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A comfortable kind of nothing.

Alexander Smith

    When you’re young, people tell you to take risks. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Seize the day. Live a little. It’d be an uphill fight convincing me that this wasn’t a joke the elderly play on youth. See, they build up this idea of adventure. Invincibility. Incredible reward waiting just outside the safe and reasonable for anyone brave enough to snatch it, and then they sell you the idea that you might just be that person.
    But when you reach? The world is waiting to snap that hand right off, let me tell you. You can practically hear them slapping their knees and cackling when it happens.
    When I decided to reach, I had a decent job. It wasn’t flashy, or anything like that, but it paid my bills, and I didn’t feel the need to hang myself by my tye from the rafters. I had a car. Old, but it ran. A fiancé. Cut a long story short, I was on the road to being a minor somebody.
    I still miss it. Even now, as I’m shoving open a sticking door over carpet that’s too thick for the opening. Without thinking, I do as I always had after getting home. Keys on the counter. Shoes off at the door. Empty my pockets.
    I’m not home, though. I’m somewhere that smells like a lavender-masked cocktail of soap, bleach and ammonia. I’m not looking out at a parking lot that frames my old beater, I’m staring at a fence that couldn’t keep out a particularly spirited flea, and carefully curated plants that I’m real certain don’t grow around here on their own. I won’t be going to work tomorrow. I won’t be wandering down familiar streets, past familiar dirt and trash, waving to familiar, sagging faces. My whole world, right here and now, is two slabs, dressed in stripes, pretending to be beds, this rug that could swallow a small dog, and a few chairs all made outta the same plastic and metal as patio furniture.
    They painted headboards on the wall. Can’t imagine why. Before this all gets too much for me, I figure I might try to breathe in the outside. Remind myself that this wasn’t the sum of everything. Remind myself that if I had to, I could shove this shoddy barrier right over, and disappear.
    Footsteps shuffle up behind me, and I catch a glimpse the other end of this spectrum. You can feel the electricity spring off her as she follows along. Grinning ear to ear. Eyes grasping and groping every little detail. Mouth working away in stinging little bursts as she talks about just how great everything’ll be when we get out west.
    I sit down. It’s the only thing I can do here. That, or scream. Or curse. Or cry. She sits across from me, at this terrible little excuse for a table, and I bang my knee turning to face her. I watch, and nod, and smile at what she says. I tell her that I’m excited too. I insist that I don’t mind driving so much. Seeing her smile is almost enough to convince me that this over-extension was wise. That it was reasonable. Smart. Admirable, even.
    Eventually, her talk fades to noise. And that just leaves me alone with reality. It leaves me alone with the fact that I don’t know what I’m doing here, and I don’t know where I’m going.

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