The New Me

by Halle Butler

My stomach growls, and I decide that maybe she is aware but can’t help herself. There are things we all know we shouldn’t do but do regardless. She might think that venting will help her find the relief and clarity she needs to move forward toward some lame ideal.

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.

In here, in this building, in this routine. Merging, submitting. Moving forward while staying in the same place. Moving forward by staying in the same place.

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.

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.

I try to assess the things that bring me pleasure, and how those things might bring me a fulfilling career. I think about how I spend my time. Where my interests lie. The questions come naturally, as if supplied by the ether, and the answer sits in my empty skull: nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Resolutions were made, resolutions were broken. 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. No one thought about the scope of history that would evade them, the sea of identical people who would replace them as time made its waves back and forth, back and forth, seemingly linear, deceptive, stationary and changing all at once.