The New Me

by Halle Butler

Another smiles, barely containing her disgust, and says “No, you look cute” with her words and “Oh my god shut the fuck up” with her eyes.

I imagine her thinking about that show she likes on ABC where adults pretend to be fairy-tale characters trying to make each other horny, and I imagine her referring to it as a guilty pleasure, like that’s somehow radical or somehow makes her interesting.

Once upon a time slander

I know that the woman checking her phone in the corner, pretending I’m not here, is wrapped up in some distraction so utterly meaningless that it should, if she reflected on it, shake her to her core.

The new offices and coworkers provide a nice illusion of variety. Like how people switch out their cats’ wet food from Chicken and Liver to Sea Bass, but in the end, it’s all just flavored anus.

I note this woman’s shape-shifting performance. How by saying a thing, she becomes it. As she complains about how boring it is to hear her friend complain about her mother, as she goes into detail, masterfully reenacting specific boring conversations (both between her and her friend, and her friend and her friend’s mother), she is essentially becoming them both, becoming the boredom she claims to want to remove from her life and mind, but which have complete control of her, and she doesn’t notice that by saying “I don’t like this” over and over she is just drawing herself closer to it, essentially becoming her friend and subjecting us all to what she claims to hate.

Back then, a sense of something more—like Oh, there must be something more!—was always nagging at me, like I was waiting, like my situation and my relationships were unimportant because of their seeming transience.

knew that if I tacitly allowed her to dominate the conversation, it would addict her to my company and lead her to flatter me by texting me and contacting me frequently, which would make me feel safe, an insider to a small group.

“Yeah, you told me that already,” she says, as if she never repeats herself. As if I’m the one who’s boring. Maybe if I’d used more hand gestures and smiled at her, she would have found it funny.

I try to flatter her by saying that the movie, the one I referenced earlier, is very intellectual and dense, and that’s why she might like it.

Back at my desk I sit and slowly collect money that I can use to pay the rent on my apartment and on food so that I can continue to live and continue to come to this room and sit at this desk and slowly collect money.

I stare at the Chococat magnet’s mouthless face and wide eyes like a Mesopotamian idol hovering above the routing number. Longest eye contact I’ve made all month.

I selfishly and halfheartedly think about my own life’s purpose, then shift to thinking about Lydia, the girl, and what it would be like if she hadn’t been attacked and killed. Would she be sitting in her apartment thinking, idly, about the purpose of her life, until she met someone and had a child who would eventually sit, alone, in their apartment wondering, idly, about the purpose of their life? I’m annoyed by the mother’s need to find a positive spin.

I go with the same intentions as most—to find a person who might realize, through a sympathy of dialogue, that I am the person they’ve been looking for to fulfill what’s been missing in their emotional and intellectual lives.

I feel bored, and then I feel annoyed, and I wonder why no one ever wants to talk to me, because I’m a great conversationalist, it just takes me a minute to get into it. But once I get into it, I really roll, and things are really great.

Better to be inside, better to be sick like I am now than to be out not accomplishing what I thought I might accomplish.

Good to be sick, good to be alone, good that it’s cold, good to stay inside, good that no one needs anything from me. Good to be me, good to be me!

You can’t ask someone to help you without letting them know you’re different than advertised, that you’ve been thinking and feeling strange things this whole time. That you’re uglier, weaker, more annoying, more basic, less interesting than promised. Without letting on that your feelings are easily hurt, and that you are boring, just like everyone else. Once you expose yourself as insecure, it’s easy to feel resentment if you’re not immediately put back at ease. If there’s even a flicker, a tiny recognition of your bad qualities, the resentment kicks in, the deal is broken, and suddenly you’re both angry strangers, spending hours alone in a room together and completely unsure of why.

I only ever had brief and fleeting ideas for things that I wanted to do, but mostly I felt completely overwhelmed by possibilities, and then just went down the list saying no, no, no, not that, not that, until I was playing this idiot’s game of racking up things I was doing that I didn’t want to do in service of some imaginary thing I might one day stumble upon. I try to push this memory out of my mind, but I can’t.

Desperate for her to talk me into taking the job, and to do so with enthusiasm, not skepticism. I can almost hear her looking at her iPad, choosing what she’ll watch when I get off the phone.

When I wasn’t engaging him in one-sided arguments, I was floating backward and away, wondering what I had done wrong, even though I knew.

I’m angry for a second, feeling that it must be a deep lack of imagination that holds her back from fully understanding how wonderful my proposition is, and that I, if I am really being honest with myself today and every day moving forward, don’t really need to be around people with that kind of stubborn lack of imagination, that inflexibility and unwillingness to let me take control.

The tragedies we steel ourselves for never come for years and years, and our negative fantasies wear us down inch by inch, so that when the blow actually comes, there’s little of us left to care.

We’re so much in our minds, waiting for something to happen, acting it out, that the body and the outer world almost might as well not exist, for all it concerns us.

She’d gotten it out of her system, knew what it was about, and no longer needed it—the “it” being vulgar and desperate ways of living justified by the false pretense of nonconformity as a sign of intelligence and authenticity.

I want her to borrow my new pajamas and have a slumber party with me, god dammit, but instead she’s bickering with me about how easy I have it, and how I’m not a reject or a criminal, and it’s so fucking frustrating, so boring, I could die.

I think about how every decision I make is a no, how every act is essentially a no, and I feel tears welling in my chest and face, and I think about how even if I let them out it wouldn’t make a fucking difference.

People took comfort, unknowingly, in the anger that filled them, the anger that took them out of themselves and into another dimension—a hallucination of the perfect future.

Somewhere in the circle of Millie’s time on Earth, she spent a sleepless night mulling things over. She was no longer in the part of life where things changed.

Her actions from here on out would carry more permanence, could no longer be easily swapped out for something new. Realizing this, she felt panic, deep and wide and boundless, and then she felt release.