I sighed and hunched over the register, looking at the time and making raspberry noises with my lips.
I began tapping along to the song. It was something that belonged on a break-up playlist. Typical.
This kid who worked here once told me that some girl named Dot added songs to the playlist they played in this store. I’m pretty sure she was going through a pretty nasty break-up at the time and decided everybody else needed to wallow with her.
She doesn’t even work there anymore, I’ve never met her, but I guess she left behind her legacy.
“You hate your life, don’t you?” my bagger asked me after a long silence.
“What?”
“You. You hate your life. I can tell.” He said it like it was fact.
It snowed today.
There’s a football game on Sunday.
You hate your life.
Yeah, it’s all published in the same encyclopedia. S for Snow, Sunday, and Suicide.
“You say that like that’s not something every over-dramatized—”
“Stop using such big words and use some of the thought you put into them to tell me one thing you like about your life.”
I scoffed at him. “I don’t have to prove anything to you. And there’s plenty of things I like about my life.”
“Name one.”
“Well, I wake up every morning.”
He expected more. “And?”
“That’s it. I wake up every morning, thus I am alive. I enjoy my life as long as I’m breathing.”
“You’re just afraid to admit you hate your life,” he paused. “I hate my life.”
“That’s not true. If you hated every aspect of your life, you wouldn’t even be standing here.”
He didn’t respond.
It didn’t even bother me so much that he thought I must be miserable enough to not want to live, it bothered me that he had nothing intelligent to say about it.
That there’s a difference between living and the feelings you have about living.
Or that he very well could have hated his life but that didn’t mean he wasn’t begrudgingly alive.
It was the least witty and tactful conversation I’d ever had. And for that reason, I think it was the most honest.
—
My mom started smoking again.
She hasn’t had a cigarette for six months.
She said she was nervous about sending me back to school.
I told her to stop using me as an excuse for smoking.
Truthfully, I’m afraid she thinks I hate college and don’t want to be there and that’s why she doesn’t want to send me. I’m not sure if that’s just me falling into the manipulative trap of an addict.
But we can’t talk about things like that. When my mom says something, it’s right. It’s also the end of the conversation. Otherwise, it turns into a fight.
I guess that’s why every time I assert myself, it’s a yelling match. That’s the only way I get heard.
I don’t know any other way.
