Page 7 of Way Down Deep

Anyhow, I was thinking you and me, we’re like Chat Roulette in the wild. But when I think harder about it, we’re not. Because you didn’t ask for this. You didn’t sign up and hit Connect or Chat or whatever the fuck the button’s labeled. I barged in like a drunk stumbling into your living room, and you were nice enough to rub my back while I puked in your flowerpots.

So yeah, that wasn’t fair, my thinking you owe me a goddamn thing. You’ve offered up more than anybody could be expected to.

But that doesn’t change how it felt, getting to hear about you. You didn’t give me much, but I sucked it down like the whiskey I’m telling myself I won’t drink tonight after the boy goes to bed.

Tell me a little more. Please. Tell me what you’d eat, if you could eat anything, and what you’d watch while you savored every bite. What you’d read in the tub afterward. What you’ll think about while you lie in bed or on the couch or the roof or wherever it is you don’t sleep at three in the morning.

(And so you know, it’s never too late to go barefoot. Even if you die tomorrow, there’s always tonight.)

As for me, I’m eating rice, all cheesy with broccoli. The boy seems to like it.

Normally he eats exactly three bites of whatever I put in front of him and that’s it, he just quietly sets his fork down and stares at the rest while it congeals until I take it away. He’s real skinny, with a big head full of the same blond curls I had when I was his age, before my hair turned brown.

His grandma—his mom’s mom—told me he’ll only eat these salty-as-fuck microwave noodle packets, and she gave me like twenty of them, but fuck that. I can’t do much for this kid, but I can at least try to get some real food into him.

Anyhow, I made us brown rice with cheddar cheese and butter and broccoli, and he’s still eating it, a fork in one hand and the other swiping at the iPad. It sounds like nothing, but I feel like Rocky standing at the top of those steps.

Fuck, I’m so tired. Tell me more if you’re ready, stranger. Don’t delete a thing. Don’t censor yourself.

Show me all your soft, bruised, homely parts, because that’s all I’m made of anymore. That’s all I’ve got, and frankly that’s all I want to see. I spent thirty-four years only caring about facades, and shock of shocks, it left me hollow.

So fill me up.

5

Tuesday

6.33am

I thought about your last words way too much. In fact, I spent so long thinking how to reply that I fell asleep at an odd time, and woke up at an even odder time, and now six in the morning feels like one in the afternoon.

Though at least I now know how I feel about your words. Truth is, I kind of want you to be a dick about it. It’s a novelty to have someone be a dick about me not giving enough, rather than a dick because I’m giving too much. The conversations I do remember from college were all me boring people to death, then falling silent over a hint of disinterest. I would listen to stories about other people’s lives for hours, just to avoid seeming selfish or like I was monopolising things.

So you’ll see a lot of me trying not to be a monopoly.

Trying not to take up too much space, or semi-apologising for spilling my guts.

But when you get specific about what you want, I can do it. I can tell you what I’m eating right now, as I peck this message out to you in bits and bats: a probably-terrible-for-me ready meal of lamb discs and carrot batons, swimming in a watery gravy.

It tastes about half as good as brown rice and broccoli sounds, but somewhere along the way to where I am now I forgot how to cook. Or maybe I never really learned? As a teenager I subsisted on floury cheese sauce made in the microwave, over pasta that I always managed to boil to death. University was a mess of those death noodles you mentioned, with the occasional slice of toast in between.

Though sometimes I do entertain ideas of more. Of fancy restaurants or hearty home-cooked meals; salads with dressings and sauces made from scratch. Pies with real crusts, gleaming and crisp. Cakes with sweet icing swirls and meat so tender it dissolves in the mouth…

Yeah, I dream about amazing food more than I actually eat it.

As for the book, and the bath:

Little Children, by Tom Perrotta.

And it was so good, I read until the water was flat cold. It had the glossy, enthralling sheen to it that American sadness often seems to have—as opposed to British sadness, which is always so droopy by comparison. We set a cow on fire in a field and go in lifts that stink of piss. Everything is damp and dark and just misses okay by a pathetic margin.

Affairs are conducted in gloomy silence at the seaside.

Thunder never rolls in the distance. There are never any haunting train sounds or bright blue pools or laundry rooms. Nobody finds any poetry.

Not even in our books.

The one I’m starting tonight is already grim and waterlogged. There’s masturbation in it, but the masturbation is a terse, depressing, single-sentence affair. Like any further reflection on it would bring the tone of the book down, or give proceedings a slightly exciting air.

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