It's 1 a.m., and I've gotten over that fucking suffocating feeling of black misery in the way one would get over having been dunked in cold water: my skin - or, I guess in this case, my soul - has gotten sufficiently warm so it can ward off the cold. Whatever towels I have wrapped up around me - in this case, being my friends, solitude, being back in the apartment alone; in other cases, the womblike warmth of alcohol, weed, or orgasms - don't feel like they are as useful as they once were. I don't feel so bad now. I can exist relatively comfortably again. And in this, I'm texting all of my friends. I'm giggling as I say aloud everything I'm texting to them. The apartment is still dark, and I'm sitting around in gym shorts and a baggy T-shirt, stabbing into the leftover boneless chicken from the Chinese place around Century Park, trying not to get syrup on the coffee table or my leg. The world and whatever blackness is ends up as can't be felt right now. By no means I'm in bliss, but I'm better than I was. Things are simple again.
I'm now sitting at my desk, about to read a Borges story ("The Library of Babel", the one everyone knows). Beforehand, I'm sucked into my phone, clearing out DM notification in my nightly 3 hours-long game of digital Whac-a-Mole. Suddenly, I get a text from MARKIPLIER: a lowercase "ben". I reply back, "MARKIPLIER".
"ive developed a fucking indian accent
what the fuck
what do i do"
"Lean into it
LET YOUR FREAK FLAG FLY!!!"
"HAHA
stop im drunk and im babysitting my younger sister on her 18th"
MARKIPLIER calls me and we talk for a few hours. Her voice is so raspy from yelling that it possesses a kind of inverted uncanniness, subliminal like voice in your head. She is drunk enough to be really embarrassed, but not enough to be obnoxious. She tells me stories of conquest - kind of. Not at all, actually. They're stories of conquest like my infamous pity-kisses were ones as well, which is to say they aren't. They're anecdotes of impulsively making out with faceless (although matter-of-factly gendered) strangers that can't be portrayed as things that were conquered. They're the kind of stories you go to someone else, "Yeah, *that* happened."
I enjoy calls like this a lot. I don't even know MARKIPLIER that well, but I don't have to. I can't tell you how many times someone has metaphorically jumped out of nowhere to reveal themselves to me over a completely unexpected call. It's a really cool way to get to know a person. Despite the comfort of one's one bed that much of this is experienced through, it's a lot like being dragged by the arm into a crowd. You're pulled into its elbows, jackets, breath, odor, pantlegs, idle chat, glares, and turning heads of hair, and you are a virgin to its meaning, but are thrilled at its significance. Life happens, even if it's just kept in words over a smartphone.
-
I feel like I'm hanging out with the big kids every day, despite how I'm clearly one of them. You know what I mean? Everything we do kind of impresses me in the same way being of legal drinking age once did. I think to how S----- is apparently a regular ketamine user. I'm embarrassed to admit that impresses me like that because it's so fucking stupid. But, still, I'm like, "Oh shit, I'm at the age where I can just do that now. I can just be a big city bisexual who does ket. Huh." Does this make me sound like a fucking moron? This is by no means an endorsement of white person PCP.
-
I miss the way the moon looked in the early summer. When I had nothing to do, but nothing was okay, driving from you-know-who's house, always taking downtown back to the highway. The streets, like usual, were almost completely emptied out, besides the garbage, the occasional car, and all the motherless ghosts sleeping on the sidewalks. At night, the only thing to do in these parts if you're not into fentanyl is go to the sketchy ass McDonald's by Capstone (we're back in Red Deer now) or Super Low Liquor. Super Low was an A-- spot, one presumably discovered by them during their borderline homeless, parentified teenage alcoholic days. Those kinds of hole-in-the-wall spots are very much a part of their whole oeuvre, in a way that is potentially exotifies enough to be kind of obnoxious but still sincere enough to be appreciated, even if this was just a fucking shitty liquor store that was open 'til 2 a.m. Here, I would buy Rolling Rock and drink it alone when I got home. This I don't miss. I would go home, whip up one of my famous Bachelor Specials (two slices of bread, a thin slab of mayo, a squirt of ketchup, and shredded cheese), and down what was typically a four-pack. I did this maybe three times that summer, which makes it sound better than I felt it was. The feeling I had drinking alone felt akin to whatever guilt you get after watching porn. Gluttony comes to mind, but it's not so much embarrassing as it feels dark, something easily understood as worrisome as opposed to just gross. You sit in your desk chair, spinning, bloated, and golden off the third slam of Rolling Rock, with the thought that all of thus being a complete waste of time disappearing into the stuff all thoughts are made of, now taken up by your stupor. It makes me think of a womb. It's why I described crackheads as "motherless ghosts". It feels like that's what's being looked for, wanting to become nothing. But in that, I'm only speaking for myself here, I think there might be something strangely maternal about this nothingness. Despite literally being nothing, you falling into it is somehow a kind of abstracted care, like falling asleep in someone's arms. Sure, you stop being present, but that's only allowed to happen because someone is holding you through it, kind of like drugs or a womb.
