Painstaking means putting a stake through your pain.
I wake up at 8:3o as my alarm beeps to me. On instinct, I hit the snooze button and close my eyes. It's too late. I'm awake. I lay their for a moment, hearing nothing but the buzz of my computers fan. There is a loud click that sounds like someone is trying to get into my window but I have learned it is only the window. That or someone is trying to get into my window about three dozen times a night. If that's the case, I can take comfort in the idea that the intruder is incompetant.
I roll up sideways and taste the inside of my mouth. It tastes like the chilli I had right before bed. My blankets are half heaped around me and on the floor. I guess I got pretty violent with them in the night. A pillow is nearly three feet away, it's fall safely broken by the multi-color sea of fabrics that are all my shirts. It has shipwrecked on the hodge-podge shores of my shitty shoe collection, and waits for me to extract it's wreckage so we can wrestle through another nights sleep.
Not now though, there are things to be done. I shuffle into the bathroom feeling like a troll, pee like a troll, and look in the mirror. A troll does not look back, just a guy that wishes he looked like one. I cross the kitchens threshold and remember that I have to do the dishes in case the plumber comes today.
The plumber is coming because the sink is making sounds like it is spilling out somewhere just beyond the walls and that somewhere is not into pipes. I told my landlord about the sound two days ago and he came yesterday. We ran the water and he went into the basement. I had to open the basement door for him as chelsea had a desk in front of it. A pocket on the desk came attached and one of her knickknacks fell and shattered on the floor. My landlord checked out the basement and as I swept shards off Chelseas bedroom floor I tried to figure out ways to never tell her about the fate of her ceramic pumpkin. My landlord appeared a moment later and told me it was niagara falls down in the basement.
"But go ahead and do your dishes." he says.
He leaves and I don't do my dishes.
Now I do my dishes, not because I want clean dishes, but because I don't want a stranger who is fixing niagara falls to think I am filthy. I finish them, though half still have the grease from the chilli clinging to their surface, and I clean out all the shit under the sink. There are my cleaning supplies, Chelsea's cleaning supplies, The cleaning supplies of the people who lived here before we did, and the cleaning supplies of the people who lived here before they did. It equals nearly thirty bottles of blue and green liquids and roughly three hundred garbage bags. If I ever decide to build a raincoat for the house I know I won't have to buy materials. I go the next cupboard over and remove my seven lbs. of pasta (every time I go to the store I think I need more pasta) and my rice and my potatos and my onions. I look at all the food I own and feel a little bit like a grownup. Then I feel like a kid for thinking I felt like a grownup.
Then I shake my head anf get dressed. I wear what I think is nice clothing but is really semiunwrinkled, unscented clothing. I grab my bag and survey my apartment. It's a disaster, and I'll have to clean it, partly because Chelsea will kill me if she returns to this and partly because I'll kill me if I return to this. There are boxes from Christmas. Unpacked Luggage lies next to three weeks worth of clothing. I didn't know I owned that much clothing.
To look is to be depressed so I elect to avoid depression and leave. I listen to Regina Spektor all the way to campus. I go to the box office right away, doing the dishes made me late for open and I wanted to be there right on time. I walk in and Kathy and Alison look bored. If they look bored that means no work for me. I smile and ask how their holidays were. I tell them about my gun toting parents. We laugh. I tell them I'll do anything, paint the walls, clean the air ducts, push a stone up a hill forever. I didn't say that last part, I wrote it here to make me look smarter and funnier off the cuff than I am. I wanted people to know I know who sysaphis is. It's called embelishment and I'm near addicted to the art of it. I'll even embelish something as mundane as a shower or a trip to the store. Or a conversation I had with my boss about the holidays.
I leave, unneeded, and go to Starbucks to get the goddamn coffee I wanted in the first place. Heike, the german baker, fills my cup and charges me full price. She and I worked together for two years and she charges me full price. I resent her for this, but I know I shouldn't. Why should you resent someone for doing their job correctly?
I go to library and print out my headshot and resume. The headshot comes out of the printer streaked and ugly time and time again. I give up and switch to the black and white printer and my headshot looks like it came off a photocopier. I don't care. I'm done with caring about these stupid fucking auditions. And then I meticulously cut my resume to size. I care again. I'm about to log off the computer when I think about everything this computer has that mine does not. It has a word processor. Mine has an expired trial version that it won't let me validate or delete. I sit and begin to write. I write a script about an incompetant scientist working on the Manhattan Project. It's insensitive, it's misrepresentative, and it takes a clever idea and makes it stupid. But it will make our audience laugh. I send it to the other members of our comedy group.
I go to rockefeller to get information to make the theatre departments posters. I check to make sure my department chair's door is open and then I duck into the bathroom to have a pee. I check myself in the mirror, my hat is askew, and then I turn and step to the urinal. I almost walk directly into my peeing department chair. I laugh, say "just the man I was looking for!" and duck into the stall to pee. He is frazzled and asks me in an exhasperated voice, "why?"
He tells me to go to the box office. I'm there again, sitting behind the desk checking prices and wondering why I can't just stay and get paid for it. I walk home listening to Doomtree. Sadie Hawkins comes on and I think of Erin. I push my feet and my mind and soon I am thinking of everything else. School, the script I wrote, my plans for the day.
I get home and start the oven. I begin to clean. My stomach is empty and the coffee makes my hands shake, but I don't feel hungry. I throw in the pizza and resume the slow organization of my apartment. I go through the luggage. I dump a bag of clothes on the floor and hear a clatter. It's a rectangle of masonite. I flip it over and see the laquored picture of Jesus playing softball with a little girl. Erin and I bought it at a garage sale. My eyes well. I breath. It's gone. I resume. I clean in a frenzy, with no goal in mind, just the shifting and folding and moving of things. I clean out my backpack and a letter from Erin falls out. I don't want to touch it, but something compells me. I open it and read. It was just before Thanksgiving. I feel the tremour again and breath and look around and it is gone. My mind is gone. I put the card down and continue to clean out my back pack.
I relize my body has developed a unique defense system. When feeling starts to bubble to the surface, and I am threatened by feeling any pain, my brain loses focus, and jumps away, like a dog that has sniffed a porcupine too closely. I find myself blinking, trying to remember what I had just thought. It happened before. It's been happening a lot lately. It happened when I broke up with Erin.
She cried and cried. I felt like a stranger. She begged me not to go. That was the only time I cried. Even now when I think of it my eyes well and then my mind refocuses on my writing and my spelling and the music playing. Last night I talked to her for the first time since I left her. I knew the time away would give her time to get pissed at me. I expected it. I'm not saying I don't deserve it. She wondered how long I had lied to her. About the way I felt, about us. I wondered the same thing. I felt terrible, but what's the point in just being miserable? It serves nothing. I wish I could though, for her sake, just be miserable. She could hear it and know I hurt as bad as she does. But I don't. Or maybe I do and my body isn't letting me. I don't know but I do know I crushed her.
It only gets bad when I think of the fun we had. Of the fun we could be having right now. Everyday with her was the picture of pleasant. But pleasant won't make me a career.
I'm going to read this years from now and feel like an idiot. As if this is the moment where Scrooge told Bell it was time to make money. But she made me so comfortable, and if I'm comfortable what will keep me striving? I'm forcing myself into a lower level of existance to push myself to grow. Yuck. I'm an idiot.
And then the mechanism cranks it's engine and I'm okay.
I'm scared I'll hurt again. I'm scared I'll be the only one that walks away alive. I don't want this to happen to Krista, and I'm so scared to be okay with her because I'm so okay to not be with Erin.
It's my same old problem, I want to make people happy but I keep hurting them instead.
I just ate a whole pizza. I'm eating my feelings. The plumber is here and I'm eating my feelings.
At least he doesn't think I'm filthy.