The Crustaceans

When I was a kid, I used to always have this vision, this sensation, that there were these slimy black crustaceans, kind of like a crayfish, visible only to me. They lived underneath everything. And whenever I would touch a wall or a chair or something they would latch on to my hands and fingers with their knobby little black pincers, first a few and then more and more until there were thousands of them swarming up my arms fast as fuck and eating me. They had prickly little pincer-legs, glossy black eyes on twitchy little stalks, rows of serrated little mouth-feelers rippling up to a weird spiny-armored alien mandible– and I would basically have to shake the shit out of my hands to get them off, so hard that my thumb would snap into my fingers and make a loud noise. That was the whole point: my mind wanted to make me do something loud so that other people would notice and I would be embarrassed. When I saw that other people could hear it and were looking the sensation would only get worse, more vivid. I could feel their sharp little serrated mouths chewing into my skin, and the urge to shake them off would just fucking amplify… and I would just be standing there like a dick, everybody looking at me, with my arms kind of hanging out by my sides like a crippled bird, shaking the shit out of my hands and snapping my fingers and thumbs together. This was from like 10 to 13.

Tags: mental illness