Janitor Ass

As Michelle became smaller, then out of view, Paul distantly sensed the implication, from his previous thoughts, which he’d mostly forgotten, that the universe in it’s entirety was a message, to itself, to not feel bad- an ever-elaborating, languageless rhetoric against feeling bad- and he was troubled by this, suspecting that his thoughts and intentions, at some point, in April or May or years ago, in college or as a child, had been wrong, but he had continued in that wrongness, and was now distanced from some correct beginning to a degree that the universe (and himself, a part of the universe) was articulately against him. In his tiredness and inattention these intuitions manifested in Paul as an uncomplicated feeling of bleakness- that he was in the center of something bad, whose confines were expanding, as he remained in the same place. Faintly he recognized in this a kind of humor, but mostly he was aware of the rain, continuous and everywhere as an incognizable information, as he crossed the magnified street, gleaming and blacker from wetness, to return to the party.