But what does that mean really?

I honestly never gave it much thought (well, ok, I never gave it ANY thought, I mean Ive got more important things to do with my life then contemplate archaic expressions).

Until one day I woke up and had to face the awful truth. Our bodies are not our own.

It began unassumingly enough with hearing small, indistinct voices. Not loud enough to make out any words, mind you. Just the annoying buzzing like a mosquito in your ear.

It wasn’t until that evening when I came home and found my roommate, Tom, crashed on the couch, eating MY leftover meatlovers pizza, and flipping through the channels on MY tv with MY remote.

Then I heard those voices clearly enough.

KillKillKillKill.

Which is how I found myself standing over the badly-beaten body of my former roommate, wielding a baseball bat and splattered with his blood.

I know what you’re thinking now and believe me it was the first thing I thought as well. Hearing voices? You’ve gone loco!

It wasn’t until three bodies later as I was stuffing the Garbageman’s corpse into the trashcan (Why do they have to pick up trash at 5am? Don’t they sleep, these freaking nocturnal rats?), that I realized I wasn’t just hearing and obeying voices.

They were controlling me.

I could feel the hairs raise up on my arms and the back of my neck, waving like thin worms, whispering to me that the newspaper boy shouldn’t keep throwing my paper onto the roof.

They were evolving.

Perhaps they have always been there, these voices, the crying out of my body. Even when I was a child, they were with me, whispering how it’ll be alright and I won’t have to remember any of this…

(Jack on the playground who ‘accidentally’ fell from the top of the monkeybars, snapping his neck.)

They sound oddly enough, at times, like my Father.

He of the beer-gut and dirty-toilet cologne. Always willing to give me advice, drunk or sober, solicited or not. His prodigious gut would precede him everywhere and when he talked, the sounds would gurgle from that gut, wet and mushy.

Yeah, I knew that voice.

Leaving the trash man I walked the three miles to the apartment building where my Father dwelled. I rang his doorbell and watched his face grow pasty-pale as he saw me standing there, drenched from the rain, my hair in my eyes and the very flesh of my body screaming out his name.

Funny, the body may die a horrific death from a fall down the elevator shaft but the voice just goes on and on and on…