ihavebeenfloated

When he thinks about it, he doesn’t like it.

Last night, he left the theater feeling something akin to utter failure. He didn’t fail at anything, of course, all he did was watch a movie, and there can be no failure in that except to not pay attention, and if Brad can do anything, it’s most certainly that. What was it, then? He’ll tell you, “Well, I’m not quite sure.” But, luckily for you, I’m not him, and I can tell you what it really was.

Brad is alone. This is something he is not used to, which is peculiar because Brad honestly believes he has always been alone, when in reality he actually hasn’t, so the feeling is quite perplexing to him. Most of the time he is utterly mystified at his strong desire for companionship. He is caught saying things like, “I just need someone so I feel like I have some sort of direction,” or, “I’m not enough for myself, I need someone else to feel like striving for.” He’s not lying, I can tell you that, but if he actually has any idea about what those things truly mean, I can’t tell for sure.

Even though he doesn’t know the why behind it, he found the answer before he even put the keys in the ignition of his car. I’ve got to call her, that’s what I have to do. The specifics of this “she” is relatively unimportant being that it could be any number of different women, but they would all be the same to him. At this point in his struggle against loneliness, all the available women, even the unavailable ones, are all the same to him. They are his salvation, his desire, his one true quest, the only thing worth fighting for, etc. This woman is just apparently more available to him than any other and he deludes himself into believing he loves her even though he doesn’t really know her. Occasionally it dawns on him that he is completely and utterly full of shit, but he shakes the thought out of his head, because it’s better to be delusional than to be hopeless.

When he gets home, he’s got ambition. He moves with purpose, throwing laundry in the wash, talking to his friends online. He sings along with the music he’s playing while wrapping Christmas presents. This is the first Christmas he’s actually been able to buy presents for people, so he went all out and bought presents for his entire family and his coworkers. Why did he buy presents for all of his coworkers? I’m not quite sure. Brad is naturally a rather selfish person despite best attempts at complete selflessness, so the thought occurs to him that he will be possibly quite disappointed when no one else gets him anything in return, but that is quickly purged from his mind as well, because he knows it is true and he’d rather not mentally prepare for disappointment, it makes it all too easy.

Why Brad hides the truth from himself, wipes his mind of all his logical and sensical forms of thought, is a question I cannot possibly answer. I think he enjoys the turmoil, the stupidity, the mistakes that come from his accidents. Brad believes that no matter what he does, he will always emerge from the messy aftermath stronger than before, and I’ve got to admit, he’s right. But what he doesn’t realize is that the more he sets himself up for heart break, disappointment, and failure, the more he becomes completely jaded, cynical, and broken. If he keeps moving forward at the break-neck speed of thought that he’s going currently… Well, I’m not sure what will happen, because I can’t see into the future, even if Brad believes he can.

Brad works through the morning, he decides the best time to call her will be when he estimates she will get home from work. He knows when she works because they work together three days a week, not because he stalks her. He has her number in his cell phone because she gave it to him, which was nice, as he didn’t have to retrieve it out of the computers at work, even though he already looked her up in those computers and emailed himself her address. He plays with the thought of asking her if he can pick her up and not actually asking her for her address, and wondering if she questions it. That could be really messy, he grins to himself, but do I really want to be that stupid?

Endless situations play out in his head. I could ask her out to a movie, pick her up, bring her back here and cook her dinner. Hmm, dinner, what would I cook? He stops in on a message board he frequently chats on and asks for recommendations of potentially easy vegetarian dishes he could cook for her, as she is a vegetarian even though he is not. He settles on a recipe for a roasted vegetable couscous salad with a sort of potato soup as a side to the salad. He thinks about it so much that it scares him, and he decides that cooking might be too much of a chore. Maybe a movie would be a better idea, I have a good hundred on me, we could just go to a nice restaurant, or something.

When the time to call her finally rolls around, he closes up shop in the office and heads up stairs to the bedroom, mumbling to himself, carrying his cell phone clenched up in his fist. He is exhausted after being up all night. He sits down on the bed and stares at his phone and realizes that he is not going to call her. But, why? I felt so determined, so sure of myself. This is stupid, just call her. No. “Why?” Maybe, just maybe, you’re not ready for it, Brad. This is the first time that this thought has ever occurred to him. Tears form in his eyes, the same tears that always appear but never fall. He puts the cell phone down on the bedside table and yells out the two most honest cries of sorrow he has ever managed to expel.

Brad believes that everything, and when I say everything, I mean everything, happens for a reason. The last thing he says to himself before he lies down and falls asleep is, “There’s got to be a reason for this. I’ll probably feel like calling her when I wake up in a few hours.”

When he wakes up, he doesn’t feel like calling her. The dogs sleeping in bed curled up around him paw at his face and he lays there, content, stroking them playfully. Brad has a tattoo on the inside of his right arm, an kanji-type symbol meaning comfortable. This moment of laying in bed is the perfect facsimile of his tattoo. He wishes that he could just stop thinking and lay there for the rest of the day, but there is a nagging hunger in the pit of his stomach and he knows that eventually he will find out exactly why he didn’t call her.

He feeds the dogs, lets them outside, moves around the house in a strange stupor, a terrible feeling in his head. Finally he picks up his keys and his wallet, leaves the house. He drives to an array of fast food restaurant. While he sits, eating his orange and kung pao chicken, he eyes the older women in front of him. The smoothness of the skin on their hands but the appearance of fine lines around their eyes places their age somewhere in their 30s, but Brad’s judgment is never sound and he really hasn’t any idea what he’s looking at.

He thinks, Why is it that we as men find women so desirable? I wish I could just stop feeling attracted to women, it’s painful. I should go home and post something on that forum asking all the guys why the hell we like women so much. It’s strange, it feels completely unnatural. I understand the urge to mate, to spread my seed, whatever, but why is it that I don’t desire to just fuck these women, but to hold them, care for them, and to feel their love? Why does it matter to me? I wish I could shake this god awful feeling. I wish I could just look at everything for what it is, not what I wish it could eventually be. I don’t want to feel this awful craving anymore. I just want to fucking live, goddammit, that’s all I want. I want to stop feeling this terrible lonely desire, that’s all I want, that’s all I can ask for. When will it end? Oh, when I finally get someone, of course, what a load of shit. Can’t I just be hopeless? Just let me be hopeless, please.

He’s not sure who he’s asking to relieve him, but every now and then Brad believes that there is some one watching over him who can answer his requests, and sometimes it seems like someone is actually answering his requests. Most of time, though, I think it’s just him purging himself of thoughts again, effectively modifying his perceptions of his life until he is happy with the position he was previously uncomfortable with. Brad does this a lot, I find. I think if everyone had this ability to effectively delude themselves into a secluded state of pure ignorance, the world would be a much better place.

When he gets home, he doesn’t feel as bad as he did. He has a strong desire to sit down and write about all these epiphanies of thought that suddenly occurred, coupled with a strong desire to smoke a cigarette, but he knows if he smokes the cigarette, all these great thoughts he has to write down will vanish slowly in each puff of smoke, for nicotine makes him lazy and unproductive. He sits down at the computer and starts to write, When he thinks about it, he doesn’t like it. He’s not entirely sure what this means, but it occurred to him while he closed the front door and decided that it would be a great opener for what he was going to write. It will only occur to him, half way through writing, that this opening sentence might actually be the entire center of the piece he is writing about himself, even though it seemed entirely unrelated to the original idea in his head.

Brad doesn’t plan out what he’s going to write, he just sits down and it comes out of him, so strange things like this occurrence happen all the time to him. When he thinks about them, he feels comforted in the fact that this may be proof that he isn’t really crazy, and that some one higher up my actually be guiding his actions. This is a conundrum for Brad, because he doesn’t like the idea of fate, even though he believes in karma. Everything Brad believes is almost a complete contradiction. He doesn’t like superstition, but he will often end up saying things that demonstrate a nearly religious belief in superstition. Fate annoys the crap out of him, but he believes that everything happens for a reason which sounds an awful like fate to me. But, it’s not for me to decide what he believes in, really, it’s up to him.

While he’s writing, he hears his cell phone ring upstairs. He sprints up the stairs, taking three steps at a time.

“Hey Brad.”

“What’s up?” He doesn’t really recognize the voice, but it sounds a lot like one of his supervisors at work.

“Nothing really.”

“You weren’t sleeping?”

“No, no.”

“Oh. Well, I was wondering, I know you’re not on call today, but I was wondering if later you would be able to come in if we need you or something.”

“Oh, yeah, sure, why not.”

“OK, cool, I’ll give you a call if we need you.”

“Great, great.”

He smiles, this to him is the reason he didn’t call her. This is enough justification of his inaction that he feels good about the miserable choice he made earlier. He thinks, briefly, that he might get to see her at work, and then realizes that the reason he was going to ask her out for tonight is because she has tonight off. That split second of getting his hopes up and them being shot right back down is enough to drop his mood a fair bit, but he perfers to believe that the moment didn’t exist at all in his head, and quickly forgets about it.

He sits back down at the computer and continues writing.