Method of Mancy

It wouldn’t be the most far-fetched claim in the world to say I’ve been bitter lately. I seem to have reached that same exhausted indifference I bore most of the winter. That alien emptiness that was only broken up by the realization that some boy band’s b-side was the only thing that made me feel the finest semblance of love in the entire frigid season. Nobody knows, nobody loves you l like I do comes floating from the radio out of the mouth of a stranger across the globe and it feels at the moment like it’s probably fucking true.

My therapist says I’m handling things well. You could be out there having reckless sex with strangers, she says. Yeah, cause that sounds like a fabulous use of my time and not the most miserable activity anyone’s come up with since they started pulling teeth. You could be binge-drinking or doing drugs, she offers again. Sure, I guess. In comparison to all that, I suppose I’m doing great. 

But great looks a little bit like piles of clothes covering every inch of my couch except the one place I always sit because there’s no real reason to actually clean it off, and it smells like the same sweaty sheets on my bed after an unknown number of weeks that I decay in every night. “Great” feels like a myriad of bruises from unknown sources, blisters on my ankles, and scratches from wild birds lighting up in pain as I work sunscreen into the skin of my arms and legs, and it looks like taking a pointless walk in 100-degree heat just to have something to do and seeing another pathetic, hopeless creature crawling across the sidewalk, somehow still going on despite how futile it all seems. 

Dissatisfaction. Boredom. A yearning for company so severe I feel it running through my blood. A bland, empty schedule leers at me from the surface of my desk and I just stare back at it. A pale grey mayfly living the first and only day of its life appears on the arm of the couch next to me and I stare at it like it’s someone who knocked on my door out of the blue because they missed me. It takes a thousand slow, tiny steps away from me until it disappears too.

Apparently I’ve decided doing things like deliberately putting myself in a situation that makes me unhappy and then being upset about it is better than rotting in the basement or aimlessly kicking cans down the street. Prowling crowded, pulsating dance floors turned into seas of flesh trying and failing to hunt down a single person that could make me feel something, humiliating myself as a forgery of me looks on, laying claim to the things I want most despite showing absolutely no indication of appreciating or desiring them. 

The demon flickering behind my retinas claws at the sockets, shrieking and snarling with a violent rage but can’t budge the shell it’s in—a princess so carefully painted and decorated, posed with flawless feminine posture under shiny, structural garments and walking with an enviable, confident stride in ridiculously impractical shoes. But even she comes home alone, bloody under the heels with a slick sheen of sweat creating watercolors in the perfume on her skin. 

I finally remembered to shower. It’s been days and as the water warms up, I stare at my naked body in the mirror like I’ve never seen it. I observe it with the same bored indifference as any other everyday object. I should probably have some sort of opinion about it, but I don’t. Well, maybe I’d prefer if I couldn’t see the bones underneath as well as I can. But that’s where the bones are, so what does it really matter?

Up too goddamn late again, I meander through the liminal desolation of my own mind. It, like life, has withered into an amorphous blob–unrecognizable and completely fucking pointless. Fragments, like ghosts peeking around the corners, echo throughout. Whispers of why am I doing this to myself? and please just choose me and why would anyone care about what you want? and is it always going to be like this, is it always going to be just me? Same old shit that always haunts me.