We're All Damaged

by Matthew Norman

It wasn’t even an important meeting—just one of those recurring weekly things where you sit and listen to your six or seven bosses hash things out while you doodle pictures of Yoda on a legal pad.

Sometimes people throw things away. That doesn’t mean those things aren’t really, really good. Most of the time, it just means that person didn’t know what they had.”

“I went off the grid,” I say. “You changed your number, your e-mail. I tried Facebooking you. Who quits Facebook? I didn’t even know you could quit Facebook.”

We hold on to the shitty things the tightest, for some reason. And this is the shittiest thing ever.

“I don’t mean to marginalize this, Daisy, I promise. But you do realize that your Feel Sorry Flick is just a hipster version of the pottery-making scene in Ghost, right?” There’s quiet, and then, “Shit. I never thought of that.” “Don’t beat yourself up. Nothing’s new anymore. We’ve already experienced everything there is to experience by watching movies. We’re basically all just going through the motions.”

Jim picks up a discarded pizza crust and takes a bite. “Sometimes, it feels like I went to the zoo and they gave me two chimpanzees, and now I have to take them places and buy them food and raise them like they’re my own.”

“Fine,” she says. “We’re on semantics again, Mitch. Call it an anomaly if you want. Abnormality. You can call it lots of things. It doesn’t matter—it’s all the same. Some things are just wrong. Some things are just mistakes of nature. That’s my point. Ninety percent of the country shouldn’t have to alter their lives because ten percent are damaged.”

“It doesn’t matter. Marriage isn’t about agreeing. It’s about staying. That’s what I’m doing.”

there’s just no way Facebook can be good for you. I’m sure there have been studies, so this probably isn’t some brilliant revelation, but I’ll say it anyway. On the surface, it’s harmless enough, I guess. How bad can it really be with its endless baby posts, food pictures, and beachy foot selfies? But it’s not that simple. Mixed in with all of its silly bullshit, Facebook is the literal manifestation of all our regrets, looping and looping, for free, on our computers and phones. People who should be gone and safely out of our lives forever are there again, one cryptic little glimpse at a time, reminding us of all the things we should or shouldn’t have done.

“I remember the day I met him, actually. Freshman orientation at Nebraska. It was a hundred degrees out, and we were at this horrible freshman mixer. I was wearing a Yoda T-shirt and shorts and these dumb Tevas.

For the first thirty-something years of my life, I never once asked my dad if he was OK . . . and now I’ve done it twice in one week. I wonder if this is just the way it is. Are all our parents, collectively, fucked up? Have they always been fucked up, and it just takes us until our own adulthood to figure that out?

For a year, I’ve been so sad, so trapped in this murky, sludgy cesspool of misery, that I’ve barely been breathing. But I’m alive now. And it feels fucking good. Everything is going to be OK. I’m going to get better. I’m going to be happy again.

“You were my sensitive one,” she says. She leans forward, glancing at my brother. “Jim was always, well . . . Jim. You cared about things, though. You always felt things more than he did. I always liked that about you.” “It’s actually a huge pain in the ass,” I say.

“It’s all so pretty,” she says. “But it’s kind of scary, too.” And she’s right. It’s absolutely terrifying.