It stings a bit, considerably less than the things I read about myself online thirteen years ago, when I first began my television career. He’s so ugly he’s so gay he’s not funny he’s got no style. The usual stuff. Over time, skin grows thicker and one learns not to go self-searching. I consider composing a private message to this comedian, informing her that she will never find love and most probably die alone because she’s a shitty human being. But then I realize she’ll figure that out on her own anyway. Best not to waste a moment of this beautiful day fanning online flames.
Perhaps Facebook will be less bitchy. I log in to my fan page and see that overnight I have received dozens of private messages written in Spanish and Portuguese, languages I don’t speak. After copying and pasting their e-mails in Google Translate, I learn these people, mostly young men and women in their twenties, are raving about a show called Amor en Linea or “Love Online.” It’s what executives at Discovery networks have apparently renamed Love at First Swipe, a makeover show I created, executive produced, and starred in for TLC. After one season, the president of TLC told me she chose not to renew the show because it “couldn’t find an audience.” Evidently it has found an audience—in South America, but at this point it is too late. I close my laptop.
Suddenly, a fast-moving blur out the window to my right catches my eye. I quickly turn my head and see a bird flying directly toward me and—bang!—right into the center of the hurricane-proof glass. The suddenness of the sight and sound causes me to jump in my seat, my heart racing a bit. I get up and look out the window. Nothing. Just the same blue skies and green palm treetops.
Maybe the bird survived, the optimist in me thinks. I pace around the apartment for a few minutes before I decide to go downstairs and see for myself. I put on my flip-flops, take the elevator down one flight, and as I walk through the lobby toward the courtyard, I realize that if the bird is not dead, he may be crippled. What would I do if I found him with a broken wing or a shattered beak? I wonder. How horrible it would be to see an innocent creature suffer. Now I hope he is dead.
I search the ground directly below our dining room window. Nothing. No tiny avian carcass. No peeping invalid. Not so much as a weightless feather lying in the mulch. The little guy must have hit his head and shaken it off. I am relieved.
And then I find him, dead and curled up in a philodendron. He is lying in what strikes me as the sweet spot of the plant, where the firm stem meets the floppy leaf—a little hollow like the palm of a cupped hand. He is roughly the size of a sparrow and the gray of a dove. He is not a bird one would look at and say, “Now there is a gorgeous animal.” Yet I find his abject simplicity attractive. He looks like the type who, when alive, may have been content with what little he had. What would that be like, I wonder, to be happy with less, to live simply? I was once, I did once. I think. The past is getting hazy. All I know is that now my little bird has nothing, except what appears to be a comfortable spot to begin his inevitable return to unconstrained atoms, some of which may float to the sky, or in my window.
Back upstairs, I notice a very faint stain on the glass; I assume I left a smudge, perhaps with my hand or forehead, when looking for the bird earlier. But the smudge is on the outside, left behind by the bird, an almost perfect three-inch imprint of itself, head turned to the side, wings spread, eye open. A little bird ghost. I consider taking a picture to show Damon, but decide that the impression is too faint. And for some reason to do so seems like a breach of trust. Evidence of the bird’s stupidity will remain my secret, until a rainstorm washes it away.
I need to leave this place, have some breakfast elsewhere. I decide on a nearby restaurant situated amid cycling and yoga studios and a boot camp–style gym. Some class or other must have recently ended because everyone around me is in perfect physical condition and wearing athletic wear.
I sit down at a table near the window and contemplate the menu. I should have the oatmeal because I’m trying to lose ten pounds, but when the waitress arrives, I order the combo platter of scrambled eggs with cheese, a biscuit, and potatoes. At the table next to me, a blonde with perfectly beachy curls is drinking a green smoothie. She must be a model. She has the most flawless golden skin I have ever seen. I don’t know how she could possibly achieve such a color, except by sitting in the sun for no less or more than seven minutes a day, every day, and taking regular baths in rainbows and the blood of angels. She has a little star tattooed on the inside of her left wrist, I assume to remind herself that she is one. Her sunglasses cover three-quarters of her face.
The man she’s with is not a man, despite the fact that he is the perfect specimen of manhood. He is a boy, at least he must be because he has not a wrinkle or a pore, not so much as a freckle. And where did he get all the muscles? One must work for those, right? And yet he looks as though he’s never worked at anything a day in his life.
I was this young once, wasn’t I? Certainly never Roman-statue-quality like these two, but cute enough. Right? Except . . . I didn’t feel cute at the time. There was always something wrong with me. My jaw wasn’t square enough, my shoulders not strong enough, my clothes not cool enough. This couple is literally everything I was not.
I despise them. No. I despise the fact that I want to be them. Just for a day. Either one of them. Or both of them. I don’t care. I want to ride a bicycle shirtless. I want to dance in a club with strangers lusting after me. I want to look in the mirror after taking a shower and not wonder who will eventually win the battle to destroy my body: Father Time set on degrading the strands of my DNA, or Mother Earth with her incessant pull of gravity.
I want to live to be one hundred years old for the sole purpose of tracking these two down. I will find them sitting in a café like this one and reach out both of my withered hands. I will touch them on the slack, mottled skin of their forearms.
“I knew this would happen,” I will tell them.
“What would happen, old-timer?” the boy will say. He will be in his late seventies now.
“The skin. The hair,” I’ll say. “It’s gone. You have been betrayed. You thought you wouldn’t be, but you were.”
“Go away, old man,” she will say, brushing her hand at me. Her star tattoo is gone. Perhaps she had it lasered off when it began to blur and fade.
*
“I hate to bother you,” the girl says. She is speaking to me.
I am snapped out of my trance. “No bother,” I tell her.
“Are you Clinton Kelly?”
“I am.”
“I’m sure you hear this all the time, but I love you.” She has taken off her sunglasses so that she can look me in the eyes.
I am surprised that a human being this beautiful even knows of my existence in the world. It is always strange to hear I love you from a stranger. My instinct is to say I love you in return, but that seems to me disingenuous, condescending. What I really want to say is, You know some of me, and I’m glad you love that part of me but if you knew all of me you might not even like me. Nevertheless, I hope that someday a stranger tells you how much they love you, because it feels pretty good.