conversation with a recluse
Ever wonder how you'll be if you continue making the same mistakes over and over again?
I'm so awkward around people. I don't maintain the right eye contact, always say the wrong thing, and never EVER initiate conversations with strangers. If things progress as I think they will, I'm going to be a seriously recluse. Like Sean Connery in Finding Forrester recluse.
And this REALLY bothered me. So I decided to tackle prose and hypothesize how I'll be waking up one day as a full-blown recluse:
Bed. Ticking. Paralysis. Sticky heat from under the shade. Today my life begins, for no reason other than I do not know if any other days have existed. It’s not love, I swear to you; no little fairies lifting me by the balls of my heel through the berry fields. A girl wearing impractical shoes is carrying groceries up the steps, and it’s the first time in a few months I’ve seen oranges toted in brown paper. I need sunglasses. If the phone rings, I will assume it’s someone I don’t want to talk to and come up with a good reason I don’t want to talk to this person I obviously, by now because of all this trouble, really don’t want to talk to. I hate cold floors almost as much as the allergies I get for trying to carpet them. Allegra, check. Radio, check. There’s only cereal dust left in the bottom of the box, and I’m pretending someone else left it there. Automatically get mad. Mad is good. It shows I’m still living and caring enough to spend I don’t know how many calories to rouse myself emotionally. Am I being witty again? This isn’t working. The newspaper is wet and makes the pictures all splotchy, and I really don’t understand some peoples’ fascination with obituaries. For once, I’d like to see a posting: Mary-Ann, great mother, won first place at county fair for Best Squash, biggest pretentious bitch alive—now dead. Today is Tuesday. Tuesday is laundry day, and Jimmy will come at 2 to pick up the dry cleaning. Sometimes I want him to stay here a little longer, just to get away from that father of his. But no judgment. Everything looks different on the surface, and it isn’t until you get those looks at dinner that you know people are judging you too. Did you know people actually questioned Marie Curie’s scientific abilities just because she slept with a married man? I can’t believe that family. What was it—three Nobel Prize winners? Yes, three: her, her daughter, and her husband, who died. I think they all died from some form of cancer, and that’s just too bad because they probably knew they would too. It’s 1 o’clock now—geez! Can it really be 1 already? It must be a cloudy day out. That leaves an hour to fix up and get everything together so Jimmy can just grab and go. I love this song. Still, it’s really sad when the songs you listened to as a teenager are now classified as oldies. Summer. ’98. I’m going to go with the beach because that’s the memory that’ll take the least effort. Sun everywhere, naked bodies basted and cooking, volleyball and Frisbee on the sand. Doesn’t everyone have memories like these? Maybe I’m mainly borrowing from TV, but it’s believable isn’t it? I wore an orange bikini and a pink coverup, kept my hair in a loose braid so it wouldn’t tangle. There was no boy that year; I was still too young for them. What would go better with ham: American or Swiss? He likes them cut up in triangles. Says he can eat them faster that way, and that’s a good thing. I’ve never seen such a busy boy in my life. Sometimes I look at him and can’t tell whether he’s living or dead. What’s he working towards? I ask myself. It’s not like his parents don’t have enough money for whatever he needs, and I know personally his mother would cave to anything. I pay him good money for errands too, which is why he keeps coming.
