Scrolling

I cut the tomatoes thin. I don’t want them to be too juicy on my sandwich. It’s just ham and cheese with mayo, lettuce, tomato, and banana peppers. I take a bite before I even sit down. I’m hungry, but I also enjoy the expectedness of the sandwich. I’ve made every day for a hundred days. It’s safe. I know what I am getting. It’s like there is some part of my brain that wants the reliability of it all. There will be no surprises and no joy. No excitement. The boldest choice I make on this sandwich is to use aged swiss cheese. One piece. Sometimes it’s three slices of ham. Sometimes four. Keto friendly bread. Low cal and low taste, but when the bread gets a little wet with mayo, tomato juice and the wet crunch of the banana peppers, it doesn’t matter. No matter what it’s supposed to taste like, it’s almost like there is no taste. No joy. It’s the ritual of it. Half and half to drink. Two glasses. The sandwich makes me thirsty. And as I sit down, the ever present shorts of YouTube play, looping some of them five or six times. Ritual. No surprises. No pleasure. Just a way to get fatter. Just one more way to punish myself. I don’t deserve delicious. I don’t deserve more.

That’s a rule not exclusively saved for lunch. The YouTube videos play all day. I have fallen asleep with a DIY short on turning a damaged desk into night stands. How many hundreds of times did that video play? Did it seep into my dreams? Who knows. I don’t dare remember my dreams. If they’re happy, I won’t believe it. If they are dark, I leave them to my unconscious mind. I’ve got enough dark just pacing the floors for hours. Scroll. Scroll. A long distance trucker, a foodie ballerina, Judge Judy, Pizza reviews/ It’s one after another, and my brain is a retainer wall, holding up the dirt hill, keeping it from crashing into me, filling my eyes and ears with dust. They say we were born from dust. My father and mother are dust. I assume I will be, too. Cremated by the city. This is after the smell drives the landlord to open the door only to find me dead. My well-fed cat. The phone is dead…like me. I will die alone. This isn’t about suicide. It’s about loneliness. It’s about the emptiness of doom scrolling. It’s about the gin and tonics that multiply quickly until the window to the world becomes a dangerous tool in my blacked-out me. This is the routine. One of many. Death can be far away or eyeball to eyeball. It doesn’t matter. I was born to die alone. So many of us are.

I wonder if my mind will slip apart or just simply stop working. I think of the people I have hurt. I think of how easy it was to hurt them. Consent in the bedroom, but everywhere else, the pain was quiet and lurking. But it was always there. Love? It’s like the sandwich. Created thoughtlessly. Just enough to feed me. I make the love. It doesn’t come naturally. I say it. I say “I love you.” I mean it, but each bite goes down until there’s nothing left to eat. I know how to show love. I know how to care. I do it perfectly at first, but the shadow keeps the love only in my mouth, a cavity. A dull pain. A temporary part of the skeleton. It will fall from my mouth when there is no flesh left. It will slip out for my cat to sniff and bat about. But it never goes down my throat. It will never excite me or rush me to joy. It’s just a noise. I scroll through all of the false empathy and care and tenderness. Sometimes the repetition becomes a warning to the other, the object. Like the sandwich, it’s just sustenance. It hides what I am really eating. Control. The words are imitation. The real dialogue is a voice of one telling me that love is a means to an end. It repeats. Repeats. Repeats.

I am a monster. I don’t know devotion. I don’t know the calm of a quiet purr or the sea. The sounds of the familiar are nothing but the teeth grinding like gears. I am a machine. I can only do so much. I am useless. Outdated. I cost everyone. They all pay, and the monster counts the change because every penny counts. The money runs out just like the lovers, trailing their regrets. However, their regrets are sweet compared to the sour banana peppers. I am regret. I am fear and shame lurking around me as I sleep. I am sure they uncover me and send me to the bathroom five times a night. They blind me. Muffle my hearing. "I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Do I dare to eat a peach?” I graze when I should be sleeping. I peel a slice of ham and a chunk of cheese. I don’t want to know new flavors. Not now. The feelings that stand around my bed follow me to the kitchen. I sit down, and they loom over me. The dull pain of regret slips back into my skin as I uncoil sleep and wake up in the middle of anxiety. I have hurt others for my own sanity. And yet, that sanity leads me to sit on this stool, leaning on the counter, drinking ice cold water. I am under water. Nothing I do can strip these rotten feelings from my skin. They are the skin, and I am bones. Between the two, there is no love. I am a tower of lies, babbling nonsense that crumples into weakness. I AM a monster, and this is what monsters eat. It’s not the hundred sandwiches. It’s my little one, unconscious in the muck of lies, unconscious and tormented by dreams that viciously scroll from one lament to the next. I am the monster feeding from the inside out until there are only crumbs. Something for my cat to lick and swallow. She might be my only healthy relationship, and she hates me, too. That makes the both of us. The nightmares scroll, but I couldn’t tell you what I just saw no matter how many times they sit on repeat. No matter how long they sit on repeat, I am an empty apartment waiting for the next tenant as the city burns my body.

Where will my ashes go? There is no one to claim them. I imagine the victims of my quiet crimes might like to dance on them, but even that is only a dream. Now that’s a dream I remember. That’s a dream that never stops.