Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Posted on July 1, 2015 (Second Post)
Exhausted from cleaning the washroom, I paced the living room to relax, a trail of smoke following me from the cigarette in my fingers. I paced back and forth, trying to clear my mind. The bottle of pills sat on the coffee table. I picked up the bottle and shook it, and remembered what the therapist had told me – that I needed to be around people -- real people. There was just no way around it.
Stationing my laptop on the edge of my tall kitchen counter, I browsed the Internet while standing. I avoided opening Facebook and went straight to POF to reply to GlowWorm – GlowWorm was real, I thought -- more real than Mindy, anyway. I wrote:
Me
7/01/2015 5:17:06 PM
I'm old fashioned myself. Dinner would be great. Which day is good for you?
I clicked send, and was satisfied. But I needed to do more. The therapist also suggested a roommate – yes, someone to live with me. I typed craigslist.com into the browser.
On craigslist, I created an ad:
Subletting a room in a two-bedroom apartment. One washroom. Fully furnished with TV. Electricity, basic cable and Wi-Fi connection included. Smokers welcome.
I carried the laptop in my arms, the screen facing away from me. With the webcam above the screen, I snapped a few shots of the apartment -- the kitchen, the living room, the newly cleaned washroom, the empty spare room, and I uploaded them to the ad. I asked for five hundred dollars per month, which was less than the asking price in my area, but money wasn't an issue at all. If it hadn't seemed weird, I would have rented out the spare room for free.
The feeling of living a dream – a dream dreamt by no one -- has taken its toll on my physical body. I was spent.
Setting the laptop down on the coffee table, I collapsed on the sofa, sprawling out and yawning. I was back on track to becoming someone, and I promised myself that nothing was going to distract me. Turning my head to the side, I stared at the laptop screen. The Facebook login page stared back at me, sideways. Reaching over, I typed on the keyboard with one finger, and logged onto the fake Facebook profile I once used to message Mindy. Mindy had been a compulsion, I thought. And writing a final message would end the compulsion – to say farewell to my connection to the unreal.
"I'm quitting Facebook," I wrote to Mindy, knowing my message would be lost -- lost like the sound of the famous tree falling in an empty forest, or as lost as this blog post, an irrelevant grain of sand in the desert dunes of the Internet. "I will only be here, www.manyandnoone.com. Goodbye, Mindy."
To be continued in Part 9