A long time ago I spent a lot of time studying a foreign language. I was excited about the prospect of going to another country and talking to the people there. Meanwhile, I was ignoring all of the people that I lived near. I was angry that they were there more often than not. I had fantasies of empty streets. I started sleeping during most of the day so that I could go out at night and be alone all the time. I turned off the ringer on my phone. I put dark curtains over my windows and didn’t leave my apartment for days at a time. I forgot people’s names and I removed the battery from my wristwatch. I bought a camera and took pictures of empty landscapes. One day, while I was studying verb forms, I realized that if I ever moved to France I would want to set up the same situation there. I’d buy dark curtains and go to the grocery store at odd hours. I’d wear oversize headphones in public so I wouldn’t have to hear their yammering voices. I wondered who I had become. I unearthed a calender and traced the months I had spent burrowing deeper into myself. When I opened the door to my back deck cold air hit my face and it was the middle of the night. I could see the stars configured in their old patterns. I remembered being twenty, out one night with two girls from college. We had coats on, laying in a field in the country to stargaze. The girl I liked best was within arm’s reach, I could hear the rustle of her coat as she moved her hand closer.
There was a girl I was talking to there for a while that had a really messed up phone. She could answer calls and hear the other person talking but she couldn’t reply. The thing is about her, she was sort of not a big talker anyway. A normal conversation with her usually amounted to her never making a reply. She even told me she just wanted to hear me, so that I should just call and talk. This kind of sounds great at first, free license to jabber on and on. Honestly though, it wasn’t so great. The normal signs that someone is listening weren’t there—the faint sound of someone taking a breath or the mmm of understanding. Without those things I felt slightly like a crazy person. Mumbling incoherently to no one. But the timer kept on going, assuring me that she hadn’t hung up. I talked to her like that for an hour one night. And afterward I felt sort of off kilter. I went deep into the recesses of myself and said unguarded things. I started wondering if she thought I really was crazy. I told her I was done talking and wished I could hear her voice just once. I told her I loved her and I hung up the phone and felt the same as when the call was still going on. There was still the vacant feeling of being alone.
there’s been quite a few times that I attempted to make myself sick. sometimes I like feeling sick, because when I’m sick, I don’t have the motivation to even think about all the things that always wind up getting me into trouble. things get me into trouble quite a lot. but when I get sick, I somehow become a better, more clearheaded person. when i’m laying there feeling genuinely rotten I wind up thinking about my life and everything. I think about people that have been really great to me. I guess it doesn’t help that I live cadaverously alone. When you live alone you try to run away from thinking about those things. sometimes i’ll go crazy trying to run from thinking about who I am until I’ve got nothing left and then i’m stuck in my room feeling like i’m in some kind of midnight fog again. but then I realize I like who I am, and I wonder why I ever tried to run from it.
