We're All Damaged

by Matthew Norman

That’s the thing I hate most about my brain, the way it stores and catalogs things, all this dumb shit on a giant hard drive in my head, so I’m forced to obsess over it all like a crazy person.

Karen was wearing her green sweater, the one I got her for her birthday. She really loves green.

It was kind of weird—her green obsession—but I went with it, because she was my wife.

I’m pretty sure I meant to say this to myself—a soliloquy or maybe an inner monologue.

Cut, color, clarity, carat. The four Cs of engagement ring shopping.

He was a linebacker at Rutgers once, and now he manages the Underground and makes broad, sweeping generalizations about Caucasians.

gi.”

emasculating

kempt.

“Mrs. DiGiacomo.

vagina

“Vonnegut.”

Karen’s

“sabbatical,”

wallowing,

Seventy-three Honda CB350.

Führer

ska

chalice.

cheesedick.

coltish

melodramatic—like

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

“Are there people who don’t like ice cream?”

non sequiturs,

pantomimes

kook

Bryan Adams

homoeroticism.

irreparably.

diatribe

cauldron

“I didn’t talk until I was four and a half. My parents thought there was something wrong with me. They tested me and everything. Then one day, out of the blue, I just started talking in big full sentences. I wasn’t ready . . . until I was ready.”

After the age of about . . . what, sixteen? We’re all damaged. Every single beautiful, stupid, precious one of us. Damaged, damaged, damaged.”

glum