There’s not much to say about my father, and if there was, you would be the very last person on earth I would tell. As far as shitty lives go, mine wasn’t. I mean, I guess my mom could have been a little less drunk, and my dad could have bought pants more than once a decade, but overall they were cool. I don’t have any huge, sordid confessions to make. I know it probably disappoints you, but the closest I ever came to being molested was on a field trip when I was fifteen and I kind of liked it.
If it cheers you up, that’s possibly the worst story I’ve ever heard. The only thing I can think of to compare is this girl I knew in high school that got high on meth and had sex with a bunch of people in line for a movie. But if anything, she disproves your whole theory. She was really popular, not in a snobby way or anything, just nice and smart and always wearing really interesting clothes. We all thought she was going to be the president or something. I think Jack fucked her once, just to show me how little I mean to him. And by the way, don’t think I didn’t catch that. I don’t know how you know his name, but my ex-boyfriend doesn’t secretly cut himself. He’s too much of an arrogant prick to mutilate his oh-so-perfect body.
Rah-Cha, the girl in high school, I saw her about a week ago at one of those snooty coffee houses where the clerks ignore you. She was sitting with some Maoist guy who kept shouting at everyone who walked in that they were elitist, capital fed pigs. She looked totally mortified. Not because she recognized me, either. She was embarrassed to be with that guy. Like it’s not a big deal that everyone knows she stood holding her ankles and her panties while random guys fucked her, but that’s not as big a deal as being seen with a raving idiot at a coffee house. It was very surreal. When I was leaving she jumped up and handed me her phone number on a napkin with ‘S.O.S.” written over it. I would call her, but things have changed too much.
The difference between you and I, as I see it, is that I’m nothing and I can really feel it. When Jack was around, he bitched that I never came out of my shell. But the sad thing is, there is no shell. I had the whole day off Saturday, I went down to my favorite restaurant in Valencia. The place has a balcony on the second floor but no one was out there but me. It was cloudy, the sky looked like old fireplace ash that had somehow dusted everything below it. The people were grey, the streets were grey, the buildings were slightly darker grey. But I loved it. Everything was the same, blank, powerless shade of nothing and I, for once, felt completely at home. I felt like I had achieved a state of being that was beyond humanity, a state of absolute nothingness. And then this guy came rambling out of a liquor store across the alley in a bright purple suit and ruined it. It was like I was a plain, brown bird in a flock of other plain, brown birds that had been suddenly interrupted by a flamingo. People like you want to be that flamingo, but people like me, we just want him to go away. We don’t care if we never shine, just as long as we don’t have to get blindsided by people who do.
-Ingrid
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