twenty-six degrees of separation

"I am the lowest thing.  I am the bottom of the universe."
-Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion

Last Friday night, yeah, we danced on tabletops and we took too many shots, think we kissed but I forgot...um, I mean I just had a birthday dinner with a high school acquaintance.  Our birthdays are two days apart and so it seemed appropriate to have a meal to celebrate at least one of our births.  The meal was enjoyable and mine was free because earlier in the day my supervisor gave me a gift card to the very restaurant we went to.

And then when we were done, we went to a funky yogurt shop with pastel striped walls and do-it-yourself yogurt assembly.  And I got hit on by the guy at the counter, some college-age kid with swooped hair and an hoop through his upper left ear.  Although he was a dude, it still felt kind of nice to have someone show some kind of interest in me.  It's been a while.  Damn, I've really reached a new level of lameness.  But the yogurt was good.

Saturday, I went Christmas shopping for my family.  I spent nine hours at the mall and various other retail stores.  It was kind of nice being off on my own, venturing out of the same four walls and the same arrangement of furniture and forlornness.  It was also weird, uncomfortable.  I've wallowed in my own world for so long that it felt uneasy to stretch myself past my perimeter.  Usually, when I have a day off work, I just want to stay at home.  Going out and doing things makes the time pass by faster, which means work comes sooner.  When I'm at home, the hours go by slower, allowing me to savor the reprieve just a little bit longer.  It's sad that I dislike my job so much I'm willing to sacrifice a social life in favor of feeling a prolonged sense of time away from work. 

The drive was relaxing, however.  An hour or so of smooth movement, singing at the top of my lungs and distancing myself from the damage of being at home and surrounded by damaging people.  I was in my own world in my car, the only place I felt safe back at school when things got tough.  It was my tank, my asylum, my music player and motivational speaker, my confessional, my best friend. 

Eventually, the urge to use the bathroom got the best of me.  As much as I tried to ignore it, I really needed to go.  I went from place to place, resisting the urge to pee at every stop, wondering where I could go and find a semi-private bathroom where I wouldn't be walked in on and have my urine flow suddenly stunted.  I'm pee shy. 

As I walked around the mall, I felt like a lot of people were looking at me.  I don't know if it was because of my usual paranoia or if there was a legitimate reason.  I was sweating pretty heavily.  It was cold outside so I wore a hoodie but inside each building, it was sweltering.  It probably didn't help that every place I went to was crowded with late shoppers.  The combination of my natural production of internal heat coupled with rowdy bodies bustling around was enough to drum up plenty of warmth.  Or were they looking at me because I was sloppily dressed due to the fact that my fluctuating weight won't allow for well-fitting clothing or if it was because I was so pale and shiny or if I was just an all together awkward arrangement of face, flesh, and bodily structure.

I stopped by and looked at all the store mannequins, perfectly sculpted, clothed, and posed.  I looked over the layered fabrics stretched across the headless torsos and liked what I saw.  I realized I still didn't know how to dress myself.  I never would have put all that stuff together but I could recognize when something worked.  It was like art and writing.  I didn't know how to make beautiful art or construct beautiful words and stories but I could recognize when it worked.  But I imagined putting those clothes on myself and realized it wouldn't work.  They were thin and hard-bodied models and anything looked good on them.  But when you get to a certain size, no matter how fashionable the clothing is, it just doesn't look right.  There's too much fabric, too little structure.

But we weren't all that different, the mannequins and I.  We were both pale and plastic pieces of nothing.  They were just dressed better.

Surprisingly, I didn't think about buying too much for myself.  I felt too fat to buy clothing and there wasn't really anything else that interested me.  I had enough electronics and music and hair gel.  I did walk into a bookstore, though, and want to buy up every book I came in contact with.  I can never shake the feeling of wanting my writing to belong to a book store, to walk along the aisles and be able to pluck my book out of one of the shelves.  It was an empty kind of comfort, a nice feeling to revel in if only for a moment.  A boy can dream.

My actual birthday was on Sunday and I didn't do anything.  I was tired from the long day before and just wanted to ring in my twenty-sixth in a sloth-like manner.  I think I accomplished that.

It was actually a pretty decent birthday.  The only sad part was realizing I was another year older and hadn't accomplished anything.  Physically, I get older but I'm still the same in every other aspect.  Same job.  Same lack of balance and faith and connectivity.  Still haven't lost that weight or written that book or found anyone or anything to make me feel alive again.  I still feel dead.

Happy birthday, you breathless body.  Merry Christmas, you corpse.

I can wish for things to be better in the new year.  I can try to make things better in the new year but if there was something I could do, wouldn't I have done it by now?  So, where does that leave me for my twenty-sixth year on this planet?  I've already wished and tried to make things better and it hasn't seemed to work out so I guess I have no other option than to just coast.  But isn't that what I've been doing all this time?  I've make a couple of feeble attempts at happiness, a stab or two at serenity but mostly I'm just too tired to try. 

I think I'll just read a lot of books and watch a lot of crappy horror movies and wait for it all to be over.