bad

perhaps a walk

You wake up this morning and you feel bad. Your alarm goes off and the first thing that occurs to you is how bad you feel. You get up. In the mirror your dry skin, your greasy hair, the absence of something in your eyes, these things make you feel sad for the soul stuck inside of your body. Are you okay?, you want to ask that thing in there. That’s how bad you feel: so bad that you are feeling pity for the skin bag that huddles around your very soul. As if you could stand on your toes and look down to the clasp of your being through your nostrils, shout down the dark hole: Are you okay in there? Can I get you anything? It’s a badness without borders, a badness that makes you cringe and shudder around other people. That’s what you dislike most about the badness: that it won’t cohere into a shape you can dismantle. That it’s not something you can screenshot and send to the eighteen people you haven’t texted back. People you like! Love, even!

You go to work, all horrendous and sharp-cornered and worried everyone can smell it on you, the bad, the unanswered texts, and something about this is freeing. You find even while bad, even shattered, you are still able to send emails. Talk on the phone. Express competence. It’s shocking.

Perhaps a walk. Perhaps a walk and a cookie and calling your mother. Perhaps buying something new: a bedspread. Perhaps the museum. Perhaps a Meeting. You lie in bed at night and try to think of something, anything that sounds genuinely enjoyable to you. It all requires warmth and a body of water. This worries you. You wonder if you should commit your life to this: a warmth, a body of water. You wonder if you should be committed. When you were eighteen, a doctor diagnosed you with chronic something-or-other. You can’t remember the exact diagnosis and it doesn’t matter. What matters? That you will sometimes turn a corner and see its shadow, the bad. It will catch up to you and your hair will turn oily, the lines next to your eyes will deepen, you will become certain that the sheets on your bed in your small and dark apartment are the only things that could possibly hold you.

You will be wrong.

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