So it’s the end of the workday. I’m feeling anxious and hypersensitive — a state not caused but no doubt exacerbated by having had too much coffee.
Shamefully typical.
I’ve just bought a six pack of Labatt Ice, a lighter, and another carton of smokes, damning myself for buying the cigarettes because I told myself, fucking told myself that after the previous carton I was going to focus on transitioning to vaping instead.
Still unhealthy: yes, admittedly. Nonetheless: relatively healthier, or so I’ve surmised.
Exiting Circle K, I walk stiffly between a big ass van that’s parked beside me and enter the truck. Just as I’m shutting the door, I hear a familiar, kind of sexy voice.
“Small world.”
“Hey,” I say, turning my head to my left, still caught up in my anxiety and self-loathing as I look towards the girl sitting in the passenger seat of the van.
That’s when terror strikes me.
I don’t know if it’s my anxiety-riddled brain, the darkness of her van, the darkness of the truck, the dirty, scummy, honestly revolting driver-side window of mine or some utterly catastrophic cocktail of all the aforementioned elements, but I can’t for the life of me make out her face.
Oh no. Oh fuck.
“I see you everywhere now,” she says.
I know that voice. Even the bit of body language I can pick up. She’s attractive, I ascertain that much, but that’s the length of it. How can I be so blind?
Is it my anxiety? The dirty window? Or is the dirty window just a metaphor?
I don’t want to ask her who she is, though, as that would make me seem like a total asshole. So I struggle. Juggling other potential responses and trying to see her face simultaneously.
Times passes. In retrospect, I realize: too much time.
That’s when I realize I’ve just been staring at her for an uncomfortably long time like a dumb-ass deer hypnotized by the headlights of a semi speeding towards my pathetic, utterly alien self — inviting an impact destined to decimate anything left of my fragile self-image.
“Have a good night,” she says, sweetly, and I somehow sense mercifully.
“You too,” I say, slowly and cautiously backing up the truck, leaving, and all the way home beating myself up for being an awkward little shit less than half a decade away from being half a century old and still not having managed to adapt properly to social situations.
I mean, what is wrong with me?
Really, man, I hate being so fucking awkward. If I can’t change it, one would have expected me to just have embraced it by now.
In retrospect, I think I might have known who she was. Maybe.
In any case, in the end, the awkward reaction was what it was: pathetic.
Far more within the realm of my control, though: I really, really do need to clean that window already.
Honestly, it’s fucking gross.
The deeper issue would seem to require deep-seated psychological reconditioning, sure, but the other? A roll of paper towels and some goddamn Windex.
I have those ingredients, in the very least. I can do that.
So first thing tomorrow…
Chronicles of a Madman. 