Fiction 2

I had been waking up at 8:30 p.m. for the past few weeks, but since it was my birthday I decided to get up at 5. I put on some decent clothes, and did my hair in anticipation of my birthday celebration. The place was clean, as it had always been since she stopped staying there. I wasn't actually expecting anyone to show up but I got up early just incase the proposition turned out to be real, the birthday part really made no difference to me. I was prepared to sleep all day then head to work at 10:00 p.m. No one at work knew when my birthday was.

I was never ignorant enough to be "suprised" at what I'd become. I was perfectly aware of the way I was wasting away, alone. With the blinds drawn and the lights off, I would wake up, shower, shift the futon into couch mode, watch TV and chain smoke until it was time to leave. I was sure I was forgetting how to speak. I didn't eat much at the time aside from vending machine food. The fact that this was bad for me was indeed a fact that I was aware of, but self pity would just make things worse.
After living in Grand Rapids for 6 months I had no friends in the city, let alone my building. This was fine at first, I had a roommate afterall, and had moved there with the intention of continuing the pursuit of something that made so much sense before. Things were great then, and things were great for the first few months after moving. The place was awesome, she was awesome, my job, though not particularly awesome, was now 10 minutes away from where I lived. Things started to deteriorate around the same time her ignorance started to build. The bills would never pay for themselves, and the sleeping neighbors had feelings too. So did I. The only thing keeping me from cracking, aside from my razor sharp ability to reason, were the weekly visits from my friends and the alcohol they brought with them. The manufactured fun provided me with the opportunity to express my feelings for my departed companion in a healthy way: through disrespect and sarcasm. Mean, yes, but much less than what I was capable of. I would rush home (to my parents') as soon as possible every weekend with the ultimate goal of making normal social contact. The combination of skipping sleep on Saturday morning and the familiarity and safety of my parents' house provided me with just one good night of sleep per week. The pattern seemed to be working out, but it was obviously unhealthy. I hadn't been physically able to eat a full meal in a month, and had extremely painful chronic heartburn. Heartburn, how fucking ironic. One of my many attempts to break her shell of ignorance was to make my doctor's appointment while in the same room.

"Yes, I need to make an appointment"
"I've been having eating and sleeping problems"
"yeah that's fine"

She didn't even seem to notice that I was there, or that I was on the phone. I left my pepcid samples and paperwork on the counter a few days later in hopes of provoking some sort of inquiry, just so I could answer "BECAUSE OF YOU!", "YOU'RE THE REASON I CAN'T EAT OR SLEEP! DON'T YOU GET IT?". It didn't really work out that way. The hardest part of living with her was the fact that I lay restless on the other side of the room while she slept every night. The fact that she was right there, that she no longer wanted to even talk to me, that she seemed to hate me for no particular reason and there was no way I could get her to try to explain it really drove me crazy. Her alarm clock would wake me up from light sleep later in the morning, and I had to lay with my eyes closed and listen to her get ready for work. It was torture. The hardest part of living without her was the fact that all of her belongings were still there, teasing me. I was constantly distracted during my TV watching by the pile of clothes amassed on her bed. Sometimes I would throw my empty pop bottles into the heap. "fuck you, pile of clothes!" The sharpie writing around the door frame didn't help either. A few weeks earlier, she held a large late night party while I was at work. Some drunken asshole wrote each guest's name on the paint with the disclaimer "BUY PAINT TO FIX THIS SHIT". If only it were that easy, jackass.
I was very angry with her about the party, but she laughed at me. She also laughed at the noise ordinance violation that was left under the door the following Monday. I let her know how I felt about the blatant disrespect, and a week or so later, she was gone and I was alone with bills and no good explanation.

Around 8 there was a knock at the door. I jumped up, perplexed as to how my visitor could knock at my door without first being let into the building.

"happy birthday Josiah!"

Two of my friends entered the apartment.

"someone was going in, so we went in after them"
"ah ha"
"we put our money together and bought you a gift"
"sweet, thanks!"
"we didn't have any wrapping paper, so we just used newspaper"
I unwrapped it.
"holy shit, its the thing!"
"yeah, I remembered how cool you thought it was when you and I saw it in the store and decided it was overpriced... We got it anyways"

It was a tiny, highly detailed Asian cork carving in a small glass case.

"sorry I didn't bring a cake like I said I was going to" said my female friend
"no, you said you were going to come up here and bake me a cake" I replied

We ended up walking around downtown looking for a place to eat. Everything seemed to be closing just as we approached. I realized that this was the first time in weeks that I had been outside in the daylight (aside from my weekend commute to Hastings) and one of the few times I had ever walked around since I moved there. We found a place that was still open,"Harry's Brooklyn Pizza", and went in. The single piece of pizza and two fountain drinks I consumed nearly made me sick. I guess I wasn't quite to that point yet, but for the first time in a long time, I was having a great day.
Some of the happiest moments of my tenure in the city were the days we moved my things back home. My friends and I ran across the balconies, pushing loud carts and banging into corners. Hell, at that point I had nothing to lose. At the end of the night we sat on the steps outside and had a small "last time we'll ever smoke here" ceremony in which we reminisced about the other times we had smoked cigarettes on the steps. The time I found a pack of Newports and someone's car keys, then activated a car alarm while smoking a Newport, the time some guy promised us dozens of drunk women and a keg in 15 minutes, not to mention hookups to the VIP room at "the stack" (he went inside after just one of his cousins showed up, empty handed).
Everything came back together when I moved home, but the resentment for the girl who caused me so much distress has yet to cease. Every time I hear from her, begging for forgiveness, I get the same feeling in my stomach that I once had every single day and it's starting to seem that I've become the depressor. My principles and standards keep me from making more stupid decisions, leaving me with only one explanation for my coldness; I bought paint to fix that shit.