All Your Fates (Currently editing/updating)

Chapter 6: The Invisible Leash Part 2

MUSIC TRACK LIST:

D-A-D: Laugh 'n' a  1/2

B-Complex: It's a funny world

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EMMA's POV

Whenever I think I've exhausted all window-shopping opportunities in Los Angeles, I turn another corner and there it is: one more sun-bathed promenade chock full of shiny consumerist goods calling my name. Is it me? Or is all of America one giant shopping mall? It's not enough to buy goods once and for all and leave it at that. No, people here so quickly tire and get rid of their recently-couldn't-live-without possessions only to make room for other-people's-stuff-recently-got-rid-of. Just take this table at the Melrose flea market for example: books, jewelry, housewares and furnishings all put up for adoption like unloved orphans, crying out to me: take me home! take me home! take me home!

I picked up a white ceramic cat and cradled it in my arms, "I can't take you with me, sweet puss. I'd never fit you into my tiny suitcase." One can only carry so much while traveling.

It was all too easy to get attached and overburdened by things, especially when one had overextended their stay as I had. I was really only supposed to be here on a tourist visa, not working as a naked sushi model at RAW, L.A.'s most exclusive nyotaimori restaurants. Only I could be accused of occupying two positions at once: working "under the table" while at the same time working on top of it.

It's a strange gig, being a human platter. It skews your perspective of humanity, literally and figuratively. First, you have to get used to always seeing faces hovering above you: an unsettling vantage point usually reserved for patients lying back on stretchers, and that takes quite some time getting used to. Often, I'd imagine I was a cadaver stretched out in my coffin with mourners paying last respects. I'd make up stories on how they knew me and what their eulogies would be in order to pass the time. I have a very morbid imagination. But I don't think I'll ever get accustomed to complete strangers wanting to pick food off my body and eat it. Sex, I can understand. But this? How vacuous does one's life have to be before you call up a friend to say: food just isn't holding its appeal anymore – let's put a naked girl under it and now we can say that we have lived. I behold the emptiness in their eyes underneath the leers, that pervading sense of cheapness that clings to them even when dressed in $5000 Armani suits. If only the rich realized the secret to feeling alive was to cut the apron strings to all their worldly possessions and lightly pack all that they own into a suitcase sitting by the door on ever ready standby. 

Yet not the worst gig I've had and definitely not the strangest. In Japan I was a waitress at a maid café serving otakus while dressed in pink ruffled cosplay outfits; in Prague an antiquities dealer; in New York, a snake charmer; in Alaska, a gold-digger; in Hawaii, a surf-boarding instructor; in New Zealand, a goat herder, and back home in Sweden, an event organizer for massive LARPS held in the forests of Västerås. Add subarctic undersea arc-welder to my list and my resume would be complete.

My friend Charlotte calls me: "flotsam and jetsam," for being someone so easily carried off with any whim of the wind. My Gran, on the other hand, used to tell tall tales of hiding me from the Norns as a babe so they couldn't name my fate and that's why nothing will ever be able to tether itself to my soul: no occupation, no city, and certainly no lover.  Gran is, how you say...eccentric, but I love her still with all my heart. And I'm the only one who "gets" her...at least some of the times.

Speaking of uprooting oneself, L.A. was already losing its charm for me. Perhaps I would go to Canada next and become a tree planter for a season. I needed to get back into some really hard work after lying on my back for months, all my hard-earned definition from mining gold slowly turning to flat doughy flab. It was depressing, like watching the air slowly deflate out of tires with a hisssssss.