How to say this without hurting feelings? I’ve gotten smarter and I’m bored. I’m a stuffed complaint box. Different types of people hate me. This school administrator with a desire disorder. This color-blind software developer. My wife of twenty years, my son of sixteen. Even that customer service chatbot that caught me in its loop. I was on the airplane when the passenger pointed out that that motherfucker back there isn’t real. Laugh if you want. I’ve sat by that motherfucker too—that rich woman is a hero. When we debriefed in the airport lounge, I hadn’t had a drink in a decade. She was complaining for her refund and was deep in the customer service chat. The war she had started was already over. I missed my flight. Solipsism syndrome has a treatment if you frame it that way.
At first, I felt psychosexual at dinner, I think, like a crime-fighting surfer or a monk in love with a nun. Am I using this word right? I felt invigorated and confused. This was our first date. Rita complained about the professionalization of the game show Jeopardy and men faking orgasms. I was unprepared for this—there’s nothing helpful in my notes—but I felt to be in the presence of a confounding worldview. I chewed and chewed on my bread. Later, she brutalized me in her bedroom, and then gave me a Dixie cup of water and some orange slices. The sun was coming up when I prayed to my late wife. I didn’t tell her everything, but she knew. I evacuated my memories. It was safer that way. Prayer is not a conversation.
We ran through our mutual, amateur interest in particle acceleration results and early Christian anchorites, and then, what is there left to say? Boy, we could use some rain? The last article I read about the LHC said they discovered the gluon responsible for lust and St. Simeon thought the best way to live was on top of a twenty-foot pole. Demons afflicted Syncletica with a mouth infection so bad that the smell repelled visitors. A neutrino was discovered in Antarctica that can be traced to the rapidly spinning blazar at the center of a distant galaxy. However, I got yelled at at work? My favorite sports team won’t make the playoffs? My wife? Yes, it’s hot in Mississippi in August, we could linger on that. But, how incredible that our interests did converge! We stopped talking in a friendly way.
Sean Ennis is the author of Cunning, Baffling, Powerful (Thirty West) and Hope and Wild Panic (Malarkey Books). He lives in Mississippi, and more of his work can be found at seanennis.net.