Weird Al Yankovich, in his 2006 hit song “White & Nerdy”, a parody of “Ridin’” by Charmillionare and Krayzie Bone, raps “Look at me I’m white n’ nerdy!/I wanna roll with-/The gangsters/But so far they all think/I’m too white n’ nerdy/Think I’m just too white n’ nerdy/Think I’m just too white n’ nerdy/I’m just too white n’ nerdy/Really, really white n’ nerdy”
If I had one word to describe the life of Oscar Wao, it would not be ‘brief’ and it would not be ‘wondrous’, it would just be ‘pathetic’. Granted, that word might be a little too harsh for dear ol’ Oscar, but think about it for a second: he is an obese, sexually frustrated, Dominican virgin, who spends most of his adolescent and adult life swimming in science fiction and table top role playing games, all the while failing, consistently, to get laid. He fails at pretty much everything; he fails so much he makes Ralph Nader look like a winner.
Being the fat kid sucks. It really does. If you’ve never been fat, you wouldn’t understand. Please don’t pretend and try placing yourself in a fat kid’s shoes. You’re lying to yourself. If your belly fat doesn’t jiggle when you walk,
I have cavities. It bothers me so much that I do. So much. Damnit.
Silence really takes its toll. It feels like someone drove a stake through the base of my skull and it’s stuck there and it won’t move.
The little fantasies are the best ones, the ones where we’re holding hands, walking down a dimly lit street lined with trees, against a calm, lukewarm summer breeze with the slightest hint of autumn. The ones where I’m lying in your lap on a picnic blanket, with the sun fading below the horizon, leaving a streak of bright, clear orange across the sky.
All I want to do is just be with you. I don’t care where I am, just as long as I can be with you.
Chances are someone out there, somewhere, is feeling the same thing you are. It feels like you’re about to dive off the edge of a cliff, like you’re about to scream, like you’re going to be heard for the first time, like you’re that tree, falling, in am empty forest, like you’re actually going to live this time, like you’ve finally found the tiniest shard of what you’ve been looking for this entire time. What’s the word I’m looking for here? Inspiration? Epiphany?
The City is quiet at night, amber tinted and still. The occasional swish of a taxi, the cackle of a drunkard stumbling out of a bar, the silence that follows consumes the city whole, like a snake biting its own tail.
You’re all that I think about, the perfume that lingers in the fabric of my clothes, the sound that echoes in the cavern of my memories. I want to be near you, to be filled with you past the point of breaking, to be pregnant with your warmth on a cold winter’s night.
She first encounters him in a supermarket, in the produce section by the potatoes and yams. He is hesitantly picking through a pile of green peppers, occasionally dropping one into a plastic bag. He does not appear to understand the distinction between one pepper and the next, but goes through the motions of mimicking produce selection regardless. He seizes another one from the pile and, with mute intensity befitting that of a snake encroaching upon its prey, he bites into the vegetable. She is alarmed by his actions, but says nothing and only glides past him to examine the tomatoes and celery. Her mind denies her the opportunity to escape and she finds herself watching him, perhaps out of curiosity, or perhaps some lonesome attraction that only the middle-aged feel towards others of their own kind.
Today is one of those days where she feels like having some peanut butter. Though she’s no great fan of the sticky paste, occasionally she craves a dollop or two on a slice of bread, or maybe some to dip a cracker or two in.
She wants to taste him, like breaking the skin of an apple and sinking her teeth into its flesh.
She had lied to him that first night they were together. She had told him that she loved him, not because she did but because she read it somewhere (a John Updike novel, maybe) that
She tells him she loves him the first night they are together. It is a lie and they both know it. Yet, somehow this one lie makes all of it real. As she bends down, slowly, the uneven fringes of her hair breaking the calm of his face, like fishing lines rippling the surface of a pond, she sinks her lips into his and is surprised, briefly, at how soft his lips are.
I think my mother tried too hard to get me involved in science and medicine. This Intel project is probably the culmination of years of her hard work, second only to my graduating from medical school. Except, at the end of this tedious, but thankfully brief venture, I’m convinced that research is not the right field of work for me.
I’m in love. I never imagined that this is how it would turn out to be, that he is who I would end up with, but it happened anyway.
I want to kiss his lips, press my breasts gently against his firm chest and feel his warmth. His little touches, fingertips trailing along my skin, like electricity, burn, destroy, ravage my senses. I want to feel him forever. The consummation of our love, the birth of sensation as our bodies touch, connected our bodies are, entangled, snared by threads of fate.
I hate it when I have to explain myself. To anybody.
I am a kitchen spatula. I have a long, plastic handle and a
The January air is cold, my breath fogs as I exhale in to my mittens. I’m intricately packed, like a snowman, under layers of clothes.
Growing up is like stripping in the cold. A child, my breath fogs in the air, I am wearing a thousand intricately packed layers of innocent naiveties. The temperature bites exposed skin and cold seeps in between the cracks of my person. Unaware, I am a snowman melting in the sun. Molded by hands other than my own, do I ever truly loose my shape when I pick myself up from the puddles of my youth? Or, do I have to deal with the fact that I am an amorphous blob, immobile, and constantly threatened by the occasional footfalls that step too close to my boundaries?
When I was eight, I wanted to be an astronaut. Space was fascinating, unconquered, possibly misunderstood by modern physics and absolutely merciless in its beauty and austerity. This childhood dream became nothing but a dream and, occasionally, when people learn that I dared to dream this simple dream, they scoff and wonder how I ever fooled myself into thinking I possess the mental and physical discipline that are demanded of astronauts. In all honesty, I just liked looking at the pictures.
When I was eight, I also watched my first episode of Cowboy Bebop. What made me stop channel flipping, and struggling with a remote control too large for my hands, was the fact that people were smoking in a cartoon. This has never happened before. Spongebob Squarepants never smoked cigarettes, neither did Patrick, or Squidward or even stingy Mr. Krabs! But, then again, Cowboy Bebop wasn’t really just a cartoon. Cowboy Bebop was the very essence of cool. If growing up was like stripping in the cold, late night cartoons took my gloves and chipped a crack in the layers of childhood naiveties.
The whole “I just liked looking at the pictures” thing really worked out for me. I became a great watcher of pictures, an avid lover of animation. Ironically enough, what made me grow up the most was something that most people deem childish.
Falling in love is like being addicted to drugs. God, you want it so much, you want it so much that it hurts when you have and it hurts more when you don’t. You know it’s bad for you but you just can’t give it up, it’s too good, it hurts too good, it feels too good.
I think it’s time I stop talking to him, because everyone is telling me not to, and time I start talking to my old friend, Microsoft Word.
The past two days, I’m not even going to try to explain the past two days. It’s going to be engrained in my memories for a long time anyway. The way my room was, my stiff pink sheets…his hipster jacket with the feminine buckles, the way his moans sounded so pained…
I hurt him so much. I hurt him so much. I’ve never heard a sound so pained and tortured in my life. I’ve never seen him cry so much and so openly. I know why he doesn’t want to be with me anymore. I know, because I’m the one who drove him to leave me. I’m the one who pushed too hard, too cruelly. He always came back though. In the end, I guess I was the one who took him for granted. I was the one who ruined everything. I miss him. I’m going to miss him terribly. My room is like a museum of our relationship. All of his gifts, all of them, the first and possibly the last, on my shelves, on my bed, reminding me of him.
I want to hold him again. I’d do anything to take everything back and start over again. I want to his lips. His lips, his soft lips, the bottom one a little bit bigger than the top, a little bit fatter than the top, the way it hangs open slightly when he’s sad, when he’s kissing me…
I want to cry. I’ve cried so much. My face stings, my eyes are poached. I can’t even really say how I feel because I’m afraid to feel it anymore. I’m afraid to touch the fear and the pain. I’m afraid to loose him anymore than I have already.
If I ever see him again, I want to kiss him, deeply. I want to hold him, and undress him slowly if he lets me. He probably won’t. He’s not the type. He’s going to push me away, avoid my hands, pin me down and tell me no. I’m still so in love with him. Even if I wanted to push him out of my mind, my heart, he comes back. His infectiously wide smile, his sad puppy dog eyes, his cheeks returning to their previous plump state…I miss him.
Everything was alright before I said those things. Everything would’ve been alright if I weren’t such an ass. It was pizza and it was a shitty chunk of cheese-covered broccoli. He waited for me after school. He gave me coconut pie from a Chinese bakery. We had Bon Chon chicken and walked to the subway at City Hall, bought a soda and took the train to 68th street. He talked about his internship, what he learned, the patients he saw and the dentists he worked with. We bought peanuts at the bus stop and walked to Cornell. There was some sort of hold up down between the avenues, so it was fortunate that we did not wait for the bus. I worked and around six we left. We took the cross town bus to Lexington and walked down to the fifties. We stopped by the dog kennel and looked at the puppies. We stopped by the pizza place and I wish I can go back and stop myself from going in. I wish I can just stop myself. I miss him. I’m in his shirt. I’m in the shirt he gave me. I believed everything. Everything. About us, our future…
Does it only hurt this much because he’s my first? Because it’s the first time I tasted the joy and pain of love? The first time I crawled into bed to feel someone else’s warmth? The first time someone kissed me and told me he loved me? Is that why it hurts so much when he signs off Skype suddenly and doesn’t return any of my calls? Is that why everything hurts so much….
I wish I can take everything back. I wish I can just stop before I said those things, before I did any of it. I am such an idiot. I am such an idiot.
I love him. I love him. I love him. I will always love him. He’s the only one I can’t let go.
Please don’t forget that Jeffy loves you.
How am I supposed to move on? How can I take anyone else but him? Please don’t leave me. I’d do anything. Anything. Sell my soul, cut my hair, give away a limb. Anything just to be with him even for just a day, a day.
I didn’t mean it for it to be our last night together. I didn’t mean it. I wish I can go back. I wish I can go back. I wish I can go back. I want to go back. Why isn’t my life like the movies? Everyone gets back together in the movies…
I can’t stay away. I can’t. Everyone tells me to wait. To let him go. I can’t. I’m not patient. I’m not. Please.
I miss him. I miss him so much. Come back. I don’t care how bad he is. I don’t care how bad it is. This hurts too much.
Yeah, it really hurts. Breaking up. How much he doesn’t seem to care. How he can just hang up so easily and leave me. I hate him for it. I hate for making believe he gave a shit. I tried to walk out of it. I tried, way back when. But I loved him so much, I loved him so much. Do I still love him now? I can’t tell. I can’t feel anything anymore. I’m so numb on the inside. I’m tired of feeling something. Feeling pain, or whatever.
Today, I woke up around nine to a phone call from my boyfriend who, having just flown back from college for winter break, was waiting downstairs for me to open the door for him. We baked cookies all day and went out to eat and cuddled and kissed and fell asleep together.
Of course, none of this actually happened. In fact, he missed his flight and we broke up. I ended up baking no cookies and crying all day long. I am actually still crying because every time I stop and think about what happened, it makes me sad. Seeing my Facebook status makes me sad. My dad calling me makes me sad. The fact that he’s not here with me makes sad, but that’s the least compelling reason. I’m seriously just unable to feel, to emote. I can’t find the love I use to have for him, I can’t find any feelings I use to have for him at all. It’s just all gone and I feel so empty. But, strangely, I still feel sad. It’s as if I woke up from the wrong dream into this startlingly unhappy reality that is called my life. I wished for most of my teenage life for a boy to love me. And when one came along, I guess I wished too hard for reality to turn into fantasy. It’s like Icarus flying too close to the sun. I got burned, I guess? I pushed him too hard and too fast and the wax melted and I plummeted back into the crumbling relics of what I thought to be my long forgotten past. In short, I’m lonely, again.
He’s not picking up. I can’t work. I can’t function. Rather, I don’t want to function. This is a really good excuse to not work. That aside, I feel deflated and tired. I just want everything to go back to the way it was.
Sometimes, I want to cry. I sit around and think about all the people and all the things we’ve done and then, in a little while, it wouldn’t even matter anymore. People, places, it would all just go away and melt, like memories generally would, in the back of my mind. I wish I can keep onto them forever. But it is difficult and I do not know how.
I want to live forever, even though I absolutely hate being alive. Perhaps, it is because I know I’m no constant fixture in the world and my existence is only temporary.
Strangely enough, I feel nothing. I feel neither sadness nor longing. I am apathetic.
I deserve most of it, don’t I? I was being an ass and well, this is what I get.
Sometimes, it feels like people will never understand me. And, when I try to explain myself to people, they’ll look at me like I’m silly, childish, immature. After all, the source of my passions, my joys is an under-appreciated art form that might not even be an art form. Aside from my budding, somewhat but most definitely serious, romantic relationship of one and a half years, what really gets me going, what really makes me feel alive, what really ties me to down to filthy, sordid earth and keeps me going at night is anime.
Think about it, when colleges ask me to elaborate on one of my interests, who is going to know what the hell ‘anime’ is? And, the real question is: who’s going to take me seriously when I mention I spend hours upon hours watching, oogling, crying at some animated Japanese hoopla? No one.
So, where does that leave me? After watching something so damn epic, something so beautiful, all I can do is tell it to my word document. Is there really no hope for a person like me? Is there really no hope for those trying to escape the unbearable miseries of their own lives? Probably not.
Sometimes, I want to cry because something in life just can’t be explained in words. I feel like everything will be alright. It’s just a thirty minute anime series, but it feels like it solved every single problem I’ll ever face in life, just as long as I can remember how epic, how motherfucking epic it was.
I love Roy Mustang. Goddamn how good it was. Damn damn damn damn, it was like, like, everything! At once!
Goddamn, it was so damn good. I love Roy Mustang. God fucking damn…
I’m a hopeless insomniac. I’m afraid of losing time, sleeping and waking up too late to do anything worthwhile. I’m afraid of waking up, waking up to a world I didn’t really want to be in. So, what am I to do? In the middle of the night, when the world is quiet and the air is cold. Shall I sleep, or not? To sleep or not to sleep? To which beckoning call do I answer? The lure of sleep, safety, ignorance or the wakeful pains of a morbid reality?
If I could, I would give my life up for him. He makes me forget everything, forget all the things that plague my life. I just want to curl up with him and surrender myself to this feeling, this feeling of safety, comfort, love. Is it a weakness that I am displaying, a secret yearning for security, defenselessness towards loneliness?
What should I write? What do I write? For whom….
It hurts a lot to be a part from him.
He sits at the foot of the bed, moonlight spilling onto his back. The patterns on his boxers are faded and the material is soft, worn from repeated washing. The sheets slope gently toward his form, like ridges on an alien landscape. They are a muted shade of blue, but appear dull gray in the moonlight. His shoulders are broad, wide, folding inwards like a jacket slung over a chair, misplaced and tired. He is unaware of her watchful gaze, her mental narration of his present appearance, of his thinning hair made all the more apparent by a short haircut, of the tiny pink volcanoes that landmine his skin, of the skin folds in his stomach when his sits hunched like he does now. She wonders why he does not come back to her side of the bed.
She reaches out to him, her arms catching him by the waist, drawing him closer to her. A rush of heat moves back and forth between their bodies until it settles, like ripples on a lake, equally between their two forms. Her cheek presses against his back, her fingers stroke the fine muscles of his chest, firm and taut beneath skin like the muscular fibers of a race horse. She hears the hollow whisper of his breath.
Gently, he strokes the faint hair on her arm.
She’s always right. I hate to admit it, but, she’s always right. People have priorities. I don’t have any. People put themselves first. I put people first. It’s such a problem. It’s such a problem.
What I honestly can’t understand about this whole is why it even matters if he says yes or no now. How much of a difference can it possibly make? It’s practically the same time every year, the same month, the same place. It’s only one night, one motherfucking night and he can’t manage to find the time for that? One night! Am I asking him to move to Florida with for the rest of our lives? No! Am I asking for him to take a month off and not doing anything except be with me? No! Am I asking too much of him? Am I asking too much, too early? We’ve been talking about this since, like, what, since the first prom that we went to together? Like, what the fuck. WHAT THE FUCK CAN POSSIBLY HAPPEN BETWEEN NOW AND PROM!? Seriously. It’s just Thanksgiving. He planned it, he pushed for it and the day before he drops out. Why? Because he has an interview. Why? What the fuck is this shit? Holy fuck. His parents are fucking annoying as shit and even worse, he persistence to do as they say even as their actual presence in his life dwindles. Worse than all of these aforementioned infractions is the fact that I’m constantly the one losing, in every fucking scenario. His fucking parents are just that goddamn important. Going home is so goddamn important. Dude, you’re like bigger than them! Holy fuck. It’s like, I have some sort of a place in life and it’s the worst fucking place. I’m stuck in a long distance relationship that pains me to no end. I have to not only work and study for the next two decades to even begin earning a living, but I also have to wait for him to find his way in the world, wait for him to be a dentist or something and even then, I probably will not get to spend any time with him because we will both be working individuals. How much does this situation fucking suck? What do I get out of this? Eating his food? Video chat? Winter breaks and summer vacations? What the fuck! He even has an internship this winter break. So much for seeing him, at all. I mean, this is my last year in high school. I thought it’d be nice but apparently this is the busiest fucking year for him in college. Fuck this shit, I don’t care if I sound like a whiny bitch. Fuck you people. Fuck everyone. I hate this shit. I hate this life. Nothing ever truly works out and I’m always stuck doing some stupid shit that fucks me over in the end. I’m not getting in a good college, I’m not getting anything. I have tests and more tests and classes to attend that teach me nothing, essays to write about myself for my second round of applications. I have a month to do what took me half a year to do for two colleges, but now for a dozen. It’s tragic. It really is. I want to kill myself. He doesn’t make it any better either. All I do is just waiting for him. Him, even he puts himself first. He who is so in love with me puts me second and puts his family, his career and everything else first. I know that’s what you’re supposed to do. I know that’s what my mother preaches. I know, I know, I know it’s the smart, right, proper thing. BUT FOR FUCK’S SAKE WHAT ABOUT ME!? Really, maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s just me who lives not for myself but for everyone else. Me who lives for a few lingering emotions that I’m not capable of receiving because I’m fat and ugly and no one wants to squander their all too precious time doling it out to me. Maybe it really is just me. I hate being alive. It hurts. Even when you have someone to hold your hand and walk with you, it hurts. It hurts because he’s never here and when he, he’s always being taken away, for reason or another, for one thing or another, but it’s better this way for him. He’ll have experience working in a clinic, he’ll be a good boy and please his parents, he’ll be successful at whatever it is he planned on do. But why the hell am I always the second priority. It hurts when I put him below Intel, doesn’t it? It might really just be me. It is just me.
Some days, I just feel really drained. At the slightest emotional provocation, I loose the need to move, the need to continue doing whatever it was that I was doing. I don’t feel like living. It’s a small amount of pain that resonates across my chest, ripping through the tender connections between flesh and tissue. It hurts, emotionally, a jarring pain that doesn’t go away but intensifies with each pulse. I don’t want to live anymore. Yet, I can’t stop living. I want to see it through to whatever might be at the end.
What the fuck. I just wanted to fucking talk. To talk. To talk. Just talk. That’s all I wanted. I’m not happy
I’ve never been happy
This hurts so much. I don’t understand why it had to turn out like this. I hate him. I hate everything. I wanted to talk. I just wanted to talk. WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS. I don’t want to leave a message. I don’t want to leave a message…I can’t think. I have no ideas. My stomach hurts.
I’m very paranoid. Specially given the nature of his Skype statuses. On one hand, I trust that he is in fact sleeping. And on the other, I’m really afraid that he’s not. I’m not sure anymore. I love him and I hope he loves me. I’m so insecure and paranoid and afraid that he might be cheating on me. My nuunuu. My nuunuu is faithful to me. He loves me. He loves me.
He’s never really given the future much thought, partly because a computer can read his short-term future to him with thirty-four percent accuracy
He’s never really given the future much thought. Partly because he hasn’t lost interest in the present, but mainly because he can always pay some back alley fortune teller to read him his near-future with, give or take, thirty to forty percent accuracy off a computer. Of course, the thirty to forty percent bit is a complete lie,
When the university pulled his funding and canceled his project, his first instinct was to place an ad in the Sunday papers.
Major Joseph Rigel had always been a little clumsy. He was not, as they’d say, officer material. How he even managed his rank of major was a mystery to many in the military establishment.
The day before her scheduled shuttle launch, Levin’s girlfriend bought him an android. She left it in his living room with a folded note tucked under one hand. From the mole hovering about its right breast to the birthmark on its left ankle, the manufactures had managed to make, with the exception of a circular connection port at the base of its neck, an exact copy of his girlfriend. Not a single hair was out of place.
Even though he knows that in its inactive state the droid was nothing more than a life sized doll, he approaches the replica with hesitancy. Gingerly, he plucks the folded note from under its hand and opens it. He reads her scratchy, severely slanted script with a beleaguered sigh.
“To keep me company,” he muses aloud, “to keep me company.”
“So, do you like it?” She is ecstatic when he calls her that night, her video feed practically radiating with happiness.
“I guess?” He responds with a raised eyebrow.
Her smile drops instantly and she pouts, “You don’t like it.”
“No, of course I like it,” he says with emphasis, “It’s just a little weird.”
“How is it weird?” Dejected, she doesn’t give him time to answer, “It’s not weird. You work with them all the time. You just don’t like it.”
“Don’t go jumping to conclusions like that. It’s different. This is different.” He pauses for a moment, grasping for his thoughts, for the right words. “I guess the problem is that it looks just like you.”
“But that’s the point!” She asserts, “It’s supposed to look like me, act like me. Be like me!”
“Isn’t that taking it too far?” His brows furrow in confusion. “It’s you in every way, but it’s still not you. Do you see what I’m getting at?”
“Barely,” she replies, “couples do it all the time. It’s supposed to tide you over until I get back. It’ll be as if I never left.”
“Right,” he sighs. It’ll be as if you never left.
Later that night, he watches her space shuttle launch on the news. The rocket traces a brilliant arch across the sky, racing higher and higher until it merges with the violet-blue horizon.
Rigel doesn’t really think anymore. He doesn’t really need to
Rigel was born on Mars.
It’s hard to write when the only thing on your mind is him. When your heart is a pool of swirling feelings, paranoia, fear, guilt, love, longing sadness, all of it so overwhelming. You just want to see him some days, wishing it would all go back to being normal, wishing you can just hold onto him and lie with him and just let it all be. You wish, but it isn’t and the world has to go on and life has to go on and he needs to work and you need to work and the universe isn’t stopping just to let the two of cuddle in your bed, the universe doesn’t stop just for you.
But you really wish it did.
Colonel Joseph Rigel was, by nature, a clumsy and overly sentimental man. He had neither the drive nor the talent to make it as a career officer in the army. His bumbling tactical successes in the Orion Rebellion and his steady ascension through the ranks thereafter bothered many of his fellow officers. So, when Rigel was finally assigned to a far flung desk job
It’s such a rush of feelings, it’s choking my heart, it’s so intense and relentless. I miss him. I miss him because I almost lost him and now he’s so far out of reach. I miss him because my mind is unsure of where we are. I miss him because I love him.
Rigel doesn’t really think anymore. Like most people, his mind is permanently wired to the net.
First, there is fear, overwhelming and intense. It clinches his heart and sucks the air from his lungs. He is unsure of its origins, but the fear is there. Then, panic sets in. He is nervous, shaking, running. A long corridor, checkered linoleum tiles that stretch ominously towards infinity. There are no doors and he feels claustrophobia scratching at the corners of his mind. He runs, thudding down the warping ground. The tiles curve and bend, flowing together. He runs blindly, his lungs burn and suddenly the ground is pulled from beneath his feet and his falls horizontally down the hallway, a wave, a tsunami of black and white tiles nipping at his feet. He is swimming in linoleum, gasping for air as the tiles overtake him, clawing to break the surface. He sinks, pulled under by the wave. The linoleum pours down his throat, cementing his lungs and he tries to scream but there is no sound. In the silence of his struggles, he suffocates.
Rigel wakes to a garbage collector hovering outside. He pulls up the time, the hologram reads a little past three in the morning. As he turns to sit up, he realizes the other side of his bed is warm, the sheets tossed open and the pillow flat. Was he with a woman? Judging from the stillness of his apartment, she didn’t stick around. The encounter must have been brief because he has no recollection of the affair. A lingering migraine purrs softly in the back of his skull. What did they say about dying in your own dreams again?
The water cooler is broken, so Rigel drinks tap. He downs one glass and takes a second with him to the window. The garbage collector had moved on and he presses his forehead to the cool glass as he surveys the city below him. Earth was different from Mars. The lights were brighter and louder, the buildings were taller, the cars were faster, as if it was trying to exceed what can no longer be exceeded, and having failed in doing so, it was burning out like a match. Breathing in deeply and fogging up the window as he exhales, he lets his mind swim. He digs into his memories, trying to dredge up the events of last night but to no avail. He can almost touch the red sequins on her dress and taste her lipstick. Perhaps it was a mistake to leave Mars.
He leaves the glass resting on the window sill. Pulling on a presumably clean shirt, he leaves the apartment with a trench coat on and keys in hand. He goes out every night looking for something, looking for someone. He prefers to think of it as freelance detective work, but the less euphemistic term is bounty hunter. In all honesty, bounty hunting wasn’t his top choice but there weren’t a lot of options and he had to feed himself somehow. Rigel’s latest case, or the last bounty sent to his feed, is a drug dealer worth a quarter of a million credits. The police say he hangs around at a club.
On the outside, the club is unapologetically bland. Rigel arrives at the a sparse metal door some hours later, having combed through the dense city underground to find the club tucked away in the back alleys, cloaked and hidden by twisting corners and mazelike streets. Without a doubt, Rigel thinks, the sort of place one might find a bounty.
On the inside, the club is unapologetically loud. A caged elevator lowers Rigel deeper into the bowels of the slumbering city, the music pounding louder with each second until he is finally deposited at the bottom of the shaft. He pulls open the cage and steps into a long corridor. Rigel is taken aback for a moment when the familiarity of the scene hits him full force. The checkered linoleum floors, illuminated by pale fluorescent light, without a door in sight, everything about the club was a throwback to the last century and uncannily similar to his dream. He takes a hesitant step. So, what did they actually say about dying in your own dream? A group of neon-haired teens squeeze past him in the hall, their eyes bloodshot and their screeches echoing up towards the surface.
Rigel isn’t much of a dancer, foregoing the dance floor he heads for the bar. The décor might have been antiquated, but the bar is still tended by an android, the band of green wrapping halfway around his neck giving him away. Rigel orders a gin and tonic. The bartender sets the drink down before him, the ice clinking against the glass. He grins at Rigel as a woman slides into a seat next to him. It’s getting harder and harder to tell the androids apart from the real people, save for the colored bands around their necks.
“Are you looking for anyone in particular?” Rigel is startled by the question, but more so by her voice. It carries a tart edge that belies the sweetness she is trying to hide.
He turns to her and answers, “No one in particular, unless there is someone who wants to be looked for.”
It’s really late. My boyfriend’s suffered some sort of a mental breakdown and in the words of my mother, I was “deetched”. It feels awful, when he just hangs up and when it feels like you’re trying to care (me, trying to care, it’s a big step) and he just wants to get as far away from you as possible. Correction, it’s not really late. There exists no ‘really late’ time reference for me anymore. I’m just tired, wasted, I feel like a damn balloon, a popped balloon, the shrivelly bit of plastic, curled up and left over. I feel like shit. It’s not a strange feeling. I just feel like dying, again, all the time. Am I suffering from some sort of mental disorder? A condition? What condition am I? Take the free personality quiz now. I wonder why people try so hard to box each other in. It’s like I’m purposefully taking a marker, popping the cap and drawing a big red, bleeding box around my personality and telling people, jesus fucking Christ, this is me: a word, a picture, something so ordinary if I ever wake up I’d kill myself twice over just to forget it ever existed. I wish he didn’t leave me like this. I need a shower, but I’m lazy and I don’t feel like it. I don’t need to be presentable in any sense for at least a couple days more. I don’t feel like washing my hair. Every time I lift my arms to rinse and repeat I feel like they’re gonna fall off. My skin is sticking to my computer table and I don’t feel like sleeping, I don’t feel like existing, so why do I exist? Did I ask to be brought into this pitiful world? This world that, in my youthful angst, I detest so much? This world that, in a short while will become bearable only because I’ve grown up, only because the neurons in my brain plugged up any sort of rebellion, hatred, hope I might have harbored over the years, I never wish I knew?
Then again, it’s nice that I have my evenings to myself again.
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As for my event…ehh……
There is nothing special about me, nothing that I can see. I am common, ubiquitous, trite. Nonetheless, I market myself as quite the contrary. I dress myself in words
I am overweight and it bothers me.
I hate it when I get into arguments with my mother, because when I coop myself up in my room and develop the need and urgency to piss, I have to pass by her desk on the way to the bathroom. Thank you, single bedroom apartment, where would I be without you.