Yourself

It takes practice.

But you have to learn to sound like yourself.

At work, standing at the order station—because they took your chair away, because you sat too much, because you were tired all the time—next to the roll gate at the loading dock that lets exhaust fumes in when the delivery driver idles as he looks at his phone or listens to talk radio or more likely than not scrambles to gather all the packages you ordered but not the right way so they got shipped individually instead of in bulk, and you’ve made his life worse, and still he’s cheery when he sees you, ringing the bell so you roll open the gate, and you grimace when you pull the chain to do it, as if it’s a big physical problem, only he’s just corralled a hundred boxes because you fucked up instead of double-checking your orders, he wasn’t looking at his phone at all, and it isn’t the smell of combusted diesel that exhausts you, it’s your own weakness, you can’t even roll the chain to lift the gate because you’re out of shape, and Brandon’s face is covered in sweat and he asks how you’re doing and you start to answer but he’s not listening and you remember you have to learn to sound like yourself but not the one right now, the one from before.

Anyway he’s got a lot more packages to deliver, from people who did their jobs right.

He’s already gone.

The boss walks down from the long racks. They look at the packages heaped on the dirty floor in front of your station, and then up at you. You’re aware the corner of your shirt’s untucked. You’re aware your phone sits on the top of the computer with the screen unlocked in the middle twenties of a list of forty-odd pieces of shit you can’t live without, but you don’t have, so you aren’t living. Their eyes cut from the heap, to your untucked shirt, to your phone, to the roll gate you still haven’t dropped.

You wait for them to say something. Anything.

They turn around and walk back between the racks, to talk to the other managers, the ones who know what they’re doing.

You talk to the empty car on the drive home. The street lights, the parking lot lights are too bright, too white, they cast huge dappled haloes in your eyes. You would spray the windshield but you haven’t refilled the wiper fluid. You should have cleaned your glasses but you haven’t. The problem isn’t the windshield or your glasses or the streetlights or the parking lot lights but something in your eyes. The broad flares full of fuzzed circles and ragged-edged wriggling shapes packed together, rustling, an organic kaleidoscope, or something you’d see in science class in fifth grade watching a short film on cellular anatomy before you raised your hand and said something know-it-all and even though you were right it was stupid to say it and draw attention to yourself and make everyone hate you.

At a stop sign, you sigh, or try to. The breath clinks.

There’s no one behind you, but you have been at the stop sign too long. You pull away from it too fast, and then slow down, because the neighborhood is quiet and winding and poorly lit.

The radio’s off. There’s a whine in your ears.

How do you sigh.

You pull in to the driveway but can’t park in the car port, there’s too much you haven’t thrown away. Cardboard boxes, bubble wrap, furniture you mean to donate but can’t now, not since it’s been rained on for so many weeks and plays host to mud daubers and spiders and wasps and is the substrate for inches of the neighbors’ blown yard dust. You close the car door softly and then realize it was too soft and open it again, then slam it shut, and it’s the only sound on the street. It echoes past the single streetlight, dark for months since the neighbor who paid the bill left. You didn’t know him. 

Him? 

You don’t know.

You didn’t make the effort.

Stepping across the garbage in the car port, your ankle twists on a loose coil of extension cord. It’s vibrant and illuminating and then it’s gone. The kitchen light doesn’t shine through the blinds in the window cut in the door. You turn the keys, but the door’s unlocked, because you forgot to lock it when you left.

You stand in the dark car port.

When you manage to step inside.

You pull a knife from the block by the stove.

What are you going to do with it?

If someone’s in here—

since you left the door open

—do you really think you could defend yourself?

You turn the knife in your hand. Blade down. A chef’s knife, now you hold it like the poster for a scary movie. A part of your brain thinks about what that guy you knew in college said, the one from ROTC, about knife fighting, and you move the knife again, but it doesn’t matter. Not for you.

You walk from room to room.

Turn the lights on, with the knife in your hand.

From empty room to empty room.

Looking underneath beds, looking in closets, behind shower curtains.

Stirring up dust.

Tearing cobwebs.

The crack of dried insect wings or whole bodies underneath your shoes.

No one’s here.

You hold the knife, in your hand,

for an hour, or maybe more.

Then you remember to lock the kitchen door.

Later—in the middle of the night, when the barred owl has stopped—you sit in the wooden chair next to the couch. You practice.

You practice sounding like yourself.

The last thing you want, is for someone to notice.

In the morning, when you wake up late, you stand in front of the bathroom mirror and open the cabinet. You watch the shake of each delicate memory on its hook. The way the hook pierces. The way the hole cradles. The way the inside of the cabinet sags. You don’t have time to do this. But you do it. You didn’t wake up late. You woke up at the right time. You have an alarm set. You decided not to. Now you will be late, again.

You look at the cabinet, wide open, packed full, but capable of holding more, because it’s never full enough. Despite its suppurations it’s never full enough.

Your phone rings. The manager calling, first one, then another.

You look at the cabinet.

When you do get to work—hurrying through the parking lot, as if a few extra seconds here will make up for the fifteen minutes, or forty, you’ve already missed—the hem on your button-down shirt irritates your chest in a line straight down. You know it will be something you have to think about all day, and not what’s inside the cabinet.

But turn the corner from the sales floor into the office and the manager’s at the desk with the time clock computer. They’re talking to the other manager. Hand out to show off a manicured and decorated finger, avian-inspired, white and feather motifed, the nail extending at first thin but expanding into a wide and rounded oval. Two red dots painted in lacquer at the very beginning of the nail bed.

You wait.

For a lull in their conversation, for the right moment to ask to use the time computer, for them to recognize you’ve arrived, for a remark about how you’re late again.

They talk.

So you wait.

Because you don’t know what you would say.

Barely an hour later the cabinet seam itches underneath the line of buttons on your shirt. Your sleeves rolled up despite the chill in the air. You move the cursor around the order station screen, click forward and back, on orders you don’t know how to fill. They are just droplets that fall into the New bucket, then leak into the Pending bucket, then seep into the Overdue bucket, before collecting as evaporated sludge at the bottom of the Cancelled bucket.

The manager calls you from behind the rack. It’s startling. Weights shift around your insides. Fluids leak into your crevices, and as you turn you recognize the motion is more listing than purposeful.

But the manager has their back to you. Already walking into their office.

You stand in front of the door for several shaking episodes. Your insides a jangle of corroding catches and pustulant inflammation.

When you can no longer stand the accretion of stress hormones sparking against your concentration, you open the door.

The manager taps at their keyboard. Their face matte and glassine. The decorated finger—the one made up like the avian complete with artificial nail—rests against their temple. The end of the nail, the simulacrum of the bird’s bill, lost in the roots of dyed hair. You sit in the uncomfortable wooden chair across from their desk. The upholstery is an uneven green and worn in the probabilistic cloud-shape of all who sat here before you.

On the desk are two speakers, as tall as your forearms. At one point they must have been a beige or neutral gray plastic. Now they are yellowed, and dirty. Metal screens protect their sound chambers. Enormous knobs sit below the screens next to flickering green lights. Each speaker has a greasy yellowed gray wire and the wire runs backward off the desk and then off somewhere you can’t see and an identical greasy yellowed gray wire runs up the side of the manager’s chair and along their shoulders and into their ears. Disappearing into the canals and buildups of hard wax.

The manager moves the hand with the decorated avian finger and the end of the nail, the simulacrum of the duck’s bill, idly scrapes around the edge of the wire running into their ear.

What would you say, if you sounded like yourself. To justify the lateness. How bad you are at your job. How little you know how to do it. How lost you are.

The manager opens their mouth. They read from the store’s task assignment bulletins. Another project come in. You hear it from their mouth, from the speakers on their desk. They read it in their affectless manager tone. When they are done—when they have properly delivered the scope of the work expected, its timetable and its priority—they return to watching their screen. To picking at the wax at the edge of the cable running into their ear.

You sit for thirty seconds. Maybe more.

Because your insides are full ballasts and you cannot float.

When you stand, you walk to their office door. You hold the handle. There are words there, in your mouth. The words do not feel good. You are not sure if they are better spoken or swallowed.

Light from the monitor shines in their eyes.

You ask them:
if you can ask them,
if you’re being honest,
when there’s something
you might need

help

with.
Something you might need

help

with
when you don’t know how to help yourself.

You wait for their answer. Wondering if—if that’s how you would say it.

If that’s how you would sound like.

You wait.

Until, watching them pick with that bird’s-bill thumbnail at the wax builtup and hardened around the wire penetrating the canal of their ear, you realize you have spoken to speakers, but not microphones.

You open the door, and walk through, and close it again.

You gather the boxes from beneath your order station. You think you have almost as many as you need. Walking around the racks, peering behind empty corners where there are no boxes, you let the shifting gravity of the collection in the cabinet scratch its own itches. You let the act of looking put off the act of finding and neither is the act of starting.

You make two circuits around the racks before one of the other managers says from their desk—the neat one, arranged with overwhelming numbers of favorite pens and photographs of smiling people organized first by linear blood relationship and then by growth stage and then by personal success, all of them surrounded by iterations of the same religious iconography rendered bloodless and botanical—“Do you hear that sound?” but the question is addressed to no one and especially to you.

The corner of your shirt is untucked again.

In the one restroom, begrudgingly made gender-neutral over complaints raised about no one specific but behaviors observed only by listening to shortwave broadcasts, you lean over the sink basin and raise the untucked corner of your shirt with more delicacy than any other behavior you have exhibited in recent memory.

Clothes are expensive and you do not want to experience dressing this body anew.

When the angle is correct, a sensation of fullness, you open the cabinet.

Amber liquid pours out, embittered like pus and resistant to flow, crystals at the bottom of the cabinet distilled and hard, its smell astringent and industrial. As it pours into the sink basin—as you empty the cabinet—the other things leave you.

With careful eyes you watch them resist swirling down the drain.

You do not want to be separated from this. But you cannot keep it inside.

When you are empty.

When you are empty.

You have to start over.

Learning to sound like yourself.

Before the cabinet closes you shake off the drops from the hanging memories and the dreams sharded on corroding studs. This a process you partake with less generosity than the other.

Maybe it’s the fatigue.

Maybe it’s this body, its fitness, the heartburn or

or who fucking cares.

Something tears free from the red and swollen emplacement. The flesh splits with a splurting glosh of cleaner, clearer liquid, and the jewelry—oval, opal, a face or feature smeared in the center—falls from the cabinet into the sink.

It shatters to bits and runs down the drain as if on segmented legs.

As readily as it had split, the fixture has not healed, but suctioned itself together. One less emplacement to pierce with a tarnished metal hook.

You feel…

not lighter.

not less burdened.

You spend several moments looking at the corner of the gender-neutral bathroom’s mirror, the dust caked into gray-green grime at the bezel, attempting to diagnose the emotional delta arbitraged by losing one of the pieces from inside the cabinet.

You do not have an answer.

Except that the act of thinking—the summed effort of cognition for these past minutes, autonomic and not—was less… exhausting… than it has been before.

You look into the mirror, and see the reflected jewelry in the cabinet. The shades of purple, mauve, hyperactive immune system pink, weeping old-oil orange-yellow.

You only have to sound like yourself if you’re trying to hide.

But this time—

You reach with fingers spread into the cabinet. You grab clinking heaps of studs and cameos and dangling baubles, as many as will prick the thin webbing skin at the corners of your fingers, as many as will stab beneath your fingernails, as many as will stretch the flesh inside the cabinet until you pull—slowly first and then firmer, faster—until you pull the hoops and wires through thickened membrane placements with slurped whispers.

Handfuls of these things, rusted, corroded, settings made foul with bristling patinas, the stones stinking sediments from kidneys or bile ducts or aspirated toys from childhood, chains tangled with hair not yet crusted into bezoars, lockets faded with lossily compressed pictures downloaded from faraway servers where the bottom halves of the images are dull gray because the connection was lost before completion.

You raise them up. You hurl them into the sink.

How many months has it been?

Since you found yourself, this time—

Another glance in the mirror. Into a face leaner, harder at the edges.

You tell your reflection what you’re going to do.

—this time, the cabinet was full, and instead of each memento being a tool for translation, a key to unlock the idiograms and sequences, a guide to lifting the tumblers in the correct order to activate sounds so that you could sound like yourself,

each item in the cabinet was a weight, a caltrop, another dose beyond the maximum allowed. Only now, after they are all disposed of, does it become obvious that the conditions that at first glance made for ideal habitation were also hazards preventing the full flourishing of this gestational cycle.

This time, you have found yourself a perfect place, but you did not realize how unhospitable you found yourself.

You walk back across the sales floor sixty pounds lighter. The placements healing already. The cabinet seam beneath the buttons of your shirt itches, but only a little. Your shirt is tucked in.

You do not go to your desk at the order station.

You walk to the manager’s door.

You do not knock.

They sit behind their desk, spoonbill fingernail still working at the crusted wax in their ear.

The other manager holds up their cellphone. The two of them watch a video together, from social media, a synthesis of artificial imagery poorly composited to appear like genuine news stories. It is not work related.

“Do you need something,” they say in unison.

You hear it from four places at once. Two mouths, two speakers.

The managers look at you.

You open your mouth to speak.

You do not sound like yourself.

Your voice is the creak of a cabinet door.