It’s been 36 days since I’ve last seen a living person.

I see dead ones all the time. More often than not they’ve been dead for days or weeks. Torn open and left to rot. Rotting organs spilling out onto the pavement or floor, deep red or dark brown, or beige grey, depending on how old the corpse is. Flies swarming like bees swarm a nest.

Do you know what happens when necrotic tissue rots for long enough? It melts. It turns into an organ goo and melts into the nearest porous surface. Usually, their old clothes, but occasionally a carpet or couch cushion, depending on where they died. Then it dries, like paint, and the liquified organs act like glue.

The worst part is the smell. The stench of thousands of bacteria colonizing and making homes for themselves. The gut bacteria, released into the open air, an offence to your nose and an attack on your senses. It can be smelled from hundreds of feet away. It’s the type of smell to make your eyes water, and to make you gag thirteen times as you use your blunt kitchen knife to try to separate the more palatable cuts of meat.

sigh But it’s worth it. The taste of your brethren is divine. Maybe it’s the disease that makes it taste so sweet, or maybe it’s something that’s been in me my whole life. But when I cut those tender, marbled strips of muscle off of the bodies, I feel as though dukes and royalty of old times would envy me. The way the meat just falls apart in your mouth, the slime of rot sticking in your throat after, is borderline orgasmic. The rot juice iss nature’s finest sauce, naturally formed on this first-class cuisine.

I’ve lost control a while ago. I know I have. I tell myself I’m acting, roleplaying, just pretending to be one of the undead. I tell myself I’m playing along, trying to ensure my own safety and survival, lest the undead detect and consume me. But when they do detect me, in the rare occasion I do see one, another stumbling former person. They detect me as one of their own, and leave me be.

I tell myself that’s great news, that I must be such a great actor, that broadway stars and shakespeare himself would be proud of me. But I know they would be horrified.

Going insane isn’t like the movies, where there is a definite crescendo, and then a snap and a bang. Going insane is like falling asleep. It definitely happens, but there’s no one point where you can say, ‘ah, that’s when it happened’. You slowly fall into it, so slow that you don’t even realize it. You’re gently lulled into undead scavengery, the disease’s fingers coaxing you into doing worse and worse things.

Geez, I should listen to myself. I’m such a great actor. No wonder the undead think I’m one of them.