We are all the same, and all of us are different - A story about you.
Chapter 1:
He stepped on something as he entered the bathroom. It squished. He moved his foot aside and made a face.
"Ew", he thought.
The object was long, dark red on one end, and whiteish-green on the other.
Is that a tampon? Or a plant?, he wondered. I'm almost 30. I should probably know what a tampon looks like? That's embarrassing. Or...it would be if someone was reading my thoughts. Oh shit! What if they're in my thoughts right now!
He smiles.
He looks inside himself.
He sees you.
But that's crazy.
He moves on.
Do you know how annoying it is?
I do too.
Today we follow Andrade as he learns who we are.
Andrade is a man.
One of those.
He often apologizes for it, though he isn't sure why, but it does seem to make people like him more. Usually.
Andrade has roommates. Some are men and some are not.
Andrade works for a multinational conglomerate banking organization with diversified interests encompassing the financial industry, real estate, and hobby-grade robotics. He doesn't know why that last one either.
Today is a big day for Andrade. He is going to work and he is going to give a presentation in front of his boss's boss.
But first he has to leave the house on time.
"Rachel, did you leave...something...on the bathroom floor?"
"Oh my god Dre", she rolled her eyes and shut the fridge. "You don't have to keep telling me to pick up my towel." She slammed the milk on the counter and said: "Do you want a bowl?"
"No that's not...", he sighed, "Yes I want a bowl."
They prepared bowls of brightly colored cereal. Jamming brightness into your mouth brightens any day correct?
No. No you're right.
Andrade didn't know what else to say. He had picked up the...thing and tossed it in the trash, but you can't ask your roommate to go digging through the bathroom trash can to see if the weird smushy thing is a used tampon. What the fuck Andrade?
No. He finished his bowl of cereal and stood. Rachel's bowl was empty in front of her. She was still in her pajamas. Scrolling on her phone.
"You not working today?"
"Nope. Ain't gonna do shit today. Paul paid me back for taking a shift last week and now I get to sit at home while you schmucks live out your dreams behind a desk. I fuckin' love a Tuesday off."
Andrade did as well.
He had showered, shaved, dressed and rushed out the door on time, at the usual time he rushed out the door.
The bus was on time too. Which meant he would definitely not be late. Which was not much.
He sat on the bus and read his book. It wasn't great. But it was thrilling. It gripped. And it let him ignore you.
His book lets him ignore you when the old lady in the walker sits down near him. He even holds her walker steady while she lowers her bones into a bus seat as bony as her. His book allows him to fail to notice that the button-down cotton sweater with patterns on the sleeves, which she wears on this bus every day, has a hole just above the elbow. And he definitely does not notice that her plastic shopping bag, which she fills every day with her lunch, which she eats at the park at the end of this bus route on her own every day, has become worryingly empty the last few weeks.
His book is gripping. The murder is gratuitous. The hero does make a good main character in a summer blockbuster with explosions and one scene where a car flips over in slow motion.
Andrade arrives at work on time. And to be honest with you, not much happens. I think you understand.
He makes coffee, he goes to his desk, his cubicle-mate and he converse about various television shows that they have recently seen. Shows where characters repeat the same procedures in each episode, and the events happen in roughly the same order and with similar intensities each week.
After those conversations, he moves documents from place to place. In some cases he moves data from place to place. These data and documents lead to transactions and exchanges of goods which in turn bring feelings to the individuals performing the transactions and exchanges of goods.
After that he gets coffee.
He crosses the street, because getting coffee from the place across the street takes him to a different place. It also takes 20 minutes to cross the street, get through the line, 'um' and 'uh' a bit, put in his order, wait for his order, smile and nod at the person handing him his order, stir more sugar into his order, blow on his order, squeeze back through the line that's crowding around the door by now, cross the street again, and get back to his desk.
And it let's him see Laura.
Laura has long black hair, slightly curly, with a purple streak, this week. And she has a tattoo and she wears black shirts, which makes sense because that's the uniform at this particular coffee chain, but he thinks she would probably wear them anyway. You know?
He doesn't talk to Laura though. That isn't how this goes.
Back at his desk, Andrade prepares for meeting his boss's boss. It is a meeting where situations and events will be discussed, which pertain to the aforementioned data-documents-transactions-and-exchanges-of-goods situation. It is a meeting which will decide his future. Which is quite depressing to think about now that you've got him thinking about it. And you have. Which is where the problems arise.
Andrade attends his meeting. It goes better than expected, though he does stumble on his words in a few places. And once he makes a joke that he thinks might have been taken as off-color even though he didn't mean it as off-color but how do you recover from that situation? The only things he could think to do other than pretend it didn't happen, all lead toward situations he would have to put himself 'out there' and possibly be vulnerable with other people. Can you imagine?
The rest of the afternoon continues. Time does not pass well in the afternoon. He should probably get coffee.
After work, Andrade heads home. Home is where his friends are. And Paul. Andrade lives in a 'pretty cool' place if you ask him, which I'm not interested in, but if you were, he would tell you he 'lives in a 3-story, Gothic-inspired former mansion, the kind some crazy old lady lives in in a horror movie, but, like, after someone's bought it and fixed it up'. It is in fact a large Victorian-Gothic-style house that once belonged to a moderately wealthy family at the turn of the century, who fell on hard times and sold the house to a property-developer who turned it into a boarding house which housed many interesting lives and characters, which Andrade would actually find more interesting if he knew about it. And which was still a house that housed many interesting lives and characters, now that you make the point. Andrade is one of those, but we'll get to that.
Inside the house is quite a lot of action and activity. Rachel has convinced others to go out that night, to attend a local gathering at a local gathering-place. The kind with lighting whose purpose is less about lighting things and more about making things seem like they were more interesting than they were. Andrade didn't feel like going.
"C'mon man", she leaned in and said conspiratorially, "I even made sure Paul had something to do tonight."
"I just got home Rache", he flopped into a stylishly worn and garishly colored armchair. "I thought you were going to do nothing today?"
"Day's over Dre. I am well rested and ready to get exhausted again!"
"Yeah", he grumbled, "well we didn't all take the day off."
"You should try it sometime. You need it. You miserable fuck."
"I don't have any PTO."
She poked him in the chest and said in a sing-song: "I don't give a fuck-T-O, you're gonna go." and left.
He grumbled and got ready.
The local gathering-place had a name you would expect, and a large black awning over the front with tables and chairs underneath but it wasn't known for its food and Andrade wasn't sure he had ever seen anyone use them, plus was it even open during the day?
It was an open-mic night, which he kind of hated, people were so bad at most of the things they tried to do up on the stage, but it was also a Tuesday and all his friends were here so he was here.
Most of the house, and their friends and even some friends of friends had come along. It was quite a popular open-mic night. Do you understand why so many people are interested in this sort of thing? You'll have to explain it to me one day.
Andrade stays near a wall, at a table tall enough he can lean on, hoping to look casual and uninterested but in a way that shows he's uninterested for cool reasons, not because he's uninterested. He thinks he even achieves it, because that girl at the bar keeps looking at him and nudging her friend. He even convinces himself to talk to her, and follows through. We won't recount that because it didn't go well and he doesn't like thinking about it.
Back at the table Rachel, and Jeremiah, and Anne, and Richard, and Mark, and Andrade keep drinking and watching the open-mic competitors take the stage. A young man plays a guitar. Another sings a song. An older woman recites a poem. A man in his fifties performs a short monologue as Mr. Darcy which Andrade finds hilarious for the wrong reasons. None of them are great at what they do. Andrade doesn't see what goes on inside.
Three beers in Rachel reaches under the table and pulls out her flute case.
"Wait you're actually going up there?", Andrade says.
"Yeah! I told you I wanted too!"
"But you haven't played since high school!", he looked around. "And it's a bar!"
"And this is a flute", she wielded it at him and went up to the stage. She sat down on the stool on the stage while the crowd chattered. Some accompanying music played, and she played along, surprisingly well all things considered. It wasn't the worst thing he'd ever heard and he applauded. She came back to their table laughing, to rounds of congratulations. Andrade congratulated her too. What else could you do? A few minutes later a guy came up to their table and offered to buy her a drink, so they went to the bar together. His friends filtered in and out, of range of the table. Smokes outside, bathroom, drinks at the bar, sneaking up to the roof through an employee-only door that everyone knew about and the bar manager pretended to care about. That kind of local gathering-place.
Andrade watched the performances.
Not long after Rachel came back from the bar, a young man went up to the microphone. He adjusted its height, clearing his throat too loudly and drawing more of the bar's attention than he'd intended. But he did it anyway. He said that he was going to read a poem he had written. It had tumbled out of him a few months after his grandfather passed unexpectedly. He would try not to cry.
The bar dimmed for Andrade. The spotlight softened on the man's face. A very young face. It got younger as he spoke. It was a beautiful poem and Andrade saw into his soul.
A wholly unexpected experience.
Other people did things that night on the stage. Andrade didn't feel those. He didn't mind though.
The next day went the same as others, in fact the following few weeks did as well.
Weeks later he saw Rachel cleaning her flute at the dining room table. He sat down.
"Rache", he began but didn't know why.
She looked up. "Yeah...?"
"When you played the flute at the open-mic the other night..."
"...Yeah?"
"Weren't you afraid of being laughed at?"
"Damn I was that bad?", but she was joking.
"No, actually I expected you to be worse."
"Thanks."
"I just mean...weren't you afraid?"
"Yes."
"Oh."
"Dre...you know I tell you you're a miserable fuck sometimes?"
"...Yeah."
"What do you want to do with the rest of your life?"
"Huh? Uh...I guess get rich or something? Get married?..."
"Live in a ranch-style dwelling in suburbia with a red lawnmower participating in bake sales on the weekends until you're old enough to covet a sports car?"
"Something like that."
"But do you really? Want that?"
He sighed. "I don't know what I want. I just wanna be happy."
She finished wiping the flute and put it in the case. "Have you thought about trying to be happy?"
"All the time."
"Dre, when I went up on that stage, I knew I wasn't going to be good. And I don't care about being good. Because being good at the flute", she clunked the case on the table, "is not something I'm interested in."
"Then why'd you do it?"
"Because if I didn't do it, I never would have done it."
"...what?"
"Jesus dude", she threw her hands up, "you have more money than me, a promising career, you're a good looking guy, you have friends and your family loves you, and you're a miserable fuck. Just once in your life, try living life. If you don't embarrass yourself, if you don't risk embarrassing yourself, you're going to pick the red convertible at the end of the journey."
She poked him in the chest repeatedly. "And I. Don't. Think. You'll. Like. It." and walked away.
It took him a few more months to understand, which is often how it happens. For some it takes years. Sadly for others it never does.
One night, a work night even, he attended a pottery class. He was abysmal, but they said that was often the case. He wanted to go back, and eventually he would, but not yet. He took a cooking class, a martial arts class, he went to the gym, he even learned to knit. None of these were right. He took a creative writing course. He wanted to like that. He'd always wanted to like that. But it still didn't fit and he didn't know why.
"Rache", they were on the porch swing, enjoying the fall morning, leaves fell, children laughed. It was a month of fading and the beginning of the beginning of new things. "How do you not care so much?"
"Jesus, am I a psychopath?", she laughed.
He laughed. "No! I mean the flute thing from before. It's so hard to just...embarrass myself."
She sighed. She did that around him a lot. She had good reason. "I said something about risk. The truth is that there is no easy way. If it's easy, it's probably not worth much. You know the phrase 'leap of faith' right? If you don't leap..."
He still didn't fully understand yet. But he started writing poems. He thought they were pretty bad. Which was the biggest part of his problem. One of them did start with 'Roses are red', but sometimes you have to. Another started with 'I ride the rails to keep going...'. But that's ok.
It had been shy of one year since the infection began. Since a young man's face and words would shine and reflect off his soul. Tonight was when it would finally set in.
It was a Tuesday. They were at the open-mic night. He had a poem prepared. His friends had encouraged him, helped him improve his poems. They really were bad, but that wasn't the point. If you don't get the bad ones out of the way, the rest can't move in. But the poem he had written tonight was not right. He didn't fully understand why. He does now though. Rachel told him it was the best one he'd written and had convinced him to leap.
He had been thinking about that leap a lot. He'd already leapt in ways he didn't understand yet. He would later be surprised to realize the hard part was already over. But the leap, and the young man's face kept saying things to him and this poem for tonight it didn't say anything. Not to him or of him. And finally he got it.
So he wrote. Hurriedly, frantically, feverishly, he wrote like a madman on a small notebook he kept with him at all times now. He wrote words that meant things and he even cried a little and the space in front of him was amazing to behold.
He got up on the stage. And this is what he said.
" This will be free.
Because I want to be free.
If I can't be free on the page, in my silence and solitude, then freedom will run from me in life.
It has been a long journey to this point. I still feel locked, even in this moment where I let it flow. What if someone reads this? Judges this?
Learn to not give a fuck.
They can judge. I can grow. Contained, I will not grow. Growth is into open space, and no space is more open and free than the air when you jump off a cliff.
So I leap.
I will leap off the cliff every day, or I will be sucked back to the top where the chains are.
I'm sick of being contained. It. Wants. Out.
Be a child of gods. Speak with thunder and lightning and winds. And in your special case, speak as a susurrus. Because you are special in all your distinct ways. In the universe of the infinite and unknown, it is undoubtable that your configuration of thoughts and perceptions and sounds belong only to you.
Wear them, with strength and vigor, or waste them into non-being. For if you do not wear them, they will rot.
My soul sings at these words. I feel it in my heart. It soars as I write; it wants to roar, it wants to stretch, reach and grow until the world sees the dragon of my being spread wings in all its glory and pride.
To stop is to die. So don't.
Roar. "
Chapter 2:
Thoughts on this story? I'd love to hear them — me@jpogden.com
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