"Misnomer" short story chapter 1

just a bit of chapter 1

A quick blurb into the life of "Pope".

It costs 20 bucks to crush a dream. 

20 euros I guess I should say. I’ve been mixing the words dollars, bucks and euros for nearly a year now. And though I often confuse them, whatever currency I land on, I don't have a lot of it. Regardless, it was exactly 20 clams to buy a roll of Ektar film for the beat up Olympus Trip 35 analogue camera I found at the kringloop*. Film that I didn’t really need to have. But we all buy things we don’t need. Perhaps it's less the things that we are buying but the ideas, the absoluteness, the feelings.

My brother for instance bought BitCoin as soon as it was name dropped in the evening news, along with those stupid digital photographs that other middle-aged podcasters can’t wait to get their paws on. Non-fungible tokens, or “NFTs” they’re called. They were like children's trading cards for boys old enough to have a 5-o'clock shadow and know what a W-2 form was. It was 2015, he was graduating high school that year. I remember him hovering over the granite kitchen counter with his fingers surging, clicking, clacking, buying. He was elated to have stumbled on something new, cutting-edge, potentially lucrative. He tried explaining the value of it all to me, but it all just sounded like a slew of sci-fi jargon; ethereum, crypto, beeple, blockchain and other mumbo jumbo. I could only feel disappointed hearing the sound of his hard earned pizza delivery boy cash dissipate into the cyber world with every refresh of the page. But suffice to say that the prospect of this financial endeavor felt better than the outcome. To his complete shock and dismay, he came to find out there actually isn’t much value in a non-tradeable online drawing of a monkey. 

I had a friend, bless her heart, got a second job just to afford her monthly hair highlights. She tediously bleached, toned, and pruned as soon as the slightest tinge of chestnut brown seeped through her scalp. I remember how excited she got before leaving for those appointments. Then she would come home a few hours later, with her roots plumped and blown out, curls styled, but her hair was never really noticeably brighter. Now, this could be because your hair doesn’t really shape shift within one month and appointments like these were useless, but I didn’t dare share that with her. The steps to our two-bedroom apartment would creak as she stomped upstairs, launched her car keys into the bowl, let out a loud and exasperated sigh, and sulk through the hall. I knew what followed after I heard that metal clank and that pouty huff. I would find her subsequently sunken into our green droopy couch I found at an estate sale, the one stained with some grandma’s cigarette ash, and she would pine through her bank account statements, wondering how she’ll finance the next $300 service come March. I reckon all the minutes before the appointment felt better.

The wretched prices we pay for short-lived certainties.

But fine, this is my fluke and not theirs. What I mean to say, while I toss the ones I love under a big fat metaphorical bus, is that maybe we enjoy the chase more than the treasure, that little high before buying. Or we spend the money we earn to feel a certainty that we lack; that we are fiscally responsible, that we are indeed blonde, and that we are fancied by strangers.

*Kringloop, /ˈkrɪŋ.loːp/ translation from Dutch: thrift store

I have found I always seem to value things just a smidge more before I have them.

I sicken myself in this way.

So I spent my money on an alibi. A justified alibi I could use to return to the film store, underneath the guise of misled enchantment, and see the tanned ginger Dutchie that gave me the slightest glimmer of hope on Monday. I guess our interaction left me with this intensifying charge, this deranged sense of promise that our little meet-cute (or very regular exchange of customer-service) could be the beginning of something. 

When he asked me where I was from, in my deluded mind, I considered it to be his concealment of interest. In his prolonged eye contact, I mistakenly thought that meant intrigue. And with prolific misfortune, when it comes to reading guys, I am utterly illiterate.

But with no strong basis or guarantee that my efforts would reward me, I still felt convicted that I had to return and see him again. In hindsight, I don’t know why I put myself through it; biking three and a half miles underneath a fat gray rain cloud that spit a constant slew of mist atop my village, swiping my card once more as if its invisible funds are infinite, and again sticking my neck out to face rejection. Pitiful. Pathetic. Brave?

People have called me brave many times before. For moving far from home. For singing in front of crowds. Backpacking the Andes, traveling alone, skydiving, talking to strangers. But it’s not really brave if there is not much chance of failure, right? I just don’t think you can really fail in any of these things. You just do them well or poorly, but you’ve still done it. I mean sure, if you don’t pull your parachute then I guess you’ve definitely fucked up somewhere, but this is more circumstantial error than a personal flaw.

Dating is a skill. It’s an assessment. And failing, in my eyes, always feels personal.

It was Wednesday when I returned. Tuesday was set aside for his interest in me to steep a little more, obviously. But it must have not been enough time to brew because this time around, he barely looked at me. Despite the lack of engagement, I still briefed him. I asked if he had used Ektar before, how saturated the photos developed, what style he likes to shoot. He seemed antsy to end the Q&A, and I was met with curt answers and a more than palpable air of annoyance. I weakly took my receipt and feigned a smile, my defeated gaze fixed on the register as I pivoted in shame to leave. I wrestled with the door on the way out, mixing up the words for “push” and “pull” in Dutch, my left hip awkwardly colliding with the handle. The door slammed behind me and a bell chimed chipperly above me, as if to mock my recurring fit of rejection.

/alternative/ as if to wake me from my recurring nightmare of rejection.

Misfortune prevailed when I exited the store; it was still raining, my bike seat was soaked, and my phone had died. Without music to distract me from another loss, I was left to focus on the clattering sound of my bike’s unhinged metal basket that rattled with every bump. I languidly pedaled, knowing well that getting home any sooner wouldn’t make me any less wet or any less disappointed. So with a foul attitude and a bad case of swampass, I cycled the muddy trail back home.

I wish that after rejection I could feel hate. But of all the guys I have liked, they still jump around my mind slowly, warmly, sweetly. I wish that I could make a list of the sucker’s worst qualities, slander his name and squash any inkling of resounding good he managed to cling to and burn his name at the stake. I wish I could say his hands were far too calloused, and the way his pants fell over his shoes looked too goofy to see past, and I wish I could manage to scoff at the fragrance of pomade he used to slick back his red greaseball head. But instead, I just sulk into a wimpy bout of misery for mourning over something I never even had.

For a moment it all felt so organic, meeting someone outside of a swiping sphere. Finally someone in the flesh, not a presentation based on photos that I felt crazy for swooning over. But if real life can’t even promise me anything, I’m better off swearing off any chance of closeness, before I lose all of myself into an abysmal and unpromising nothingness.

“Oh the drama, the agony, poor poor you for experiencing the pitfalls we all face,” you sarcastically cry. I have lived a privileged and fulfilled life thus far, and nobody wants to see sad, privileged tears fall. Trust me, I am just as disappointed as you are. I imagined my breaking point to be just about anything else. If we have time, I could turn to the bank of fear instead, wistfully telling stories about encountering a skinwalker in rural Northern Spain. If you’d like, I can touch on a near miss with a human-trafficking ring in Genoa, Italy instead. If you allow, I’ll recount trekking the Incan trail in Peru, waking up inside a mosquito infested sleeping bag, and chewing on coca leaves when severe altitude sickness challenged all my organs' strength of will. Maybe I could share about the parasite I contracted there from unfit drinking water, that left me spiraling in an insomniatic state for well over a month. But stupidly, it wasn’t even the parasite that made you lose weight, just the kind that makes you constipated; so no, not even the cool kind.

There is a wicked part of me that longs for something torturous to tell, because it is always hardship that grabs attention; the aches and ills of life you are fortunate to only have read about. Rampant alcoholism, tales of addiction, grief and loss, these are things people actually sympathize for. Of course I don’t wish for hardship. I just think it's pathetic I mope about things so juvenile.

Instead, this entire story could’ve been about a friend that has taught me the secrets of life on the cusp of my twenties. I could share the ways that I envied her wisdom, her interests, and her prose, revealing the tale of how our friendship had to break the fall of a spiraling ego, growing further and further apart after having been fused together. I’d go on to say that she always talked too much about herself, mostly in crowds, the most blatant giveaway of insecurity. She wasn’t so bad when she was just beside me, but turned into something insufferable when she had more people to compete with. It could have been me that she was threatened by. I too was opinionated, bossy, gregarious. I could say that I wanted what she had- a doting boyfriend and a seemingly endless flow of spending money, but it was quite obvious she wasn’t all too satisfied herself. Maybe it wasn't just my own, but both our egos that hurled into the concrete, shattering into indistinguishable bits from each other. 

That would make for a fiery story. A bolder breaking point or a bigger a-ha. But instead this story begins with another whining protagonist forlorn and far too in her head to let things go. Instead of whimsical prose, you get another rotten account of someone at their breaking point.

I’m quite accustomed to embarrassment, you see. I could just write you countless pages of embarrassment; cringe-worthy accounts that guarantee discomfort from a dear reader. When I accidentally pooped in the shower at a friend’s house and they had to hire a plumber to fix their entire piping system. When I pissed myself on a train to Berlin and stood naked in the bathroom holding my pants out to the window to face the wind. Or maybe when I forgot the words and mumbled the tune to the Star Spangled Banner for a full gymnasium filled audience for the local middle school basketball game. Arguably the latter stands at the not-so-stinky side of its competitors.

I wish that my breaking point was a historical one. An experience shared by generations that people read for decades to come, unfathomably considering themselves in that very position. Like if I were the wife of a wanted man in the beginning of the Cold War, the tale of a jury member at Roe vs Wade, an account of a jaded and broke barback during the era of bootlegging and jazz in Chicago. I could tell you about something that has sincerely touched me, or acutely altered the course of my life, but I was born too late. 

I don’t like to say I’m too young because that would indicate I have something to do with it. It’s not my fault I am young. I find english so weird, so condemning in that way. We are forced to say “I broke my leg,” or, “I haven’t healed yet”, yet this is just plain wrong. Your uncle's big red truck that you fell off last year is what broke your leg. The gravel you landed crookedly onto is also a culprit. They tag teamed your demise! And it wasn’t you who hadn’t healed, instead it was your lazy red and white blood cells just weren’t doing the job fast enough.

I can't really pinpoint what drove me to my breaking point. How did it all become so messy? When I gather the words, attempt to make sequence to the tale, why does all slip through my arms and fall to the floor, splattering like broken eggs?

So writing this book is like compartmentalizing all the things I don’t have a grip on. It’s like I have folded all the clothes but I haven’t yet put them up where they belong. 

So now both literally and via literary example, I’ve once again half assed laundry day. 

I not so secretly wish that I could start this book with anything else. Anything, anything other than an anecdote about male-focused disappointment. It’s a pretty meager opening, I know. It is a meager opening that will only improve in slight increments; from horse shit to just palatable. I'll remind you that I’m no chef. So in the kitchen, I just shoot to make things edible. Just as I am not really an author, so I will just aim to be legible.