This week should have been a celebration. Monday marked my 365th consecutive day of home-free living, a grand total of 407 days during The Office Hobo experiment. As luck would have it, a newly ordered memory foam mattress was delivered to the office door that afternoon, as if to signal that it was time to rest easy. I walked through the office with the oversized package without a look from my coworkers, and set it unceremoniously behind my desk.
Despite the well-timed delivery, there was no celebration on Monday.
I had no real reason for this to be the case. This day hadn’t marked the end of my experiment, so there was no fanfare about leaving the office. There was no revelatory event or office-related catastrophe. No one (save for my friend, The Cock (trust me, I am not responsible for this nickname, though I take pleasure in introducing him that way) was even aware enough to remind me of the occasion. In fact, it wasn’t until later that evening until I even remembered this was the anniversary of the day I moved back into my office–for good. I was just kind of… brooding.
Why?
Last week, I hit the town with my friend Slaps (again, not my nickname). It was a Thursday evening and I would have preferred to stay in. Work has been extremely demanding as of late, and frankly the holidays left me a little tired of drinking alcohol. But it had been a while since I’d seen him so I kept my word.
The night started simply. A couple rounds at our old Culver City hangout, and catch-up conversation. It’s a dive bar, by Los Angeles standards, complete with perennial Christmas lights and variable-talent karaoke. And somehow we always manage to drink for free. With a name like Slaps on your tab, who would dare charge?
We very nearly called it a night early, but by some twist of fate we ended up at a speakeasy off Hollywood Boulevard. The evening’s memories play back like stop-motion animation, hollow human drawings slinking in and out of frame, interchangeable silhouettes breezing past with the seemingly purposeless shapeshifting of a school of fish in the open sea. It was a spatially refreshing place. Like the smog in the sky above the town, the neon-lit ceiling hung low, giving the aura of intimacy without the immediacy of illumination. Slaps and I took advantage. Or were taken advantage of. Two parallel zephyrs whisking around the jetties of bachelorettes, collecting names–Loretta, Mireya, Ashley–and sharing stories. This is not usually my scene. But tonight I was out of my mind.
Out. Of. My. Mind.
The bar was closing when I met Mileka. We found ourselves facing one another in a tunnel of a hallway, both waiting for our respective friends to finish… something. Her weight shifted backwards against the mortared wall as if the bricks were melting into her, absorbed by the kind mystery of her black eyes and rubbed smooth by the coarse intuition of her humble voice. Mileka and I talked in this way, merging thoughts on Haitian culture with philosophical collaborations on genealogy. In truth, I don’t remember much more as far as details of the conversation. I just know that it felt important.
It is a silly basis for connection, anything initiated at such an hour with a stranger nearly ten years your junior. Oh, but to be simultaneously aware and care-free. The rest of the evening saw us inseparable. Stealing away from friends and rides home, chatterboxing champions of the evening. When I kissed her later that night, she thanked me for doing so. We agreed to see each other again. Soon.
It may seem old hat at this point in the experiment, but the prospect of rejection still looms large, causing me great apprehension over revealing my living situation. When we set a date for Saturday night, I plunged into immediate cowardice. I turned down her 11pm Friday text message request to meet her out, and spent the entire next day projecting my anxiety onto my appearance and my lack of concrete memories from our conversations. Instead of touching base with her early in the day to confirm our date, a Los Angeles anti-flake tradition, I put it off, waiting until an hour and a half before our scheduled time to call her.
The date never happened. Some element of my behavior–the Friday excuse, the delayed call–had changed her mind about me. Our text conversations fizzled and we haven’t seen each other again. Mileka was gone as soon as she had arrived. I had fulfilled my own prophesy of her rejection by acting foolishly before the actual situation could even arise. How was I capable of this kind of mental lapse? After living this long under these circumstances, shouldn’t I be accustomed to the expectations?
As I lay on the celebratory memory foam mattress for the first time, it struck me just how delicate the human psyche can be. We create our own little realities, convenient or otherwise, so we may exist within them. And we invite others to join us, sometimes without taking into consideration that they too have constructed little realities of their own, realities that we ourselves might not fit into. It is in the intersection of these realities that we find conflict. Incompatibilities. Misunderstanding. Rejection. We can choose to disengage from those consequences or dive in. Disregard it, or invest, reassess, change. The latter can be a very uncomfortable place to exist. But if I haven’t learned anything else during this experiment, I have learned to exist in discomfort.
Laying with these thoughts, I felt the urge to cry. But in reality nothing sad had happened. A stranger remained a stranger. An anticipated outcome was realized. An experiment accrued more data. In learning from this experience, I actually gained more than I lost. All that I lost was the potential of a person fulfilling some preconceived ideal, some romantic notion that was fulfilled by a few lines of forgotten dialogue and a well-timed kiss. I was falling in love with the idea long before I knew anything about the person.
I spread my hand out across my new mattress, pressing down and watching as the mattress gave way to the force of the hand’s pressure. I held my hand there for a moment, feeling the gentle foam embrace the contours of my fingers, free of hesitation, my skin disappearing into the forgiving whiteness. Then, suddenly, I pulled back, releasing my hand from the mattress, studying closely the resultant impression. The imprint was so loyal to the outline of my hand, one might have thought I had become invisible, pressed still against this foam canvas. It took many moments to vanish, this phantom hand outline, but it eventually did, allowing the surface to return to its original state. As if the hand had never been there in the first place.
We should all be so lucky as to heal ourselves in this same fashion.
– TOH
