~Banal

I am sitting cross-legged on my couch with a friend of mine. She is telling me about her day. I think this is how friendship works. She shares first, then I go, then she talks again. Her body is animated when she speaks, often gesticulating wildly when her emotions run high. She describes things with consistent narrative beats. A to B, then C. She talks in literals, describes things, concerns herself with the grounded and the mundane and the earthly and I want to blow my brains out and paint the floor with my aching boredom.

This is my feeling, unable to wholly be encompassed by words, yet sat on the tip of my tongue. An irritant for a writer, to be certain. It flits about at the edge of my consciousness, taunting me, animating and taking a sentient form. I ache to know it better. I would tear out my hair to find it. I would scratch and rend at my skin, dig down to find the dastardly thing buried somewhere inside me. It itches me everywhere. I want so badly to scream and rage and impotently, helplessly, smash and overturn my belongings.

My friend is still talking. She has not noticed my discomfort. I have not provided her any sign of my grotesque, flaccid desire to extricate this cursed thorn in my side. I can hide it well. I drink often, to forget that I feel this way, and for short whiles, when wine seeps from my pores and I am a placated, lumpish drunkard, I fool myself into thinking I can no longer feel the spineless, hidden visage of my perverted yearning peering atop the recesses in my mind.

She lacks depth, she lacks any interest. She is an unexciting, unstimulating human, and I have lost all my patience for her being this way. Nothing of her captivates me. I want to be obsessed, inspired, turned upside down with envy or concern or joy or ravenous excitement. I am sick to utter death of banal, balanced, grossly tepid mediocrity and this feeling of mine knows all this and will not let me think of anything else.

It is the cousin of my hope, it is the step-brother of my wanderlust. It is telling me that something, somewhere, somehow, could be different. Not just different, but better—and in a way I cannot presently imagine. It is a giant melting pot, the amalgam of every inch of my narcissism, every speck of my daydreaming and just enough rationalisation to believe I am not delusional. I can trick myself different ways—like how my mother’s alcoholic mind can find any excuse to turn back to the drink—to think that life might change in ineffable ways someday. A new colour or flavour, perhaps. I haven’t seen even a fraction of the sights the world offers, but I fear greatly that I might’ve already felt too many of the feelings. It keeps me up at night, worried sick that the novelty is gone and that this is all there is.

I know this woman must have more going on. I cannot be the only crazy one. What of her lusts? Does she feel things crawling under her flesh that drive her to her own melodrama and madness? Are there aches and urges that she dares not tell anyone? How can I tell her that it is safe inside, that we are warm and cozy compatriots, that she can express these things and I have only love in my heart for them and for her. I want to know what she keeps even from herself. But I can see nothing behind her eyes. She selfishly refuses to share how she concerns herself with these things as I do, and so my childish rage overflows and runs circles around the room.

I want more from her, and I cannot have it. I am the only real person. There are deceivers amongst us. I have found the philosophical zombies and they were our brothers and sisters all along.

Why should fantastical existence be the sole domain of the fictional and the bohemian? Do I need to live in the gutters of Paris or the bowels of San Francisco to be relieved? Could it be that my passport has denied me satiety? The world’s most unsteady artists have grasped feverishly at this same feeling, packaging it for consumption in their own ways. I am yearning for what could be, much to my own detriment, burning myself out on prophetic visions of things that aren’t real. I am boxing with shadows and losing. It makes a grown man weep to know all the impossibilities that cannot be.

This woman—still talking—goes on complaining, as we all do, about the trivialities of existing, as though that is the most important thing right now. I am busy with myself right now, and do not care for her unremarkable drama. I am not moved by her fiancé failing once again to live to her standards. He is a cad. I am a prick. Oh, I want to beat them both senseless and most of all myself, to quiet the rattling in my head.

Instead, I barrage her with nonsense questions. I can feel my facade slipping. I want to find the sequence of words that might press past her veneer of regularity and penetrate to whatever oddity she is when she is by herself. I desire to shake her and scream her awake. I am possessed most of all, by how she cannot see my frustration in front of her face. Surely her spirit can recognise my own? Surely my soul bellows loud enough to be heard by someone else? I just want to be validated, to seek solace in a kindred spirit. My vain desire for connection does not exist on the plane of her own and it is my own fault that I have become so consumed by fantasy and an exceptional kind of self-indulgence so we can no longer speak the same language.

I do nothing. I say nothing. I nod politely and listen to her complaints and I hide away this part of myself until I one day might smell my scent on another person. I am still waiting.