The New Me

by Halle Butler

Obviously, I recognize, in a grander sense, that I have a tendency to alienate myself and blow things out of proportion, and that these women are basically guiltless from a certain perspective.

I think I’m drawn to temp work for the slight atmospheric changes. 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.

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.

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.

My expectations so fucked up that my relief at having more clerical work is real and strong.

I was embarrassed to be me and needed someone to reassure me that I had good qualities, to reassure me that I was just overreacting or having a bad day.

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.

It’s satisfying to hear a lie in a voice.

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 get socked in the chest, thinking about how things never change. How they’re on a slow-rolling slope downward, and you can think up a long list of things you’d rather do, but because of some kind of inertia, or hard facts about who you are and what life is, you always end up back where you started, sitting drunk on a hard, sticky chair with someone you hate.