And I don’t wanna talk face-to-face, either—that might even be worse. I can’t play games on my phone if you are watching me. Tell me, when was the last time you had some soul-draining emotional talk with someone and came away from it feeling happy and secure and wanting to spend more time with the person who just berated you for forty-five minutes about something you couldn’t give a fuck about? Wait, scratch that. When was the last time someone came at you suggesting a “talk” and it turned out to be anything other than forty-five minutes of being berated about something you couldn’t give a fuck about?!
I have never, in any of my interpersonal relationships, with women or men, proposed to sit down somewhere and have a talk. No one ever wants to sit you down and talk about something good, like how he or she should buy you more stuff; people want to trap you in an uncomfortable chair so they can go through the laundry list of your perceived crimes. And all you can do is sit there like a scolded child, nodding sadly in agreement that yes, you are the literal worst.
I’m not doing any of that. You’d have to trick me into a talk. If I was lucky enough to get a warning text, you would never see me again in your life. That is not a joke. The minute you say, “Hey, Irby, we need to have a talk later,” you can guarantee that my phone number will be changed by the end of the business day. Send me a follow-up e-mail to reiterate that a conversation must absolutely take place and I will be in witness protection by the end of the week. Can’t I just apologize before you work yourself into a lather and save us all a bunch of nervous sweating? I swear to God, I’m really sorry for that thing I did, and I promise I will never ever do that thing again as long as you promise not to leave me any more anxiety-inducing voice mails.
I’m depressed, man! Please don’t ever leave me a voice mail! Lexapro has yet to cure the existentialist horror that is modern telecommunications! I see the voice mail notification pop up and am instantly consumed by dread. I mean, I didn’t pick up, so you should know I’m not emotionally prepared to say words into a phone right now. Why make it worse by saying “Dude, call me back” without specifying why or whether this is time-sensitive information?! Like, literally, someone better be dead, or even better, the caller better be dead and calling from the grave to give me the info I’ll need to collect that insurance. THIS IS HOW MURDERERS ARE MADE.
I am a simple person. Kind of. I mean, I don’t really have any dreams beyond comfortable pants and unlimited sparkling water. When I was little, I was never brave enough to declare what I wanted to be or what I wanted to do, because I grew up in the kind of situation where you just wanted to make it to the end of the week, or the next school day, or to graduation, or to work, or to the next paycheck, or to Red Lobster every once in a while to celebrate. I don’t like to think more than a few weeks ahead; I just ride the least choppy wave and see where it takes me. I like to sit at home in mild terror as the world rages outside without me, hoping that no one is going to drop by and expect me to come up with a humorous anecdote or ask me to have an opinion on something. I like to get in the car and turn some funeral music up real loud (King Krule, Mazzy Star, anything dark and brooding) and drive around looking at all the nature I don’t want to get on me. I want to go to Walgreens and have the cashier pretend I wasn’t just in there yesterday, buying the same exact shit. All I want is for the self-checkout at Target to be open—is that a crime? I also just want to pay whatever the fuck things cost, without question, even if I think it might be wrong and especially if there’s a line forming behind me, because arguing with someone who can smell you is embarrassing. I can feel my organs shutting down whenever I’m forced to stand behind a woman demanding forty cents off a bottle of ketchup despite the fact that she forgot her coupon at home. As if she is red-faced and raging at Mr. Heinz himself, rather than Jonathan, who has to ride his bike home and write a book report after this.
I will never be snappy with a waitress or lose my mind on the phone with customer support or make small talk with someone else’s kid, because, honest to God, I would rather eat my own teeth than suffer any more humiliating human contact. I promise you that I will never ask the woman at the wine shop about her shiny new engagement ring or wonder aloud about whether the pizza delivery man caught that flu that’s been going around. I will smile politely at people walking their dogs, but I will never grab them by the arm and say, “Hey, what breed is that?” while they struggle to decide how to courteously answer my question with a steaming bag of shit in their hands. While I do appreciate a succinct elevator pitch, I am balls at delivering one effectively. Joanna, who owns the indie bookstore down the street from our crib, asked me the other day to give her the name of a good book I’d read recently, and because I value her opinion, I stood in front of her for, like, three real minutes cycling through every book I’ve rated on Goodreads in the last three months trying to determine which one would be the most impressive. I just stood there with my ears on fire wondering if I should just say A Little Life because no one would think you were dumb if you made it all the way through a seven-hundred-plus-page book. And I didn’t; I did not make it through that book, because a quarter of the way in, this other book about teenagers in love that I wanted to read came out, so I abandoned the smart shit to spend an afternoon sobbing over a story about children I could have given birth to having sex.