millenium baby

Millenium Baby.


In his own foolish mind, he was text messaging on a higher level of consciousness, like a fundamentalist Mormon receiving a strict instruction from God. He had thought it would elevate him to greatness, this gesture born from ultimate kindness and subservience to the Right Thing.  His was a release from the pain inflicted when faces stare at each other, delivering the news from war, of a devastating tragedy, in a neat box without any windows for blame. What would be left to wonder when the message is clear, vibrating against the entrapped walls of a tiny phone screen with persistent authority. Blocks of the Saint appeared like fireflies, flickers of light tricking me into thinking the ugly, common fly is actually the leftover body glitter from a comet’s birthday party. Receiving the message seemed initially to be a heroic stand against the tyranny of emotion, the rejection of the illogical and wasteful use of melodrama. Simple and to the point.  I first read it, and thought him to be a noble citizen, relieved that we would not have to stare at each other in awkward humanity.
How easily we fall out of love, and into numbness where there is no guilt or shame. Staring at the illuminating screen from the quiet of my darkened bedroom, I attached ten different voices with varying tones and inflictions to the typed words, either so thoughtful or so carelessly tapped into his phone. I couldn’t imagine exactly what was in his mind, and without the clues of a bashful grin or a shameful frown, there would be no way to know for sure. It was then that I realized I had just been dumped through a text message that he most likely spent a total of two minutes thinking about before typing it in with the grace and speed of 30 seconds.
As I read the text message again, the world around me seemed to be closer and yet untouchable. This new world was discovered by microchips and invisible tubes of internet thought, seeking out our lifeforce to stay alive and thriving. Hyperspace is what it sounds like, frantic energy moving aimlessly through the space of the world, bumping into each other at lightening speeds so fast we hardly know we were touched. 
         My vanity would not allow me to accept this. Petite I am often called, but I am also firey and spunky, as many small people have to be in this world to be taken as more than a ball to toss around for fun. Small people are often quite rageful when provoked, unlike the favorable image of a tiny burst of giggling joy, desiring treatment not unlike that of a badminton birdie. It was with this small, firey body that I punched the wall in front of me, thinking it was made of Hollywood cardboard. I did not have ice, so shook the limp hand as I hopped to the door and gathered my car keys with my mouth, hoping to look as helpless and unraveled as I felt. The drive was longer than usual, and the darkness of the road ahead made me think that this was all a dream. I would soon become like melted wax and fall into the road, which would soon become a river of black emptiness, sucking me in with a large yawn. The day’s events had created an unfortunate slim all over my skin, and I was exhausted, but I wanted to surprise him with my presence. Such a good girlfriend, he would be absolutely thrilled and delighted. I was a goddess from heaven to be worshipped as if I were carved out of gold, his words not mine, spoken on a lovely evening with fog lapping at our toes, a cynic’s nightmare. As soon as those tragically poetic words had fallen from his lips I wanted to tell him that I detested gold jewelry, that it made everyone beautiful look cheap; instead I kissed him and said thank you. And then, abruptly, without any text message to warn me of the next, he ended everything.
         The text was delivered as an ultimatum, because there’s nothing else it could be. There was no question strategically placed at the end, a question that would in He was not expecting a response. It was also his protection against further skewing of the Truth, of which since I am a girl would be expected to tell my girlfriends horrible nasty things about what he had said. Now it was documented in clean black lettering, straightforward and literal without need for translation. It was fun, but I can’t do it anymore. goodbye, I wish you the best in the future, I can’t be with you anymore. I have to let you go. :I.  Admittedly, I considered that it was generous, the avoidance that could save both of us a needed restful sleep. The bandaid theory. It would have worked, had I been six with autism, without real connection to human beings.
         Turns out, I am a twenty something woman who was dumped over text message, by a boy she had dated successfully for over six years. I do not believe in forever, but please have the courtesy to at least leave an inconsiderate voice mail message that says I hate you, goodbye. Something tangible, with the technicalities of emotion behind it. Turns out, I am not made of fucking gold, and I am not a goddamn goddess from heaven. I am human, and our species’ favorite pasttime is sipping on a delicious bottle of Revenge. I filled mine to the top and chugged it.
          In my heart of bleeding hearts, I knew that all he was doing was acting normal. Everyone communicates over cell phones, it’s normal. Everyone text messages during class and concerts and walking down the street, it’s normal. I should have erased his name from my phone and gone back to sleep, indulging in the comforts of solitude and self pity. But I am not normal, and I don’t enjoy peace and quiet. I thrive in the midst of chaos. I refused to accept that this is how decent people spoke to each other, such the anti emotional, compacted method of speech that is so accepted there are entire books written in the language. Whoever has the time should write a dictionary for text message slang, and sell it to every 5th grader who wants to be cool next year for middle school. For example, a rather adult text message conversation might read, “AFAIK, E1 is OTL, and im BOOMS. WYCM WYGAM?” means something like, “Dude, I am so freaking bored and horny because everyone is out to lunch, will you call me when you get a minute for some phone sex?” The art of conversation, of language, is slowly slipping away. Now, it scratches the surface of life, never penetrating or exchanging or inquiring into the heart of the other. Soon, we may communicate so efficiently it will take but a lift of the finger, a grunt of the throat, to tell others what we want. Food. Water. Sex. A devolving of the species with the self delusion that we are becoming better time savers. When I was your age little girl, you know, like five years ago, we actually spoke to each other while looking at their faces. I am too young to be a grandmother. Before I knocked on his door, I imagined the future, and saw a horrible premonition of a population takeover of Zwinkys who resembled us once, but now were using our own body fluids as a life force for their own fabulous digitized lives. Damn those dirty Zwinkys. So cute and unassuming. You always must be cautious of the cute ones. They can get away with nearly everything.
         And suddenly, without a text message to warn me, he opened the door. I felt my body more presently than I ever had; I was primed for a fight or flight response, and I prayed my instincts would not betray me and choose to sprout wings and fly far, far away. There he was, a startled petri dish subjected to my scientific gaze sent as a cloud of curiosity and mocking. He was certainly not expecting this. “Yes, it’s me in the flesh,” I said, practicing a cocky half smile. “The Princess of Pain, the Sender of Serpents, the Witch of Wilting Penises.” I paused, wondering if I’d ever get the chance to see his wilting penis again. Maybe this break up wasn’t such a bad move. He had a deformed nether region, of which as a good girlfriend I had overlooked mercifully for six years.
When I fell in love with him the first time, it was because of his willingness to trust people he had woven into his life, without judgment and without superiority. He was my American Idol. He should have known better than to break up with me this way. When a woman in love is thrown to the streets, there is generally a quiet hatred that builds, soon turning to nothing at all but cosmetic space, and forgetfulness surrounds her like a death mist. She then agrees to float aimlessly until she finds another reason to love, for the mist to recede gently as if it were merely an unpleasant fart. This happens even though she knows that it will happen again, and again and again until there are calluses on her lungs, because women are wise and also know that temporary love of another is all we ever live for. I did not wish to float. I wanted justice, quick and hard. I honestly have never really cared for floating. It is for crocodiles, who are ugly and bitter about it, who need vindication in the shape of love to love themselves.
         I am not a disbeliever in Love, but I cannot claim to know anything about it. I am considering between the two schools of thought that it is either a delusion we wrap ourselves up in to feel safe, or if it’s based on complete lies and assumptions that reveal themselves later to be self manufactured, wishful thinking lies that if believed with enough conviction, may turn out to be true simply by mental reinforcement. Nothing is sacred anymore, so to the point that my cousin had knocked herself up just so that she could feel like a magic orb, glowing with the promise of miracle, life, and purpose. Religion is tyrannical and corrupt, romance a tool for the Patriarchy to submit women into enslaving themselves to only one man, and everyone is getting fat while they console themselves with these ugly truths with high fructose corn syrup mixed with ground up dead animal stew. Oh when you say it like that... nothing is sacred, not even love.
         “Sweetie,” I tried again, to close his opened mouth that seemed to be a Sesame Street ad for the letter O. The Letter “O”, is for Oh my God, Oh Shit, Oh No. Since he did not seem to adjust to this new information that his girlfriend was paying him a kindly house call, I said, “You do need to explain something to me.” I resisted the urge to add, “young man.”
“Uhhh...” Jared opened his mouth to say more, and I waited patiently. But that was all.
         “What am I supposed to do with this?” I said, holding the phone by my face so that he would be forced to look at me instead of past me, in the empty night.
         “I uhhh...”
         “Did you get Down Syndrome while I was away?” I realized then that I should have sent him an encrypted text message in response, something clever that made absolutely no sense. I know what you mean, those carneys just have the smallest hands. we’ll do it again in paris, I promise. god bless. :L. The bottom part of the L would be interpreted as a drool, or a stroke or something. Should have done that. I’m always so clever in moments when cleverness is least appreciated.
“You don’t need to be so upset,” he backed into his house, as if I were the crazy one. People have killed for less in other countries, and especially in my own. I laughed, and laughed harder when he looked sufficiently freaked. I stepped one foot into his house, right by the door entrance.
         “Honestly sweetie,” I said smiling rather errily in the florescent lighting of his foyer. “I can’t imagine being more calm at this moment. I was just hoping that there was a genetic reason for your recent temporary insanity that I could blame this on. I do not want to blame it on your choice to be nominated the ‘guy who looks like that guy who had the world’s first ass transplanted into his brain’ award.”
         “Look. This is why I didn’t want to talk to you. I knew you would act this way.”
Staring at his genuinely confused and skittish face, I realized what people meant when they said that they saw their lover as they truly were without the veil of lusty romance clouding their sight. I saw what he was, what he really was. This man in front of me was a boy, a lump of playdough, colored yellow with spots of blue and red. Yes, he was a lump of Playdough. It always begs to be tasted, looking like frosting and smelling like comfort. But as any adult who once was a child knows, Playdough actually tastes like the poop of slugs. This is what he was, slug poop. Weird and slimy and soft and icky. Before I could stop myself, my tongue reacted to his prophecy of my obnoxious behavior and hurled a splatter of mucus in his general direction. It landed in the area around his collarbone, which by the grace of God was uncovered by his sleepy time t-shirt. A cheer almost slipped out from my teeth, but I caught it before it broke wind. I remained silent, and breathed, trying not to let it show how fast my heart was beating. Since I was given no satisfaction of a reaction on the other side of my attempt to connect to him on a physical and asexual level, I allowed my voice to stall.
“So what is it then...are you a friend of Dorothy now? What’s his name? Can I be your fag hag? Think of all the adventures we will have together, skipping across meadows, wearing each other’s lipstick... I could tell you about that one time this asshole broke up with me over a text message. We could laugh about it and discuss the psychological reasons why the pussy would do something so cruel to a beautiful, extremely smart, sophisticated, sexy, attractive, mouth watering woman.”
That was not a very good strategy, but it couldn’t be helped. It only inspired his greatest talent, defensiveness, of which I was perfectly aware that it would. When he was five, he wanted to marry his best friend Howie and wear his mother’s dress to elementary school, with his nails painted with all different colors to achieve a shape of a rainbow when he raised his hands. He just wanted to be fancy, but his poor hilarious mother told the story at every family reunion, with the unfortunate concluding twist that he was a big fat gay kid. I couldn’t wait to see what he might throw my way. I grinned fearlessly at his fuming throat, wishing that all veins might burst and destroy him. “So?” I probed, “What’s his name?”
         There were those who thought he would be last picked in life, a lost soul drifting into one temporary job after another, too smart for anything with structure, too proud to let himself be sucked into the spirit of American corporate life, too lazy to do anything great. Yes, he was practically a creative genius in my eyes, but he was also an idiot because he was born a boy with a normal family. Yet, he loved to thrill people with surprise, doing exactly the opposite of what was sent for him to do in the stars. For example, the last time he and I had lunch with my mother, we drank cocktails and thought about the future, and he told my mother how fantastic our children would look. That was only a week ago, but I suppose now that it was a catalyst for him to rotate his mind elsewhere, just to surprise us. So, when I heard the next word it slipped into the air easily, and I wasn’t affected. I knew what he would say.
         “River.”
         He is not a lover of nature, and the River he spoke so plainly of was not, unfortunately, the place where he intended to drown himself after wrapping his cold clammy legs with rope and attaching a brick to it.  River was a name. The name. It was that subtle slap in the face that shouldn’t hurt but after the tenth slap the cheek is so sensitive to the touch. My arms crossed, mirroring an Amazon, the steel tank, warrior, a steady and logical procession to what reason should feel like. Saying River was not reasonable. It tore into my flesh and left me vulnerable to disease and worst of all, social embarrassment, the kind made of memoirs and country songs.
         It was her, the ordinary girl from the suburbs with ordinary parents and ordinary thoughts like who would take her to the prom, who would accept her into their sorority, who would she sit with at lunch today.  She disgusted me because there was nothing that I couldn’t figure out about her. She was honest and did her homework every day on time, and to my knowledge she had never smoked a cigarette or pot or tasted the poison of alcohol. To my knowledge, she was also a virgin, but as I assumed the cool and calculating stance of the Amazon, and saw his panicked face objectively, I knew she was virgin no more.
         The world was suddenly thick with the disease of another cliche that I should have seen coming and stopped it before it became a Lifetime movie. Here was just another boy, with a singular goal of having sex with as many women as possible, just like everyone else. Just like everfuckingone else. I wondered if I had ever actually loved him, or if that was a trick of the mind, the way his had tricked him into thinking that River was somehow better, that somehow different was always better. “I don’t want to hear this story again,” I whispered to myself. I needed to innovate, to create different ways of connecting, mold a future from hope.
         He had deleted everything from the last six years like he was a database of useless information, no attachment to memories stored inside. He had forgotten how my eyelashes felt against his neck, the taste of my mouth, the smell of my perfume strategically rubbed against his shirt so that it would smell like honeysuckles when he woke up the next day. I secretly envied his talent for switching life on and off as he seemed to do so naturally, without any signs of guilt. I wanted that badly, to be less than human, to give into mechanical urges that could lessen the pulsating pain of living.
         One drop fell from my eyes, and that was too many. I wiped it off roughly with the bottom of my palm, and felt my entire self bleeding out into the ground, dissolving as soon as it touched the earth. “River,” I echoed weakly. “How easy life must be for you now,” fell out of my mouth like tiny diamonds, each word sharper than the last.  How easy you must think other people are.
         “I love her,” he said. A tiny shrug. “I’m sorry. I don’t want you to become angry and do anything stupid. Just please, let it be what it is.”
         If my eyes closed halfway, I could pretend that he was trapped in the teeth of my eyelashes, closing on him, a Venus flytrap for lying and cheating motherfuckers. Escape from life is our greatest accomplishment. We have longed to escape from our limitations, our emotions, our endless search for a man made purpose. I knew that he thought River was the One, just as he knew I was. It was just a way to entertain ourselves temporarily. That is all it was. It didn’t matter, because nothing matters until we make it matter. But knowing that did not make it easier to understand.


“She barely likes you. All she wants to do is torture you and then leave you so that she can observe what you’ll do to win her back.” Don’t you know this? Are you really this dense and obtuse of a person?”
         Shifting back and forth, he became eleven again, then one, wanting to crawl back into his mother’s womb. His hands lay open by his sides, his face peppered with a mixture of sleepiness and boredom. Now I was nothing more than a mailman, a door to door salesman, a girl scout begging for cookies for the third time that day. His absolution into the void of silence was anything but heroic.
         I laughed. There was nothing else to do. “This isn’t a machine you’re talking to, Jared. This is real life here. People need some kind of contact with others, you know. Or do you, know.”
“I want someone who offers more than you will ever be,” he said casually, softly, like he had been waiting to say this to me for six years. I wanted to bite his eye off. It was almost the most ridiculous statement, yet I felt sincerity vibrating from his lips, his lowered stare, his quivering jaw. It was almost adorable. It felt like a business transaction.
Whenever I become nervous in an awkward situation, my arms fling out, and I become an animated character of my sober, sane self, hidden inside that pair of jeans and t-shirt. I become high pitched, squealing my words as if I were standing on a pit of lava, and my hair pricks up with frizz involuntarily. He, on the other hand, tended towards contraction. His body folded in on itself, he crossed his arms and tried to contain himself into a pressurized box that he created with his mind. So he did now, crossed his arms and hunched over, wishing it all away. It was 2:30 AM, and he was probably very tired.
“Fuck that asshole, that’s not why and you fucking know it.”
“Why must you be so hostile? I’m trying to speak to you calmly.”
“Thanks for trying to calm down the outrageous bitch here, breathing fire down your neck. Are you completely out of your goddamn mind? What has happened to the world!” I consulted the night sky. People always turned to the sky for answers, but rarely did they get them.
“The world is just fine,” he said.
What a prick. He would say something like that, just something so innocent and grating that I would sound melodramatic if I disagreed. I bit my nails and stared at the ground, eyes wide and thinking. “You can’t keep looking for someone to complete you. That’s not how life works.”
“This isn’t your life. How can you know how another person’s life works?”
         “It’s life. Life affects us all the same way. We all want the same things, and we all try to find them in the same dumb fucked up ways. Some of us realize how stupid we are, and some don’t. It’s that simple. You will never find what you are looking for with her.”
         “Yeah,” he smirked so condescendingly. “I forgot how smart you think you are. What else does that genius brain know.”
         Manners for one, boy. At least my mother taught me never to break up with someone over a text message.  “She doesn’t like you,” I repeated. If they believe it strongly enough, it becomes Truth.
         “Look, it’s late.” He frowned, and I recognized that dull glimmer in his eyes. It was the same look he gave the lady at the DMV. But he broke character for just a moment, catching the moonlight’s beams of romance and perhaps remembering how my skin felt against his mouth.
My heart suddenly felt a passionate resistance to this unwanted path that was chosen for me, and began rebelling against my passive aggressivity, against my sarcastic defense moves. But even my heart seemed to come to terms with reality. I think my heart realized that in the end that the relationship would hardly be worth fighting for. “Well, so it is. I should let you go jerk off to Justin Timberlake while you light incense and collect your unwanted baby junk in a Power Rangers sock.” He did have Power Ranger socks still, and I had never made fun of him for it but had always wanted to. “I always thought you were smart enough to realize how stupid you are. ” And like George Castanza, I must always leave on a high note. So I paused and stared straight into his eyes before saying, “I guess your father was right about you after all.”  My feet swished around towards the dewy grass, and I felt him watch me as I walked away. The high note is a secret and delicate art; it must be delivered as the last word or else left ineffective. Inconspicuous enough, and forgotten immediately. Later though, he will begin obsessing over the tiny phrase, dissecting it, until you successfully pricked into his soul with a blowtorch.
I sat in the car, hugging myself tightly because nobody else would. I did not want to accept this dawning of a new kind of love story, one littered with sophisticated jadedness and hostility, a rejection of the romance that our parents were trained for, a directionless sense of who we are and what we should be doing. It makes people say things like “why buy the cow when you can drink the meal for free?” and laugh about it while bonding together over apathy. Well, this is the new millenium, I told myself. I’d better get used to it, if I want to survive the takeover of machines. I drove home and without thinking, watched The Terminator until I fell asleep.