The Rat Monologue

 

I feel like I mean nothing to anyone .

I mean nothing to my own family .

I could disappear and it would take weeks to notice .

People would only notice once they want a favour from me, not because there's anything particular about me that they like.

I know why and it's different for different people, it's my own fault. I think I do it on purpose to make life predictable, to make human relationships predictable because they scare me so much.

To closed off people I am too much and to colourful, rambunctious people I am completely blank.

I perform a personality that means whoever is watching has nothing else to wonder within about five mins of talking to me. 

I am so scared of anyone wanting to learn something about me and realize there is nothing worth finding. 

This whole speach would be beautiful said in French by a woman in a new wave film.

I am a post modern Irish girl who eats too much and wants too much as to what her face can afford so it's less romantic.

I know everyone feels like this so there is not much special or intelligent or thoughtful about what I ever have to say. 

Even as I write this I am imagining it said in this affected tone, as said in one of these French films that I love so much...beacuse the life that I live in my head exists in one.

In reality it's the 2020s, life will never be romantic again and the way I speak is in online meme talk, swearing and thick culchie accents. 

I can't seem to catch the rats that live in my room. I mean this literally I wish I was speaking in metaphor (it's wonderful what hindsight can do). I have been camping in the living room for the past two days. Upon returning from Venice, rats the size of small cats have moved into my attic room and have terrorized my psyche. We are going to call a man about it tomorrow . The thing about living in the city is that no one has a good mouser. I've set traps of peanut butter hoping to find a fat corpse whenever I'm brave enough to check. Rats are smarter than mice. 

I can't help but feel a deep moral failure is the cause of this invasion. The bloodlust that it has inspired within me is making me disappointed in myself. I was meant to have been raised with budhists. I used to have pet rats. All God's creatures great and small are equal until they start going through my cupboards. 

I had a dream last night where my friend began to hoover the rats up as a way to bind them while she slowly decapitated them with kitchen knives, sawing. I could smell the blood in the dream. It was my job to catch them with my hands, each progressively looking more like a pet, getting smaller and softer. Only the day before I had joked in real-life-world that this was a way we could get at them from odd angles. 

After waking up it took me about ten minutes to realize this was not real. Did we really do that last night? 

We've been carrying empty wine bottles and hammers with us through the house. The rats are coming from the semi-abandoned house next door. I think they are holidaying in my room, maybe the stink of insence is exotic. 

I was in the living room when the old man next door died. When the short term dereliction began I guess. I was watching telly when the ambulance arrived and took the body out. Watching between parted blinds I kept the household groupchat informed and later that night after smoking I saw his ghost on the stairs landing. The house hasn't been haunted before or since. 

I need to stop feeling sorry for myself.