AAEVEYN ULLOVTO loved playing Scrabble on his IPad versus the CPU especially during wintertime in EREKWY, his place of origin, where the moon stayed out and the cold stayed in until the spring month of IAPEZOU, seven full months from the start of ERVOEXU.
AAEVEYN never married, kind of had a girlfriend once a long, long time ago for about half a semester – a kindergarten classmate who made his thingy feel funny but then who died one bright, cheery morning during reading time when an unchewed piece of graham cracker got wedged in her windpipe and because back then none of the adults in schools were trained in either the Heimlich Maneuver or in CPR and the voluntary ambulance crew arrived seven minutes too late to save her life. He got a semi-circle front row seat watching his young crush choke to death, a true picture-book horror story that, likewise asphyxiated his desire for socializing with anybody else, ever again.
The hermit crab never came out of his shell after that because his psyche was fried at five, and when the panic attacks began wherever he was forced to socialize with someone he was always told to suck it up and be a man! because getting mental health help back then was only for them crazy Hollyweird actors who had nothing better to blow their easy money on.
Even through several bouts of lying fetally in the corner of the classroom, undiagnosed as early adolescent PTSD, which wasn't a thing back then because only combat veterans got shell-shocked and that was only temporary because they sucked it up and became a man!, he graduated, but led a lonely, friendless life, never daring to get chummy with another classmate again, not even in accounting school, and the same around the watercooler among the other number-crunching drones at work. He found his fun and safety net at home gathered around the card table creating words from seven little wooden squares with letters and numbers on them trying to score more points than his opponent and apron-tethered housemate, Dear Mother, did.
Life was lived this way, quietly and unassuming, gamed away at Scrabble, until Dear Mother choked to death on an unchewed piece of graham cracker that got wedged in her windpipe during an overexcited word play and he didn’t know how to perform the Heimlich Maneuver or CPR and the voluntary ambulance crew arrived seven minutes too late to save her life.
Soon after that, he moved to a smaller place and got an IPad and felt blessed that the Scrabble app was downloadable. Soon after that, he began receiving messages from Dear Mother through it. She told him that he could decipher her messages from the Great Beyond and all he had to do was study the unshuffled letters that appeared on the digitized tray, and the CPU, her soul now named INREENA, would guide him through the rest.
He pushed the Start New Game button, seven random letters were electronically doled out–APLINCK–and INREENA was right because after a great deal of contemplation, APLINCK correctly translated as “hello, Son,” in Scabblese.
He exchanged every tile and the letters UMNCCJR took their place: “how are you?”
Life was lived this way, quietly and unassuming, chatting away during a Scrabble game just like the good old days, feeling like a new person, until INREENA spelled out some bad news one bright, cheery morning when he pushed the Create New Game button and a death sentence spilled out: AQOUAHE, which, in his new language, meant ‘coronary’, then ENRVMII, ‘thrombosis’. Nervously exchanging tiles, the next seven, HUSOKGN translated as, ‘tonight’, the next seven, INOENUG, ‘in your sleep’. Seven final tiles, TTSCSKR, he decoded as, ‘see you soon!’
This was the press release issued the next day:
Leon Lamont Periwinkle, formerly of Upton, Maine, died overnight from a heart attack, aged 77. Periwinkle, a certified public accountant, spent his final years committed to the Murdoc-Rupus State Home for the Criminally Insane in Bangor, after strangling his live-in mother to death during a heated word game. He was never married, left no survivors. While institutionalized, the prisoner/patient insisted he was AAEVEYN ULLOVTO, from EREKWY.
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If you or someone you know has a mental illness, is struggling emotionally, or has concerns about their mental health, there are ways to get help:
In life-threatening situations, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room.
If you are suicidal or in emotional distress, consider using the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Call or text 988 or chat online to connect with a trained crisis counselor. The Lifeline provides 24-hour, confidential support to anyone in suicidal crisis or emotional distress. You can reach a specialized LGBTQI+ affirming counselor by texting “Q” to 988 or by calling 988 and pressing “3.”
Learn more: 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/find-help
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