Tangent to Your Curves

SADIE (THURSDAY)

Stop it, I thought to myself, alone in the dim evening light of my bedroom, snuggling into pillows, trying not to think of his softness. The way his body had spilled over the armrests of the auditorium seats, the way his dark hair shielded me from seeing his plump, cherubic face. A shiver ran through me. Stop it. Stop it!

I flipped over to face the other wall, hugging a pillow. But the soft pillow was making me think of his soft body. I wonder how he would feel if I hugged him, filling my arms. Maybe even overflowing. Would my hands touch at his back, or was he too big for that?

Stop! I threw the pillow across the room in frustration.

I kicked my legs off the bed and stood in anger. I grabbed the pillow and flung it back onto the bed as I left the room.

I'll take a walk, I decided, shoving my arms into my jacket and grabbing my keys. I needed to get out of this big, old, empty house. Beautiful as it was, it was big and secluded and lonely, all reasons I had chosen it, funnily enough, which now made me feel even more detached from humanity.

I kicked chunks of old snow out of my way, watching them explode into little showers of white on the ground. I heard birds scatter in the skeletal trees around me as I walked into the woods. I picked up a stick from the ground and held it aloft like a sword . . . but there was no one to sword fight with, and so I soon snapped it in half and stepped over it as I went out to my thinking spot beside the creek, where I would sit on a big rock and contemplate the meaninglessness of life. I watched the shriveled leaves drop from tree branches into the cold water below. With a smaller stick, I picked at the skin of ice forming at the stream's bank, watching little flakes of ice break off and be consumed by the flowing water around them.

I lived in fantasies. I thought that would have changed after five years away from the world I knew and hated, but it had only gotten worse. Five years of my life, reduced and compressed down to near nothing, the monotony making every day seem like a restart, an alternate reality of the one that came before it.

Fool I had been to stick it out. What did I have now? Stolen money and nothing to buy. An empty house, an empty heart, with no friends or family, a mistrust of everyone. An incinerated past and a dark future. What good was I? What did I bring to the world? A has-been prodigy, spent and useless. I could never bring joy to the world like the art or music that got me through the half decade of my life that was otherwise devoid of any anchor to life. My written stories were nothing but twisted sexual desires and anger taken out on strangers. There was nothing left for me here. Life now – or this strange sort of afterlife, as it rather felt – was just a bad sequel to a disappointing original.

And yet, like a TV series drawn out far past its prime, I continued to exist, in solitude and uncertainty far worse than any punishment the justice system could give me. All I had was lie that I could restart my life. That, and an unhealthy obsession with a stranger.

I almost wanted to cry, but I had long since finished that. I felt self-pity no more. I had wept over my predicament until it no longer made any sense. Instead, I stared at the scaffolds of decomposed leaves and accepted the course of reality. The future held nothing but entropy – and not just for me. The thought was comforting: that someday everyone and everything would disperse into nothingness, and no longer remember anyone who accomplished any more or less than I had, any expectations I had met or failed. No longer would plump strangers be of any temptation, neither their absence cause any distress. The freak accident that was life and matter and time would be resolved eventually.

I watched a small brown bird pick through leaves, searching for food. Something about this brought me back to my senses. I buried my head in my hands. Fuck. I really needed friends. Anything to get me out of this loop of existential angst. I didn't want to waste my life contemplating meaning that didn't exist when I could be creating one.

I will talk to someone, I thought. Who? I knew who I wanted to talk to. But they were all either loved ones who had hurt and betrayed me, or a fat stranger whose life was fine without me. Better, surely, as I tainted everything I touched. Why had every person I ever trusted betrayed me? The track record alone suggested it must be me. Years ago, I read a saying, "if you smell dog shit everywhere you go, check your own shoe." Everywhere I have a problem, it turns out to be my fault. You can only be in denial of such consistent evidence for so long.

But fuck it. I really don't care about doing the right thing anymore. I tried that, or at least what I thought was right, and look how that had ended. Perhaps my vision of right and wrong, rather than the effort I put into following it, was the problem.

Then what do I say to him? Something we had in common would be best. Yet all I knew was that this rando shared at least one class with me. How could I go off of that?

Voices from another lifetime echoed in my head.

If you do my math homework, you can sit with me at lunch.

I'll be your friend if you help me pass this test.

I'll play dinosaurs with you if you let me copy.

Sick memories of broken promises that I fell for time and time again. I felt a knot in my stomach, a sour taste in my mouth. And yet, had they not worked?

What if I took the other side? The one asking, the one who always won. But this time, it would be reversed. Pretending to need help, while really wanting companionship.

It's a new life. I'm not making the same fucking mistakes I used to. Including selflessness.

Eat or be eaten. And I was done starving myself.