Sam Pink - Person

I’m walking around Chicago, feeling like a piece of shit.

It’s winter.

There are many people out.

I pass an older homeless man and he is dressed almost exactly like me.

Almost exactly.

I want to stop him and grab his shoulders and say, “So I make it past 30 then?”

But he walks by me.

Eye contact is bad I think.

I don’t make eye contact with any girls because I don’t want to ruin their night and make them feel bad.

I make eye contact with some guys because sometimes I just feel angry.

Eye contact is bad I think.

At a stoplight, I wait to cross and there are two men next to me.

They’re holding hands.

I imagine myself as one of them, standing next to me, this dipshit with an ugly face.

Later on, will one say to the other, “Hey did you see that asshole at the stoplight. Why does he live on the same earth as us, with his dipshit-ass ugly face.”

And then the other man will agree in some way, if only in quiet.

Christmas music plays from someone’s car at the stoplight and I can hear it through the closed windows.

Will I get run over tonight.

Is tonight the night of magic.

It’s totally possible that something will suddenly kill me.

And I accept that.

I always think about getting randomly hurt and how awesome

it would be to just immediately be changed and removed from my situation.

To have something direct to worry about, like a broken leg or a really big cut.

I’d no longer be a person blending in.

When the stoplight signals to cross I wait to take a step until the other men walk away.

I don’t want to walk next to them.

It is horrible for me to be walking at the same pace next to someone on the sidewalk.

And like all others, these men pass me.

Now knowing that in infinite space there is a pure negative, shaped exactly like me.

With no intentions of making friends.

Insecure enough not to make friends so as not to lose them.

There’s ice on the sidewalk.

Will I fall.

If I fall, and just stay there, will someone eventually help me.

Will a police officer walk by and say, “Stay there,” motioning with his/her hand to stay still.

Will I just roll into the gutter and disappear.

I don’t know where I’m walking.

This is Chicago.

On a street with a lot of bars and people yelling.

Earlier I walked to Lake Michigan and I stared at it.

It remained where it was, and I stared.

No one else was there.

It seems like there and here are just as loud somehow.

It’s cold and I hate everyone I can see.

All of my strength is required to hate this many people but I manage and I am proud of my effort.

I expect the same of everyone else.

No, I don’t know.

I wonder what my roommate is doing right now.

Last night he knocked on my door and asked me to check the back of his neck for pen marks.

He said, “So, I think there’s a pen loose in my bed and, I think I slept on it.”

There were no pen marks.

I made sure not to touch his body while checking.

It seems likely that if I were to give form to what I believe is my roommate’s abstraction of me, it would be some parts of a pencil eraser that someone blew to the floor after erasing something they didn’t want someone else to see.

I walk by a group of people standing outside a bar and someone almost bumps into me.

I imagine myself pulling this person apart with my hands.

Just pulling off pieces of face and neck and upper-chest.

Just ripping an arm off with a single pull.

Could I accomplish that.

What would this person think of himself if I were to do that.

Would he fight it, or accept it as inevitable.

What would the people watching think.

I walk by them all and smell perfume and I am no different.

It feels like practice.

I concentrate on my heartbeat and worry it is never going to stop.

Then I worry that I will have a heartattack, and that the heartattack will hurt.

For a very small amount of time I can fully understand the pain that would accompany a heartattack, a heartattack so bad it rips my heart into more than one piece.

And I can see either accepting everything that happens, or accepting none, but in between I lose hope.

I can accept the heartattack of caring that much or that not-enough.

What if I have a heartattack tonight and say something really dumb when it happens, like, “oh jeez” and then make a dumb face when I fall.

What if that happens to me right now.

People would laugh.

I would laugh.

Oh my.

Once past the area with all the bars, there is an outdoor ice rink to my left.

People are skating there together.

None invited me.

No, I don’t know, I mean that’s how I want it.

And the light inside the rink is what these people use to skate.

And that light is the same that gives them to me, not me to them, because I am outside its area on the sidewalk.

My nose is cold and my nose is also dripping.

Oh my.

Nobody at the ice rink looks at me.

In passing.

They don’t because it would be weird to be looking at someone this far away.

Arranged relationships with other people that technically never happen.

It feels like practice.

Yes.

Not quite a piece of shit myself, but the streak for sure.

For sure the area the shit passes over and leaves behind parts of itself.

At the streetcorner just beyond the sound of the ice rink, there is a long patch of ice on the sidewalk that I have to slide over in very small glides.

Like, I use maybe two inches per glide to be safe.

As I’m doing this, I hear my cat meowing and it sounds like he is in my coat somewhere behind me.

My cat is not there when I check.

He died a while ago I think.

This makes sense.

It sounded so real when I heard him meow, but it didn’t happen.

Just the thought of my cat’s ghost is enough to make me feel like there’s like, a sour feeling in my head area.

I want to itch my back until I feel pain.

No, I don’t know.

I see a billboard with a young girl on it.

The young girl is bald.

The billboard is for cancer research.

I feel bad about people with cancer.

I think that if I discovered I had cancer I would immediately say the word, “Phew.”

Phew.

On the sidewalk in the cold weather, the word “phew” scrolls through my head in big block neon letters.

Yes.

I watch it scroll, and I approve.

It’s like everyone I see now has a haircut.

Having a haircut seems like something important.

It seems defining.

I’ve noticed my thinking towards another person is immediately altered if that person has clearly had a recent haircut, still shaped.

Maybe that’s my problem.

Cutting my own hair for years has maybe contributed to me feeling different from other people in a fundamental way.

Could that happen.

I just need to get haircuts.

Maybe that’s my main problem.

I need to get haircuts from now on.

Across the street there’s a bookstore and I walk to it.

I think maybe I’ve read here before (read in front of people on purpose not like randomly out loud among other people who just happen to be shopping).

Will they remember me there if I go in — the employees and the people there.

They will not.

Will one of them shoot me with a water pistol full of some dangerous chemical.

They will not.

I realize it’s not the same bookstore.

I go into the bookstore.

Inside there is a girl walking around and she is pretty to me.

She has a pretty face and a pretty body and it feels nice to be close to her.