I was starting to get the feeling that I needed to connect with my roots. Or reconnect I should say. “Yeah fuck this shit,” I said, “I need to get back to my roots.” It felt good to be able to say this. I felt that I was coming back to myself a bit, even by having this thought, even by realizing that I had – over the years – drifted far from my roots. Very far indeed. I didn’t know what I was doing these days, now that I came to think about it. However did I get caught up in this shit, I wondered? How the hell did that happen? What the hell was I doing?

“Fuck this shit,” I said again, “I don’t need any of this crap.” It was as if scales were dropping from my eyes and I could see again. Something inside me was stirring. Something inside me was starting to wake up – something that had been asleep a long time. Something dusty and covered in cobwebs. “I’m going back to my roots,” I said again. But even as I said this I knew that something was wrong. I knew something was wrong because I didn’t actually know what my roots were! I didn’t actually have a clue as to what my roots might be. Insofar as I could tell, I didn’t actually have any. This came as a very unpleasant surprise to me – the very worst type of unpleasant surprise. What could be worse? I had always assumed that I had roots. I knew that they were there somewhere even if I wasn’t in touch with them. Only they weren’t.

I didn’t know where to go from here. My whole plan was pretty much based on the fact that I had roots to go back to. That I actually did have roots. “You useless rootless bastard!” I cursed myself. “Fuck you!” “What kind of a person doesn’t have any roots?” I asked myself bitterly. “How is that even possible?” Then I realized that it wasn’t possible. I wasn’t actually a person at all. I was just the façade of a person, the imitation of a person, the fake appearance of a person. That’s kind of OK, I reflected, just so long as you don’t ever look too deeply into it. Which obviously I hadn’t been doing! What kind of a fool was I, I wondered, that I never ever checked up on myself to see if I genuinely was a real person or not? What sort of person just drifts along, never bothering to look beneath the surface to see if there’s anything there or not? How was that even possible?

Then it came to me in a flash that it wasn’t possible. No one could do this. No one could possibly live life as superficially, as lazily as this, so as not even to bother to ever look under the surface to see if there is actually anything there or not. Any real person there or not. Which again clearly meant that I wasn’t a real person at all. My mind reeled. How could I have been so appallingly superficial as to not notice how frighteningly superficial I was? How could I have missed that? How could I have been so incredibly vacant as to never notice that that I didn’t actually exist? I hated myself so much at that moment. I hated myself with a white-hot hate. Only – I realized – there was no one there to hate. Do you know how frustrating it is to want to badly to punch someone really really hard in the head, when that person doesn’t actually exist?