Beautiful Victim

Chapter Two

My apartment is small, but it's clean.

I like my things neat and orderly. I like to know where everything is.

I put my things away when I'm done with them. I dust, I vacuum and I mop my floors. I bleach my toilet after I take a shit and I keep my windows clean and shiny.

Cleanliness is next to Godliness they say. But I say fuck God. What does he have to do with anything? I just like things to stay where I put them: I like to know that things won't go missing

I kick my soaked sneakers off at the door, and then I bend over and put them on top of the rusty radiator.

Hopefully my sneakers will be dry by the morning. I notice there's a hole in the side. I don't want to have to buy new ones. I like my old ones. I like each scuff and stain. I like the way they are faded in the middle, yet the color is still bright at the edges. I like how comfy they are and that they are stretched enough for me to be able to slip them on and off without untying the laces. I hate wasting time with unnecessary things like tying laces.

I'm dripping all over my floor and I make a quick exit through my living room with its second-hand furniture and faded wall paper, to the bathroom, with its cracked mirror and chipped tiles. I drag my clothes off and put them in my hamper.

I dry myself with my only towel. First my face and hair and then my arms and chest, and finally my legs and feet. The rest of me I let air dry. My dick is the only thing I like to feel wet.

I can pretend I'm inside her that way.

Walking back through my apartment, I go to my bedroom and I grab a hoody and sweatpants. I shiver when I put them on. The soft burgundy material gives me goosebumps as it slides over my cold skin.

I'm hungry so I go to the kitchen and I pull out a pan and grab a can of soup from the cupboard. It's Minestrone. I don't really like Minestrone, but I like the idea of it. It's a mix of everything, and nothing. An odd combination of flavours and textures that don't really go together, and yet people still make it, and buy it and eat it.

'And it's bizarre,' I think. 'I wonder why they eat something that is so conflicted.'

I don't know, and I can't work it out.

So I buy it. And I eat it. And I try to work it out.

Perhaps it reminds me of myself; so muddled and conflicted in a world less ordinary. Or perhaps it reminds me of life, and how nothing really makes sense. How blacks and whites, and males and females, and animals and humans and any other combination you can think of all mix together in the large soup pan of life, and it shouldn't work. But it does.

Somehow it just fucking works.

We are the people. And we are all different. But we will make this work. Even if it leaves a bad taste in the mouth of some and not in others. Because that's life, I guess. When it all boils down to it, life is just one giant accidental fuckup. We all fell in the pan and we try to make it work the best we can.

A baby starts to cry somewhere down the hallway interrupting my thoughts, and I frown. Because maybe I'm completely wrong, maybe my thoughts are all total shit and nothing really works at all. Maybe, in the grand scheme of life, we're all just fakers trying to make it through.

I look down at the pan and I tip the Minestrone in it, and while it's cooking I stare out of the window at the black, washed-out world, and I think about a lot of things.

I think about work, and I think about my wet sneakers. I think about the lady with the stroller and how she should have smiled back at me and how her kid will turn out to be a spoiled jerk just like she is. I think about the crying from behind the doors. The wails of anguish that evaporate out of the windows like steam.