The New Me

by Halle Butler

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.

I cry for a second, but I’m faking it. Waaaaaaahhhhhh. Poor me, poor me, who cares. This is what I wanted. To sit here and not have someone judging me. I’m fat, I smell, no one likes me, my clothes suck, I’ll never amount to anything, everyone around me is an idiot, self-involved, judgmental, stupid, too dumb to know the harm they’re doing, too dumb to know they’re not happy inside, not like me, I know. Ha-ha-ha. I was right about it all, being alone is clarifying. And there I go, I’m crying again, but still faking it, half of me still unmoved.

James used to say I was good at being ugly and indiscriminately resentful, and maybe that’s what I’m doing now. And maybe he liked my resentful side, and that’s why he said I was good at it. Who knows!

I should read a book, I should make some friends, I should write some emails, I should go to the movies, I should get some exercise, I should unclench my muscles, I should get a hobby, I should buy a plant, I should call my exes, all of them, and ask them for advice, I should figure out why no one wants to be around me, I should start going to the same bar every night, become a regular, I should volunteer again, I should get a cat or a plant or some nice lotion or some Whitestrips, start using a laundry service, start taking myself both more and less seriously.

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. 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.

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 cry and think about the things that I’ll be grateful for in the future, once I have my life together a little bit more.

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.

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. 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.

The summer breeze moved the leaves in the most perfect way. Friday. Blissfully free. The vast expanse of hours laid out in front of her. The countless hours between now and the end.