Fiction.

You’d Be Surprised

I guess it’s this sort of wanting to be.

 I was walking in the park last night. It was dark—it gets dark so early now. I didn’t bring my headphones. I wanted to hear the calls of nature, the birds and the branches overhead. But mostly I just heard voices. Phone conversations and late first dates and commands to dogs. That was okay. But I couldn’t hear my own voice, the one that usually didn’t stop speaking inside my head. I was worried. I tried walking away from the people, walking faster, not paying attention. 

I almost ran home. I  shut the door and panted in the dark. I had forgotten to make the bed. There was the pulp stained glass of my orange juice from two days ago still on my bedside table. A basket full of unorganized laundry pressing against the half open closet door. I didn’t need the light to see. There was the overflowing tissues and the ripped up pages of old diaries in the trash. I would glue it all back together, I was half sure, half so tired that it couldn’t ever happen. 

My roommates weren’t home. I was grateful, for that, at least, but also scared, too. They hadn’t been back for a while. Was it some holiday I forgot? Last Christmas I stayed here alone because I had lost track of the days. Funny, right, how you never realize? I needed a new lampshade. The old one—what happened to it? One morning I woke up and it was gone, just the too bright glare of my energy efficient fluorescent bulb. 

I met a therapist once. She had such a lovely office. Calm pretty blue walls and an orchid. She had the loveliest cheeks. I told her that. And she looked unsure, then laughed. I wondered if she was transcribing our conversation into her spiral notebook. I shook her hand seriously at the end and told her I probably couldn’t see her again. She blinked fast and I saw the black mascara flakes in between her lashes.

I was okay, I promised her. I would write her a note telling her so if she couldn’t remember. I wrote her the note the next morning, on a folded piece of yellow legal paper. I never sent it though. I thought she was probably okay, probably meticulously watering her orchid. They are so hard to take care of.

I have trouble remembering the past, my childhood. People always have these stories. Like my old boyfriend. He told me a story about when he was three and was scared by the goats in the petting zoo and ran screaming and how his mother caught it on video and laughed and laughed at the tears streaked down his face. I wondered if he only remembered because of the video but he told me, no, he remembered it in person. 

I remember I had a birthday party once. I was wearing a very green dress with a very full skirt and neat white socks and shiny black shoes. The cake had green icing on it because it was my favorite color. I had trouble blowing out all the candles. And then the smoke scared me, that shy sliver from the burnt candle tip. I wouldn’t eat the cake because I thought it was poisoned.

Was that a real memory or was it because my mother told it to me so much? Whenever she got angry she yelled but after that she would look at me and tell me that story and her eyes looked small and hard.

My job though. I find it nice. I shelve things in the supermarket when it’s late and closed but the lights are so bright it’s like a mid summer afternoon. And I don’t have to smile at the customers and the others are so heavy lidded and filled with sigh that they rarely talk, and I don’t have to remember anything except where the cans and brands go and how they stack one on top of one another, perfect pyramids. 

I buy a lot of nail polish from drug stores. So many variations on the same shades! I line them at the edge of my desk against the wall and have my own little rainbow. But then the papers and receipts pile up on the desk so much they become invisible, or simply coated with dust. I hate the feel of dust on my finger tips. 

Sometimes my roommates look at me funny. Are you okay, they ask, I look at them and say yes, thank you, I am. I think they are okay too. Isn’t that the best way to be, just okay? My old boyfriend said he was in love with someone else. I met her a few months later, at the restaurant that he and I always used to go. When she laughed she opened her mouth so wide you could almost see down the length of her throat. When he watched her laugh I could see that he wanted to laugh too. 

(Source: paintedfictions)

#fiction #flash fiction #short story
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