering, limping, wounded, pathetic self esteem problems that cares so much about making mistakes and what other people think.

This version of me, the cold plunge version, the one with thick skin, is the one that I’d like to be all the time. The one that knows she can never make a mistake.

The Klonopin helps. All of a sudden I’m back to the invincible feeling, that nothing matters, and the only makable mistake would be to give up.

I step out of the tub, wrap myself in one of the luxury beige Turkish cotton towels. I just want to feel this way all the time. I stare into my reflection in the mirror, and immediately begin to pick apart my appearance. I was barely 30, but inside, when I looked in the mirror, I felt like I was in my 60s.

Even before my father died I felt that way. Did anyone else ever feel that way? I had heard of the phrase “old soul,” but didn’t consider myself much of an expert in anything spiritual or outside the strictly three-dimensional realm of appearances, wealth, and status.

Staring into my reflection now, I felt the bad feeling horrifically starting to spill over again despite the bath and cold and the benzos. The expression lines that had once been so fine were suddenly stark and visible on my face. The lines on my forehead - the same lines my father had, too - were etching deeper, now. Though hardly noticeable to anyone else but me, my hair had undeniably thinned, and every day it seemed I shed dozens of perfectly good hairs from head, and why, for what? Every time I found a stray hair I felt a pang of dread. I would pick it up between my thumb and first finger and carry it for a funeral march to the nearest trash can. Over the past 6 months I had begun some sort of horror-film rapid aging process - grief, trauma, and stress will do that.

It dawned on me that 30 was the old lifespan of ancient man, and here I was at 30, practically in the grave, somehow expected to continue on.

Out of nowhere I was tearing up, almost wanting to rip the skin off my own face, so frustrated with yet another thing I couldn’t control - my age, my appearance. If there was one thing I wished I could do it would be to stop time. I blinked away tears as I frantically pumped a peptide anti-aging serum into my hands and pressed it into my forehead, around my eyes, and the ever so faint parenthetical lines that were beginning to set around my mouth.

I washed my hands and watched the serum set into my face, still shiny and glossed. I reminded myself that my brain is a fucking malfunctioning blob of electrified flesh, and just because it malfunctions sometimes doesn’t mean its malfunctioning all the time. I’m not old. I don’t look old. I’m just depressed. Tired. Grieving, possibly my least favorite word of all time, right up there next to its stand alone, grief.

Suddenly there’s a knock on the door.