Bryce Matthew
Kelly Hoffer
Studio, CW:1800:0024
10/11/16

Untitled
	I poured two drinks, one strong and one rather weak. The strong one, for myself. I’ve rarely ever liked drinking itself, only for its intended effect. Ronnie’s, on the other hand, was weak. She apparently could enjoy the taste, not just stomaching it. We hurried out the door upon learning that a mutual friend was waiting for us downtown.
	As we walked, Ronnie questioned me as to how exactly I felt. Somewhere between my own drink, finishing hers, and smoking a bowl, I was already tipsy. It’s tough to describe the exact feeling, something like a muddied sense of being high. Generally happy, with the more basic, uncreative thoughts of drunkenness.
	“I could never date someone who was very emotionally dependent,” Ronnie said. It might have been the tenth time this week we’d had this conversation. Having just broken up with someone, Ronnie felt the need to establish what groups of people could not be dated quite often. I gave her my same assurances, rephrased with some fresh diction, but the thoughts began, yet again the someone she could never date ever so coincidentally included me.
	I told Ronnie some months back that I liked her. We were both incredibly drunk at the time, commiserating over a horrible day of work. It had been torturing me for months. Some days I tried to convince myself I didn’t like her, some days I mused over my predicament, accepting it, and occasionally I mustered up the hope that she might like me someday, somehow. She said she knew the whole time, something in the day we met over a year ago made her suspicious, and being the rather amazing person she was, assured me that she would be fine with it.
	And so, I gave my usual stump speech. I don’t exactly know how, but somehow I turned nearly every conversation to something about myself. I would find anyone I know, a random coworker or acquaintance, and tell them my sob story.
“My dad cheated on my mom with men for 15 years or something.”
“I’m sure I’ll end up addicted to something or another and losing all meaning in my life by age x.”
Or, the classic “I hate myself.” All were true, or at least thoughts I truly had, but every one existed solely as a horrifying display of one-upping others’ stories and seeking pity and shock value.
In this case, it was my favorite, or at least well versed:
 “No one sees me in a romantic way. I’m a little brother figure in everyone’s lives. I might as well be a lamp for all that people think of me.”
The lamp bit was stolen from a comedian, but it was otherwise all original, pitiable, true content. There’s a certain formula to me meeting people. I talk with them, I make them laugh, or I manage to intrigue them with an interesting factoid. That’s about all I manage, before I’m told that they are explicitly not interested in dating me. Harsh reality sets in before I could even bother to consider asking, while I’m just trying my best to meet someone and maybe come off mildly interesting.
And so, Ronnie, being the unknowing saint she is, tried to convince me otherwise, as she had every other time this cycle began. She’s not the first friend to do so. It reads like a form letter:
“Bryce, you’re _____(adjective, rather general, ex: great). You’re _____ and _____(specific adjectives, cute and funny the most commonly used), you’ll find someone,  _____(arbitrary uplifting phrase). There’s some bystander effect logic to this. They’re certain someone would find this set of qualities worthwhile, yet equally resolute that they themselves would not.
Somehow, she heard this day in and day out, or one of my other random complaints, and managed to console me. And so, my pity parade out of the way, we continued and met Ryan outside Studio.
Honestly, it’s a strange place. Everywhere is cramped, and so, there is a constant proximity amongst any neighboring people, likely intentionally so. Everything is flashy, between the people, more flamboyant than most, and the lights and smoke machine on the dance floor. And then, me, completely opposite. I stand with a slightly bent posture, my arms are always near me, preferably (to my subconscious, not to anyone in particular) near my chest. Ronnie always makes fun of my “T-rex arms” and with good reason. I’m aware of every movement I make, and every one I choose just happens to signal any observer that I’m reserved and awkward.	Eventually, we made our way to the dance floor. On the off chance it wasn’t readily apparent, dancing was not my forte. This whole night entailed of either conforming to Ronnie’s wishes, or me desperately trying to overcome my nature and become the sort of person people liked. The worst part was trying to figure out how to start. How to create a series of motions, ones that I noticed every step of, and continue in some way that didn’t look completely off-putting.
Somehow, in 15 minute sessions between drinking and smoke breaks outside, I more or less overcame my issue. I have no doubt that it looked idiotic to any bystanders, but I at least became unaware of my missteps, and therefore, could pretend to get it, to have a sense of motions without noticing every last bit of them, a subconscious ability to do something that people who get it have, and people who don’t… don’t. It was easy, singing along to various remixed pop songs, dancing in some fashion or another, and for once I was lost in the moment.
Lacking any particular reason, I fell back into my normal preoccupations. That most of what I did in my life was simply stalling, entertainment to pass the time, hoping that I might find meaning someday. This was nothing new. It led me to laying around at home and almost failing out of college last year, and this year, it led to the list. The list was a way to force a structure onto my life that might give some small modicum of meaning. It had one-off tasks, completing classwork or running an errand, but its primary purpose was in the continuous tasks. Some were simple; less caffeine, run every day, not chewing my fingernails. Most, however, were much deeper. Being more confident, arms in a reasonable, non-defensive place, not telling everyone every single awful thought I had. For the most part, I did it, or at least tried. But none of it was for me. As far as I could tell, I was amorphous. There was no defining characteristic to me that felt quintessential, anything could be changed for the right person, especially anything for Ronnie.
On the dance floor, however, she wanted to be around anyone but me, or at least it felt that way. She even pushed me to the corner after some 30 seconds of dancing with her, in order to make sure our ever expanding group had room to dance. It wasn’t really any single issue that ruined me. Emotional topics can’t be made into disjoint events. It was never completely about her, and yet it was never solely the general case either. Drinking probably didn’t help with this at all, the list of random, disconcerting thoughts blended together.
	Ronnie asked me if I wanted to go. She always knew how I felt. She could see it in my face, or hear it in my voice, even read between the lines in my texts. Once, on a fishing trip to my family’s cabin in Minnesota, she told me I was “thinking too loudly.” She knew, presumably from the sound of my voice when saying goodnight, that I wouldn’t be asleep 30 minutes later, that I’d be trapped in the same pointless rotation of thoughts.
	“What’s wrong?” she asked.
	“You don’t want to know,” I replied. I often deflected her with this, or similar forms of it. I generally don’t say anything hurtful when I’m angry, I see next to no purpose in lashing out.
“I’m feeling pretty happy, just tell me.”  She was far more drunk than I was, so she probably hadn’t deduced the theme of tonight’s ruminations. So, I, in my also drunk idiocy, told her everything. It’s already hard enough to articulate complicated ideas when sober, but drunk me just vomited them all out.
	“You’d rather be with anyone but me. I’m asexual, like a fucking lamp….
	I fucking hate myself.”
	I hadn’t really said any direct insult, but enough was said.
	“I knew you felt that way, but not about me.” She stated it as a matter of fact, it simply was.
	She saw me cry for the first time. I generally don’t cry, let alone in front of other people, which almost certainly stems from my childhood. I’d get yelled at by my dad for crying, likely because he was afraid of being his father. As long as we didn’t cry, and he didn’t hit us like his dad had, he wasn’t as bad, at least I’d assume that was his logic. As a result, I’m really good at stopping crying, and at not starting too. I usually focus on my breathing, but this time I dug my nails into my arms. Pain is constant, it draws attention from everything else, distracting me from reality.
	I couldn’t silence my thoughts as easily, sadly. Every idea from before came back, as if they were premonitions of this moment, that no one would love me and that I’d drive people away from myself eventually. It’s a pattern in my life. Some litany of thoughts sets in, I pull back from my life, I return to simplicity, to the forms of entertainment that keep me sort of sane. Yet somehow, she still tried to comfort me a bit. Every once in awhile, she’d put an arm around my shoulder. She was more shocked than me and she still could keep everything together and try to make me feel better.
	That was the dynamic in our relationship. I never was alright, either not caring about anything in my life and letting myself fail classes and strain relationships, or outright hating myself, stating with certainty that nothing would work out for me, that I only refrained from killing myself for others. Ronnie was unchanged by it all, she never accepted my bullshit. Every horrible idea I had, she told me the opposite. She was the counterweight cancelling every insecurity I had.
	We headed back to my place. Nothing out of the ordinary, she lives outside of town so she stays here whenever we drink. Completely ordinary, other than the fact that I had ruined everything. We arrived, and I tried to explain how drunken me just mixed everything together, that it wasn’t just her, and apologized profusely. Nothing I could say at that point really mattered, and we both went to bed. Nothing is ever ok. On the off chance it is, for just a moment, I don’t allow it to be.