A Journey of a Day

I wake up, my body feels pitifully detached, like a rock the size of my bed has been dropped on it, my mouth feels like a paste I've chewed for eternity's, and the eternity's all feel like time.  My gooey mouth says, "I would die forever if I could live forever," then moans, "I shouldn't be feeling this way because I haven't been physically active, and I brushed my teeth last night."  Describing how my insides feel (my heart and soul) couldn't be done; they act the equivalent of my outsides and mouth except they, or it, moan dreadful moans. There's not one ounce of my Being, all of it, that feels supported, or peace at this moment.  The memories of what's token place over the last twenty-four hours arrive hear in my bed and head, and I ponder them. What's told from here is a memory until it isn't.

Then came the day before my pitiful wake-up, and hearing talking, the people at where I work are talking about death.  She, the obese women who secretly despises me and who I'm always annoyed with and by, said that when her brother died she got goose bumps, chills and a feeling. I say, "Like a feeling of chills?" and putting my arms around my body I shiver, shake my head lightly and vibrate my lips like a hoarse. She says quietly, almost as if not to disturb the rooms stillness--a stillness so quite it could be exaggerated by up to date religious leaders as the status quo of righteous, modern spirituality--"No, a warm feeling of love, and I felt it." To break the misinterpretation I want to say, "What a heap of bullshit," hear it echo, then say "Just kidding," but I don't. The other girl, the one who's sitting next to the obesity, her legs dangling and swinging little girl eating cotton candy style off the table she sits on, who's sad but acts happy says whenever a light bulb in her house bursts and shatters it's her dead brother telling her, from the beyond, he's watching her. "From the beyond?" I say, "like," and I put my hand above my eyes as if to shade them, squinting them, and pretend to search a mythical, imaginary landscape with the sun beaming above me, "Heaven?"  "Yes!," she says, and almost rudely.  She believes in this because of Oprah Winfree she said.  Oh please, and I pretend to get goose bumps.

Later at work I'm mopping while thinking thoughts like "It's very bad, a dream come true."  Then I'm called in the office by her, the one who's called boss but secretly called bitch, mostly by independence of myself. "Good," I say in response to something she had asked, (I don't remember.  I never will.) and my face shifts like a direction when she says "We took a vote, and you were voted number one employee..." (They do care about me!) she stops to take a deep, hollowing breath, "to be laid off first."  She says, breathing, almost moaning deeply, "Oh, I hate doing this, sigh, I'm sorry." When she says sorry my feet become my face because that's what she's looking at. Sorry, the one I say, trembles, then stutters out my mouth making me a speech impediment, and I don't know why I'm the one saying sorry too. What I'm doing is adding. Maybe I'm adding to the respectability of discomforting vibes in this room?  Maybe I'm wanting to make this room I'm in a better place?  Personally, me, I don't know. Before leaving without making the room a better place, or making it a better place before I leave she pats me on the back hesitantly, her eyes wiggling, strolling downward.  "It's okay I say to her," the one who's firing me, "I felt it coming, and it was good working with you."  

Then she giggles a nervous giggle and starts walking me out the door, handing me a paycheck. I've known this women for a year. Walking out the room--the one where such variations of cliches, my trembling and shifting, took place--then up some stairs I'm thinking, "I look openly humiliated;" however, I think this inwardly and hope no ones looking at the physical reaction that's plastered on my face like dried fruit to the conjunction with this thought. I keep saying I'm sorry to myself, and straining to work to walk up the stairs I say it for each stair my foot touches, and on the last stair my tongue gets twisted and it's like a birds neck being broken.

I'm in my car, driving at a steady pace when I tell myself to calm down. I want to kill myself.  Calm down and kill myself.  I don't have a gun, or the guts to walk my talk. Fear still plays a big part in my life. I tell myself to keep cool, keep calm and find another job.  I never will. Right now in the car I'm so in the moment, and actually in time. I'd look calm but my face is the painting of expressionless red. I'm still driving at a steady pace, my voice-over a muddled, distorted, therapeutically muted lenience of the absurd. The description of my face: Nowhere to go, hideous in it's mannerisms, rotated in it's unable congregations of expression. No one knows, which hurts them the most, or cares about the fear I'm frightened by, and at some point in our lives, everyone bleeds like this. The road ahead lies blank, as does my face.

At the stop light, it's so red, I'm looking behind me (the rearview mirror) and in front too.  I'm singing "It's so hard to lay down in all this" and I can go because the green light say so.  I'm singing "This place is so silent sensing that storm" turning left and looking behind me.  We're all lucky we have music.  First gear with the stick, second with the clutch and singing "Ohh, ohh to return again and again, I come to you with defenses down" and goose bumps, I'm getting goose bumps via the chills.  The chills run up the spinal cord via electricity when I sing "It's so hard to lay down in all of this."  Fourth gear, switching lanes, crisscrossing the car behind me, (I passed it) I look to the left lane to see, hopefully, if a teenage girl is looking at me ready to subdue the stress I feel with a glance. I sing again, and "It's so hard to lay down in all this."

I'm still driving and when I get home, simultaneously composing the switching of my paces, which are frantic and steady (a silent gesture of awareness), I park, shoot a glance to my right and see my blood in the car next to mine.  The girl on my right, the one that's my sister who lives next door with my forbidden family asks if I just got home from work too? I had already read my horoscope for the day which said that I'd find easy solutions to problems that would otherwise be annoying, so this one question, the one she's asking, must be what the horoscope, the one I read while sitting at the bank waiting for my check to be cashed after I'd been fired, pertained to.  The question isn't only annoying but hard to answer so there's a tiny possibility this isn't what my horoscope was focusing on. Nonetheless, the answer to this itself out my mouth, steady and with a tone of confidence that no one who feels as sorry for themselves as I do, could mutter. The answer is "Yes" with clairvoyance. Saying, the one who's speaking is me, to my sister while prying myself out the car, "You know that job you got that you've been bragging about, how can I get it?"  As we talk, heaving ourselves up the stairs together, I'm behind her, she starts answering me.  She, the one climbing in front of me says "Oh, so now you want it, eh?"  I say, "Yeah, well, I need it, eh."  She laughs at my eh then says "Oh." After this there's this short pause that silence rides, and it's between us... 

"No," I say, "I really do need it."  When she turns away to open the apartment door we walked to, I tremble and say I got fired; but acting like it's no big deal, I say It's okay.  She turns quickly, the one who didn't see my tremble and says in as comforting a voice as she can muster, "Oh, really, I'm sorry." When she says this I remember the girl, a coworker at work who saw me, after I'd been fired and walked up the stairs to get my jacket hanging on the rack, who couldn't look at me, but only my feet in that humiliated way like she'd just been the helpless victim of the unauthorized penetration of her personal vagina with a disrespectful, and selfish penis.  The girl who's the sad but act-happy-one was clearly on the committee of voters, and that's why she couldn't look me in the eye.  I told her it was okay, it's all good, I'll still try and make it to your wedding, and she tried looking at me, then my feet and walked away. In response to my sister is the best facial posture that outlines the attempts at confirming the presence of my sanity; and me saying it's okay out loud compromises my contradiction.  "I'm really okay," and this is what I say.  "How do I get this job now?" "Well, come with me in the apartment." "No!  I don't want to go in there, it's too..." "C'mon, we'll go in my room."  I say okay.

In the room I'm with the one who persuaded me to go there.  "Here's what you gotta do" she's saying, and spraying.  "Nasty!  Don't spit in my face bitch!"  She laughs so hard she almost passes out and me, I laugh too. As my sister explains I'm oblivious which reminds me of the pep talk I got before being fired: I don't remember any of it. I only remember being let go, laid off, voted the number one employee to be fired first, which I know was a lie.  She, the one who's explaining the job I now need is still talking, elaborating the action I need to take while I'm still remembering other memories; And getting handed the information she's kindly written down for me, about the job, I switch to the different memory of seeing, on my cell phone, the one missed call of the day. "Call him before you call the number I've written down for you, okay" she says. "Oh no, I don't want to call him... and it's not like I don't like him but he...well, he just doesn't care enough and he acts like he does.  It's always the same thing with him and me: 'I'll get you on as soon as possible...' he's always saying that, and I just can't handle somebody beating around the bush, especially with me right now." "I know he's like that, but call him up, it could be better, tell him the situation and ask to be on his team, ask for help; it's good money with him." After my blood says this I'm thinking, "If there's any hope left it's him." I feel sad though, and before leaving, after feeling that repetition of sadness I explain back to her what I vaguely listened to, and she says "Right, just do that."  "Thank you" is what I, the one who feels dismissed, forgotten, and instantaneously tired in a physically way says.

I'm walking into my own apartment, the one I share, when she, the one who's the daughter of the other person who lives here walks up to me and says "Hey, sorry." This time I'm the one looking at my feet.

She, the one who's twelve years old and the one who I've demeaned with a diminished sexual appetite (which is to say I'm a pervert in an insane, vulnerable, stupid, weird kind of way) isn't saying sorry because I lost my job (she doesn't know), but because she had locked the door which I had to, inconveniently she thinks, open with my apartment key.  This is why she attempted to unlock the door I was behind, so I wouldn't tire myself in opening it with the key. Oh, am I this pathetic?

I'm in my room--the one I walked to and where I sit right now remembering this all and calling him, pressing number six for the option to reach him, specifically--feeling weak.  To my despair unfortunate, he's not there and the voicemail is too full to take my pathetic help message, so I hang up, sit on the bed, the one I sleep on, and try to relax but realize that I don't know what to do next.

I ask myself questions. Realizing trying to relax should be the next step in my schedule of paranoia, I keep asking myself more questions, the same questions even.  "Do I eat now?  Do I sleep now?  Do I call the missed number for the hundredth time?"  This is where I accuse myself of being lazy.  This would all be clear on a clear day.  This, the choice I make, is the later question I just asked. But the suddenness of the answer made by choice makes me remember the insane dialing I did on my way back from the bank, no more and not driving at a steady pace in time, but instead shouting out loud in a maze of craziness: "god dammit, god dammit!!!  Ring you god damn son of a bitch!  Ring ring ring!!!  Please, for the love of God, ring! Please..." The way I muttered that last "please" was so pathetic it was funny, even though I didn't laugh.  How I felt was intense, anger.

After that moment, the one where my multiply decisive heart beat turned from one thing to another I started punching the gas of the car and edging way too closely to the cars proceeding the front bumper of my own; my path of disregarded humiliation a barrier between the walls of civilized momentum captured in an instant of sparked aggression and lost understanding. Yelling and dialing at the same time the missed number over and over again, but 1-801-765-3950 had no ring, and I missed a call I now, for some reason unknown like the lands guarded over by a No Trespassing sign, couldn't return.  It was the first time, in a three week period of time, I had gotten a call on my cell phone; and now I couldn't even return it, for the love of god who must hate me! It was when I got home, and turning to my right to see the blood, which was my own, in the car next to mine, I hung up the phone I was obsessively dialing and possibly gave up cooperating with the incongruent number, but only for the moment.  I thought, "What if it was someone offering me a job." I decide, in these memories of moments, that I'll call the missed number again, but later, and who is it who called, who is it I missed?  I call, no answer.  Bad number, or just beeping?  I'm remembering looking at my blood, the one with the red hair, in the car next to mine and thinking I made the mistake, in the mode of a thousand emotions all vibrantly arriving in a punctual state of deje ve, of parking in a handicapped space which would be the wrong space; and moving the car, even though I don't want to, I really don't want to, may be a good idea because the last thing I need, right now, is the dreaded piece of paper one of Hitler's late servant bee's posts on my windshield. A ticket may not be the last thing I need now, but it's up there with not being able to find some sort of pornographic material to jack off to. I get up, walk to my car in the handicapped space and drive to another. Sitting at the place I call another I analyze the situation: It's not that loosing this job was bad, in fact it was good; this.