Page 4 of Way Down Deep

I can’t remember the last time anyone sent me a letter, or I sent one to somebody. Not even a heartfelt email. People don’t really do that these days—take turns, wait for the other person to finish saying what’s on their mind.

We don’t tell stories about ourselves anymore, just let the mundane blurt from our brains into our phones, hit send, half-read the reply in a rush, knowing it’s our turn to blurt again, to send a photo of our boring lunches or our boring faces, made very slightly less boring by the application of a colorized filter.

Anyhow, I’ve found that idea distracting in a nice way.

And I’m finding our correspondence very refreshing. It makes me want to wait until all the pings are in, and to read what you write, then let it settle over me before I rush to word my own reply. I haven’t done that in far too long.

Anyhow. My important something, as you put it, is about as far from cool as a something can get.

That’s a lesson I’ve been learning in recent weeks. That “important” and “cool” rarely intersect. Cool used to be a very big part of my life.

Before I moved here, I owned a liquor store. To say “liquor store” doesn’t paint the right picture, though. It was a boutique, basically, in the most happening part of Albuquerque. The kind of place where parents blow $600 on a bottle of ancient Scotch to give their kid when he graduates law school, where guys my age drop ninety bucks on bourbon in an attempt to convince ourselves we’re connoisseurs, not alcoholics.

I guess I’m probably a hipster. Or was. I don’t have any cred anymore.

I used to, though. My shop was like hipster church. Everyone came by each week to worship and be seen and empty their wallets.

It meant a lot to me, that shop. I picked out every light fixture, stocked it with stuff you couldn’t find anywhere else in the state. Hipsters fucking love hard-to-find shit, and I loved being the guy who found it.

That shop was me. It defined me the way being in a band defined me when I was in high school. I’ve always been like that. Like there’s not enough bones and meat inside me to build a person worth knowing. Like I needed a costume as big as a whole fucking building to pass for one.

And I did pass. I had dozens of friends, all as hip and clever and unique as me. But when shit went south and I had to sell the shop, it turned out I’d picked those friends the same way I had the light fixtures. They looked good, looked right and slick and hard-to-find, but they didn’t really give a shit about the guy behind the counter. They only cared about shining. Same as me.

Anyhow, that was the old me. The new me’s got nothing to hide behind, just this crazy, sad, inescapable anchor keeping me here, neck-deep in my own incompetence twenty-four hours a day.

I’m no one here. I’m that sad American guy who rents the apartment above—get this—the village off-license. It’s so fucking ironic, it could grace a forty-dollar T-shirt.

But that’s plenty about me for now. I want to know more about you. Tell me something. Anything. You seem full inside the way I feel empty. You’ve got poetry for marrow and compassion pumping through your veins. You seem genuine, and earnest. Everything I’m not. So tell me how you do it, stranger.

11.45am

I think the truth is it’s easy to seem full when you’ve spent your whole life not letting anything out. I have years of conversations inside of me; decades of unvoiced thoughts. They’re practically straining at my seams. Honestly, it’s a relief to have someone pluck at the stitches holding them in. To have someone actually ask about me.

I just wish there was something of worth in there to tell you. I have no interesting history—or at least nothing as interesting as hipster Scotch and fake friends and being in a band. I didn’t fall from the grace of some golden false god.

There was no grace to begin with.

Only falling.

I started out above the off-license, you know? Only in my case it’s above an abandoned movie theatre, after dropping out of university and dropping out of every job I’ve ever had and dropping out of humanity. The last time I went outside was a Tuesday, but I couldn’t tell you which Tuesday it was. It could have been the last one in June.

It might have been the first one of five years ago.

Really, I’m the last person you should come to for advice on how to be a person. But if it’s any consolation at all, you seem to be doing pretty good to me. You didn’t have to tell me that story, but you did. And you don’t have to be so honest about everything, but you are. They seem like solid places to start, if you’re trying to rebuild yourself into the kind of person you want to be.

I have faith in you, Smith. Even though I’ve only known you for five minutes, I have faith.

Doesn’t that tell you something?

12.20pm

So we’re both trapped, huh?

Me by circumstances and obligation. You by … what, exactly? Something in your head? Or your past? Help me understand. What on earth could have made someone with so much to share decide to keep it all locked up?

Was it even a choice at all?

Go ahead, stranger. Break my heart. Show me I’m still capable of feeling something so tender.

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