Halt and Catch Fire

Where do thoughts go after you’ve had them? What depository can I go to and retrieve them? Like old books in a library, stacked one next to another pressed easily somewhere I can use them. I have so many thoughts, I know I do, but when I move to put them down on paper; make them tangible; make them real. They just… stop, and I sit, staring at the empty page and it’s like my brain’s been vacant since I was born. The empty page bores into me, consuming me with the nothingness in my head, and taunts me with my amnesia. Though even if I could drag some fear-stricken thought out of the recesses of my mind and put it out to the world, center stage, the translator that moves the words from my head to the paper is in disrepair anyway; what seemed so fluid in my head comes out clunky and awkward on the page. There is no lattice for the flowers to climb, just dry seeds buried in barren ground begging for water I cannot give. The universes in my mind burn through me, scorching the places they were when I cannot take it, but give me a hearth to store the flames and they disintegrate, ashes on the breeze.

Maybe my thoughts burn me on purpose, like an army scorching the fertile earth, ensuring nothing there grows. Self-destruction turned automatic. A virus that makes it impossible to reboot. I heard rumors once of a command that threw a computer off the deep end, the processor trying to move faster and faster, beating it’s last time trial, and once the control was lost, it was not possible to reclaim the computer. Halt and catch fire. Maybe that’s what’s happened; it’s not that I have no thoughts, but somewhere along the line they started coming at a speed I could not process, and that’s just their speed now. Nothing I can do to regain control of my mind, so why be bothered?

There is no such command. Once there was a bug in some code, and two commands could send the computer into a tail-spin, an infinite loop that could do nothing but race to the non-existent finish line, but all it took was a reset. Just turn it off and on again. Now, halt and catch fire is a catch all for any command that would cause the processor to seize up, to lose control. Sometimes it is malicious, someone, somewhere, attacks you and won’t let you regain control. Sometimes, though, it’s there on purpose, looking for other bugs, other problems to fix. Just turn it off and on again and find the bug. Is there a bug in my code? How do I reset me? When my thoughts don’t let me sleep, don’t let me rest, what am I supposed to do?

My thoughts burn my mind, looking at memories it doesn’t care to process, taking a match to each of them, burning exponentially faster.

Halt and Catch Fire.