Someone named Angel was supposed to go with us tonight, but earlier today she got caught in the drain of her jacuzzi and almost drowned.
I don’t trust anyone named Gavin.
Trent senses I’m tense and says, “What do you want me to do? You wanna lude, is that it?” He pulls out a Pez dispenser and pulls Daffy Duck’s head back. I don’t say anything, just keep staring at the Pez dispenser and then he puts it away and cranes his neck.
Eyes suddenly focus in on the eyes of a small, dark, intense-looking guy wearing a Universal Studios T-shirt sitting two booths across from me. He’s staring at me and I look down and take a drag, a deep one, off the cigarette. The man keeps staring at me and all I can think is either he doesn’t see me or I’m not here. I don’t know why I think that. People are afraid to merge. Wonder if he’s for sale.
Romeo Void blared out of the sunroof.
And then I flashed on: When you talk to me you’re really talking to yourself, dude. I was still haunted by it.
At our last session – yesterday, in fact – the psychiatrist I’ve been seeing for the past two months asked, “What method of contraception do you and Evelyn use?” and I sighed before answering, my eyes fixed out the window on a skyscraper, then at the painting above the Turchin glass coffee table, a giant visual reproduction of a graphic equalizer by another artist, not Onica. “Her job.
My life is essentially uncomplicated.
I concentrate on the Absolut and cranberry I’m holding and it looks like a glassful of thin, watery blood with ice and a lemon wedge in it.
Have you ever wished that you could disappear from all this?
I thought I was going to cry but it passed.
The next morning over a breakfast of bran muffins and kiwi and Evian water and wheatgrass juice, Ann mentioned something about buying a BMW and I had to hold back a scream. It was clear that this had not been my best term; it was clear that I was losing it.
Walking with Debbie, our sunglasses on, I suddenly felt I was a model in a commercial, we were a couple in a travelogue who barely knew each other, which led to the notion that I was actually begin watched, that everyone was looking at me, whether they were or not, or that someone hidden, from a vantage point I couldn’t see, was monitoring my movements.
And I just stood there in the fading afternoon light, realizing at seventeen that I was already staring into my past – that the past had a meaning that would always define you. I remember this being one of my first moments nearing adulthood, when I realized how powerful memory was – or at least it was the first time it hurt the most. And there was nothing I could do about the pain of the past – it just settled over me.
Hey,” Price says. “I’m depressed, I mean impressed.
The day really became effortless once you faked it and it actually became more real because of your changed demeanor; the act became the reality and it affected everything in what seemed like a positive way. In fact, it was preferable to reality.
I had all the characteristics of a human being – flesh, blood, skin, hair – but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that my normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning.
Redken product that prevents mineral deposits and prolongs the life cycle of hair.
And since I felt so alone that day it became a friend.
Love cannot be trusted.