The Only One I See
By any definition I was already crazy before I spent 5 years working alone in my dark little apartment on the other side of the country. I’ve been growing stranger in there, all alone, like a mushroom. I’m meant to already know the rhythm to the world but my step back into normal feels off beat. All of that time alone left other people’s volume too high. The constant ticking of it all makes me feel like a bomb that needs defusing.
From the window I watch the man from next door conquering the steps of his home in a way that only Real Men do. Maybe I should be more neighborly. Head outside and make conversation. I used to know how. Maybe I could compliment him on another fine gray knit. So like the color of concrete. Or his leaf blowing work. Wow, look at you. Fix my face like I’m talking to a handsome little dog. My mother would like that. If I tried to fit in. I close my eyes, forehead cold against the glass. What I would like to do is add him to my list of people to hate. Add him and go on hating him for years for no real reason at all. Put him on the list right up under Jack. Jack, Sweater Guy, Me.
I should be a nicer person. I know I should. People say if you look out of your window and you see one asshole, that’s just one asshole. But if you look out and see 100 assholes, that’s still just one asshole. He’s reflected right back at you in the glass. Looking at myself in the shadow of Sweater Guy I think I’m looking at the world’s biggest. I look around this place at all the smiling people and I feel irritated. Fuck do they look so much happier than I feel. Fuck do I wish I felt that way even as I hate them for it. Fuck do I feel lost. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
It’s got a meanness taking root in me. A meanness I don’t remember having 5 years ago. A part of me that wants to squeeze Sweater Guy in on himself. A living clay turned back into something rough. Started all over again. This place and who it needs me to be only amplifies it. Built to escape the brick and industry of the city it backs up to. Both stacked upon the backs of working people. This village has stripped itself of something the city hasn’t. Something that makes me feel like a stranger to it several decades on. Flinching at the reminders of another lifetime. I feel lost in the grid of it in a way I never do in the woods.
I should be more tolerant. Of my family. Of the guy next door and his collection of horrible sweaters. Of everyone. Tolerant of their need for my attention but I feel poorly designed for it. It all feels like it’s grabbing at me. Forever tugging at my skin with little barbs trying to pull things out of me I would have given them if only I could. Every interaction another open hand demanding something I don’t have left. They’re pulling on a frayed thread and demanding a return to the rope that got them here. Well, as it turns out I can’t help you there. You go right ahead and call me crazy.
I’ve spent more than my fair share of days in bed over the last month. Feeling my ruptured friendship threatening to swallow me whole. Rotting there gave me ample time to feel sorry for myself. My sadness is a self indulgence I’m not sure I have any right to. A heartbreak I’m not sure I have the right to claim. The brightness inside of me now hunting for what Jack and I even had. Maybe Jack and I were better defined by what we weren’t. Defined by all those conflicts he tucked away in his back pocket to keep the upper hand while I pretended not to see him. Prioritizing the fine to the death of the good and unintentionally letting him do the same. What does that make us? I don’t know. I’m tired of thinking about him even as I can’t get my mind to stop trying to solve the problem that is Jack.
I failed to notice that something was deeply wrong. Broken even. Something in Jack and something in me. And now that I’ve seen it, I wish I knew how to find an off switch to the feeling. One that doesn’t come with a price I’m unwilling to pay. Flip it and let disregard burn through me like poison, just as he has. I put my arms through the sleeves of my parka and stand by the door feeling stiff and stupid. I’ve abandoned myself in too much slippery fabric and too many slippery men. I never even saw Jack coming. Right now, I don’t know what to believe about Jack. Or myself. Even as I suffocate in this down of ineffectual rage and hurt. I stand here stuck glaring at my own boots. Trying to unwind my heavy heart only to find myself still twisting in the wind.
Jack’s disappearing act leaves me to come to my own conclusions. All I know is if I sit in this house I’m going to peel all the skin off of my own face. Take it down to my shoulders in a sheet like a mask. Throw it away and be free of it all together. From the backdoor I trudge down the stairs and into the street. A natural bounce leaving me only just too to be a Sweater Guy. I politely aim my glare away from him as I pass. Briefly locking eyes with his dog in solidarity. Even the dog resents him for those ugly shoes he has on. In my mind I see him diligently chewing, filling up on foam and a raw knowing that there is another pair just like it at the back of the closet. I wish I knew how to help him. I let my feet drop heavy on the face of the sidewalk. As it is, I don’t know how to help myself.
My life feels like something I picked up the pieces of and tried to balance before I could name what toppled it. Set it down on my desk next to my job like an ugly paperweight made of my own broken parts. This is the only thing that helps — walking out. I need the time alone to avoid the accidental detonation of the stockpile growing inside of me. How fortunate that over the last few years my life fell apart into one I could walk out of. More and more it feels like someone has their hands over my eyes. Like I’ve traded the psychopomp for the shade. I keep walking but it feels like I’ve lost the path entirely. It’s one foot in front of the other. One foot in front of the other in a life lived with too many days spent putting one foot in front of the other. Walking in a long loop only a couple of miles long getting nowhere.
Every day I clip-clop the same circuit like a well trained horse. Down the street to where it ends, turning to follow the creek running through the woods. The headphones clamped around my head standing in as blinders. I trace the houses as I walk. Counting on them to shepherd me where street signs have failed. The one that smells like bleach. The one with Christmas lights I like. The one that parks on the sidewalk. The one with a backyard full of thick black plastic bags. Their contents a secret, packed and ready to bury. Until I reach the last of the street lights standing solemnly against the night at the end of each day.
The longer I walk the more things feel familiar even as they don’t look it. When I left this town a small part of me hoped it might be hit by an errant meteor. The sky is a big place, a little thing like that could get lost up there. When we first moved and I suddenly found my skin too tight I used to comfort myself with the thought — You gotta give it that, they have fewer snakes in town. I used to look in the mirror and remind myself. Then the older I got the less true that seemed.
The longer I was here the more handled I felt. Until I was straightjacketed by my family’s expectations of what it meant to be normal and good. What it meant to be acceptable. Until all I saw were people so terrified of their own humanity that they’d turn on you. Desperate to smother yours before it outed their own as some shade less than perfect. Or really some shade closer to ruinous than Chantilly Lace. Hissing for you to be quiet. To be small. To be plain. Eager participants in a Death Cult of unflattering golf shirts and nepotism. Always ready to sacrifice their own children should they need to.
Even before my insanity and heartbreak of dubious provenance I hated this place and it hated me right back. Jack was the one who helped me feel sane again. I always thought we held the people in this town in contempt together, laughing at our own darkness. Our own shadows. Somewhere in me is a fear waiting to hit me harder than NASA’s little whoopsie daisy. To crack the earth and swallow me. A fear that Jack was never like me at all. A fear that the joke was always my pain. The thought that maybe he’s like the little white fences surrounding some of the houses here. Shiny and plastic and Bullshit. Maybe like the rest of this place he’s allergic to anything resembling honesty. I think that might be worse than being forgotten. Never being at all. It is a possibility I don’t feel prepared to stare at. Not yet. Today I’ll let myself remain a hostage to the delusion that I was loved. One that I fear will break me before it lets me go.
