He and Me

He obsessively brushed his teeth every day.

He did this because he knew many people in his life who did not brush their teeth daily, and he found this habit abominably disgusting. So every morning, as soon as he woke, and right after he urinated, he furiously put brush to tooth and scrubbed until his gums nearly bled. He usually awoke with a fierce erection, making his flight to the bathroom even more urgent. He was terrified of someone noticing his erect penis, standing proudly outside his body, parallel to the floor, and sometimes had to walk with a hunch or abruptly turn around and pretend he meant to be heading in an opposite direction if he encountered someone in the hallway, already up before him.

This was part of his ritual, which, in his mind, helped define him and bring his entire sense of self into focus. He believed he was the sum of all the things he did, which was unfortunate, because he did not do much. He was a college student, but he neglected his studies. He was a writer, but he neglected the page. He was unemployed and terrified of labor, avoiding it at all costs. Thus, as he was not a very productive person, he felt that his identity was slowly slipping away, or perhaps being taken from him, because he was not entirely sure why he was so inept. To put it simply, he believed he was not capable of doing things that other people did.

Of what other people actually did he was not entirely sure, because he did not yet, in his formative age of twenty-one years, understand the meaning of life, so to speak. Whether it was to work and die (the thought of which petrified him), or form close personal connections with others (which seemed extremely difficult), or get married and have children (which eluded him because of his sexual preferences), or create art (which he was not convinced he was capable of doing either).

In the end, he settled on becoming a consumer. And consume he did.

He gorged himself on fiction and literature, absolutely devoured electronic entertainment, and spent hours transfixed in front of the television. The arts soon came to define who he was, and he found he was nothing more than the sum of the things he was consuming. This was just as distressing as his innate lack of productivity, and ultimately did nothing to help secure his place in the world. He still felt as though he were drifting through time and space, selfishly taking all that he could while giving nothing back.

He was a chronic masturbator, although not because he was sex-deprived. Whenever he had sex (or whenever he ejaculated, period), he felt a deep emptiness afterward that the ecstatic sensations he had just delighted in had not filled. This was not conducive to maintaining a loving relationship with someone, intimately or otherwise, and so he was ostensibly all alone. Masturbating, however, the act itself, frequently made him feel, in the doing of it, that he was getting closer to God, or some mystical force that controlled everyone and everything by subtly manipulating the strings, like some puppeteer of pleasure, and that, while he was doing it, he could almost feel the direct tug on his own invisible strings, the ones that somehow, when wound all together, formed a vast tapestry that he supposed could be called his soul. He was also entirely convinced that absolutely no one else felt this way, so he shared these thoughts with no one.

He frequently wondered whether other people were happy. He liked to imagine that they were, but he was never quite sure. It comforted him, in a bizarre way, to think that there was some magical formula to being happy that he just hadn't discovered yet. Perhaps this being happy, this imaginary thing, was the key to self-identification that he was missing. He began to think that maybe he was not himself, but rather someone else, and that all his attempts to become himself had failed so miserably because he was not, in fact, himself, and could never be himself. But he did not know how to be anyone else other than himself, and since he despised himself and his consuming nature and his existential crises, he felt that his self was most definitely being sucked into a black hole of nothingness and that his entire self was actually made of nothing, that nothingness had somehow become substance, and it was so all-encompassing he could almost reach out and feel it, feel the nothingness flowing through and of him.

So if he was not himself, then who could he be? It suddenly dawned on him that he was me, and I was him, and this startling revelation was so incomprehensible, the ramifications so unfathomable, that he exploded. And all the tiny pieces of himself went spiraling through the time and space of nothingness, and landed squarely in my lap, and I thought to myself how unfortunate that I should be so unlucky as to be this poor sap.