A story for now

Thursday 5/15/25

Like I said, this is really good. It's from "Just Pants," which is likely to be in Become Your Own Superhero: Intrepid Exceptions to Modern Fiction. It's such a story of now that speaks to the loneliness epidemic. But it's timeless. That's what you're going for--that both, if you will. You have to have the both. The prose is untouchable.

***

Or perhaps she was in a new line of work. Having had her fill of doctoring she became an engineer. A professor. A coach for the overcoming of trauma. There are all these avenues in life and you don’t require so much as a blinker signal to turn down any of them, and he’d only gone how he’d always been going.

This was a horrid train of thought. A death train of thought. He needed to pull it together. Regroup. Deep breaths. No—slower breaths. There was a difference; the latter facilitated the former but the former didn’t guarantee the latter. Get it right. Today was a waste but that didn’t mean tomorrow would follow suit. It was guaranteed to be every bit the new day for him as anyone else.

That’s it—start tomorrow.

But each time that tomorrow came and he awoke only to realize that his back hurt again, he knew that this was just another day and it didn’t stand out as a start seems like it should, but was instead the latest entry to the endless middle that felt the same as any other he might have remembered if there was anything to remember about them.

Or not actually endless, because he’d eventually die, thus bringing the events of the middle to a close without ever having a natural winding down period or him knowing that he was in the last phase. Which made him wonder if that was the only way the days might change—by being all over.

He honored those thoughts as the worthiest of adversaries, which made for a solemnized battle with his anxiety and fears as they threw ever longer shadows across the surface of what he called his life, demanding of himself that he resist the temptation to add, “For lack of a better term,” but often failing even in that.

Bouts of productivity and a redoubled commitment to being properly hydrated were yoked in service to inverting what he grew increasingly certain was a lost cause, but at least his body had adjusted so that he didn’t have to use the bathroom as much as he did before.

Come the early evening, he’d formally admit what he had really known all along: He’d lost again. By a lot. The contest was never close. His legs had lacked for the necessary juice. Lactic acid had permeated all of his muscles. His spirit. His fight. In a manner of speaking.

But the afternoon was in its final phase. Some hope there. The day was becoming more tomorrow than it was today. Kind of. It’d end and he would not. So there was that.

Recognizing these thoughts as what they were, and understanding the point at which they came, and what the pairing communicated about the hours he had passed since he last slept, he let resignation take its accustomed, formal hold, capped as per usual with a summarizing, elegiac sigh of, “Well, what are you going to do? We’ll hop back in tomorrow. Let’s be sure we’re ready.”

Then he’d try to relax by putting his interactions with the day down to an experiment that hadn’t worked, which didn’t mean that the next one wouldn’t, take the deep and slow breaths, say the same words to himself that he did every evening while wearing his scrubs because the day was a loss anyway so what did it matter, existing in a kind of between-days state of not being in this one or that one, and hoping tomorrow would be different.

But just because he was no longer in the day that was and was yet to be in the day to come, didn’t mean he’d stopped existing. Actually, having entered into this in-between state, he’d notice an uptick in energy, and a weight come off of him, such that he felt almost peckish for life, as someone who responds, “I could eat a bit,” despite not being especially hungry.

Often—but not always; often enough—he’d then go to the cafe near where he lived wearing his scrubs after dark, and thus wasn’t in for the evening after all. You’re still free to venture, he told himself. It wasn’t as bad as all that. Prospects. That things could be different. A great many things. One event, one person—yes, one day—can change your life. Then he’d look back and think, “See? It was right around the corner. And you acted like none of this existed for you at all,” and make a sweeping gesture with one of his hands signifying his largess were he of a mind.

There weren’t many people at the cafe on these nights to notice that much about him, as if a higher volume of customers would have produced an aggregation of knowledge in which they all somehow shared and had access to after the fact pertaining to how lonely he was and that he only came in alone, but at least now he could see other humans and there were four walls that were different than his usual four walls and the excursion also served as a form of what he considered airing himself out without anyone having to be close enough to detect anything noisome.

Distance could be maintained on all sides, which he wouldn’t be able to do, say, at lunchtime when the people in the adjacent office building came here for their repast and reprieve. The scrubs were a good cover story against charges of malodorousness anyway. What was he supposed to do? Let someone die just because they urinated on him? Certain things just speak for themselves. Or say more about the person who levels the charge when they ought to have known better.

He popped two wintergreen mints in his mouth—one to bite into smaller parts and eat on the way to the cafe, the other for sucking while he was there. A memory of an old commercial flashed in his head about a happy woman boasting—no, giving thanks—that she didn’t have dishpan hands thanks to the soap she used. But what if she did? Was that not the cost of doing a self-appointed job right? And was that not an impermeable act of honor upon which no amount of pruney skin could infringe?

Someone, he theorized, who was aware of these workings of the world, or that mostly bygone world, might walk over to him. Initiate an exchange with a nod. For a fortuitous coming together. Nods spoke to prospects of resonance. Can be deeply mutual. Like graves with two names on the headstone and people landing on the same phrase simultaneously. “No, you go.” “No, you.”