Me

When I arrived at midnight I said to her ‘I am not a bad person’. She replied, ‘I never thought you were. You are just lost.’

And so I stand at the counter piercing holes in the cellophane of my ready meal. It is now 4’O Clock on a different day. But the same day. It is always the same day. I am not hungry. I never am. Not for food. The noise stabs into the silence of this beige room. My fingers shake around the knife. Maybe this will be the last bite of reheated cauliflower. The last taste of dried carrot. If only the shop would stop selling these small boxes of sadness. I keep opening them up hoping to find something. But there is nothing. You will never leap out of a 10cm box.

I exist in this slow world. I look at the words I have attached to the fridge. A few black lines that tether me to something other than this beige food. A few reasons to go back to the shop. To keep on. But they hardly drown the silence. They can’t take away the crushing weight in my head. Sitting. Looking at my hands. So strange. A tangle of yesterdays and nothingness. Sheer nothingness eating at me. My lips make no noise as I try to call out. I grind my teeth over my nails to try and fill myself up.

I would like to make a sound. I try to summon it up as I walk. When I wear out another pair of shoes. Endlessly moving, trying to find the right words. Any words. The right pair of hands. Any pair of hands. The timer counts down on the oven. Twenty-five minutes. I watch the dial - Age going up. Time going down. But it is still too much. I cannot bear to wait. Why wait for something you do not want. I eat the food cold. It hardly matters. What is warmth? It is so hard to find amongst the aisles of a supermarket. Standing in a queue with strangers. Real people. Something I can never be. Replicant. Imposter. Bad, bad, bad.

I can barely swallow. I cannot taste because I know I will never be found. Me. The scraps of congealing potato tossed in the black bag. Lost. This is the way of me now. This is the way of me forever.