I had planned on going to class today (yesterday? It’s late here in Belgium…) It turned out differently though. Experiment No. 7 showed up on campus right before class, on the verge of mental breakdown. It turned out he hadn’t been taking his meds for a couple of days already and he believed he was growing increasingly paranoid again. Now, what is a good mistress/experimenter/friend to do? I took him out in town to get his mind off things. First I brought him to my favorite coffee bar, let him lament a bit, fed him cookies while I enjoyed a double espresso, and then I intended to take him to a lovely park I know.
It turned out differently. The park was closed, but when I walked on I noticed an entrance gate to what appeared a schoolyard, half concealed under vegetation. I am an experimenter, a curious soul by nature, so I pulled No. 7 with me for some urban exploration…
The path lead to an abandoned school complex. It was a great place, calm, with lots of plants, abandoned and yet inhabited by… well, those society likes to forget about. Most of the buildings in the complex were locked, but through the windows we could see traces of who lived there. A guy owning at least five big weed plants, a suspected collector/thief of traffic signs, someone apparently very fond of Smirnoff… I tried all doors, until I found one open. It took some coaxing to get No. 7 to follow me, but obedient as he is he did (not without calling me an evil psychopath though, I thanked him for the compliment) and together we went inside.
The building was clearly inhabited, although not permanently. I believe someone had made it a hideout of some sort, a temporary residence. The person living there… It was the vibe in the whole building, it felt as if it resonated with me. No. 7 said, and now I’m quoting “I can smell the crazy in this place”. It was all relatively neat, there was little trash, and empty alcohol bottles were kept in a box in the corridor. There were drawings. Abstract, graffiti-like drawings, so at first I believed the place to be the hideout of a tagger. Then I also found plans to make some sort of table, neatly drawn out and complemented with calculations about weight, length, torsion on the integrated pulley system… I was impressed.
We advanced, and then we reached a room painted all red. Blood red. The walls, the ceiling, the floor. All was red. There was one huge painting on canvas, black and eerie, of a madonna with child, standing against the wall. It was… Suddenly I just… didn’t want to leave anymore. It was as if the whole room requested, demanded that I would stay. That painting, that color, the drawings, the math… I just wanted to stay there, sit down, sharpen my knife, wait for the one who lived there to return. It was beautiful and eerie and a little destructive too. It felt like home. I could feel a certain type of cautious fear inside me, but… I also felt an excitement I have rarely felt before. It was chaos waiting to happen.
The need to plunge my knife into a human body, cut and see the fear, taste it on my lips like wine and paint those walls, paint them red all over… It was so strong, so all-overtaking… In a certain way it was an intense need for self-destruction. An urge almost animal. To undo a life, to take something so fundamentally belonging to someone else… I wanted it so badly, even hours after I got home I couldn’t find rest, it kept calling me, tempting me…
I don’t know if I will be able to withhold my urges when I live on my own and they don’t have direct consequences for my life anymore…
We're All Mad Inhere 
Oh I totally understand the sweet taste of destruction. It’s so addictive. There is a series of point-and-click flash games made by “melting-mindz”. I don’t know how but the game-maker has all these photographs of the real abandoned hospitals and asylums. I don’t care about finding my way through the game, I just wanna see another room full of the rusty and bloody junks. 😉