#flatlake

Tahir, my boss, waves me over to his desk as soon as I step inside the office. "Jesus, Zan, the toilet's been backed up for over an hour."

I work for one of those sitcom companies that never actually does anything and turns a profit anyway. Conley-Bryant Systems, LLC. Systems. I spend a lot of free time at work thinking of new systems we could add to our repertoire.

"On it," I sigh and grab the janitor's kit that hangs precariously from a peg on a decrepit corkboard. Septic systems.

I put some Florence + the Machine, the good esoteric kind, on in the back to replace the droning jazz Tahir favors in a vain effort to appear sophisticated. He's going to change it back within five minutes, but I do it out of principle anyway. The toilet really is a mess, with the whole ceramic floor shimmering under a turbulent veneer of dark fluid. I flip the light on. Thermodynamic systems.

Cleaning up is mundane work, and I drift off as I plunge the bowl and mop the tile. My shoes are too thin to be doing this kind of work-they're running shoes, which I own not out of any particular athletic tendency but because they're very light and once you've tried them other shoes feel like they're made of concrete-and some of the water seeps in through the mesh over my toes and soaks my socks. Most people would find the sensation disgusting given its source, but it's cool water and I don't give a damn what touches my feet, since they're not going in my mouth anytime soon. The water reminds me how dreadfully close together my toes feel, and I stretch them apart wide until I can't feel the friction between them. After a while my toe muscles start to itch and I have to release the tension from them. The space between them normally feels way too hot to provoke as little sweating as my toes will do, and it bothers me like a cicada in the wardrobe at 2 a.m. But the water from the now-dormant commode has them cool enough that I can return to floating around in the Dead Sea that is my idle mind.

Someone hammers on the door. "We good in there?"

It's Christophe, from Accounting. Christophe is Accounting, more accurately, and his office is as far away from the bathroom as is possible in this building, so I let him in. "Careful," I warn him, "it's still a little slick."

I exit the bathroom, carrying the mop over my shoulder like a fifties street cleaner logo. Systems of a Down.

Sammy has collapsed on the water cooler that divides hers and Tahir's desks. I poke her as I walk by, eliciting a muffled grunt and a swat as she rolls her face over to face away from me. She's Marketing, and has carte blanche 'cause she's so good at it. She's a couple years older than I am, and I have a soft spot for her. 

People treat me pretty well at Conley-Bryant, considering my lowly position. It's a good gig; pays enough and the hours are reasonable. The work is mindless, though, and bears no sense of fulfillment upon completion. I draw a conical cup from the dispenser under the cooler on my way back to the bathroom and drink three cupfuls before tossing it in the trash that I need to empty. Sammy's actually snoring, which means she had an eventful weekend. Tahir's watching her out of the corner of his eye, and I can tell he's dying to chew her out. Prison systems. 

Houston is a humid city.

The sun made ripples in the air as it wound its way down through a window-many windows, in fact, but one window in particular-and lighted on a tentatively flashing alarm clock bearing the ridiculous assertion that it was just past 11 p.m. Maybe in Shanghai, I thought. Definitely somewhere. But go wake them up, and quit bothering me.

I slosh over to the kitchen through the dying maelstrom of sleep deprivation that comes from spending one too many nights going to bed at a decent hour, and put some coffee on. I don't like it much, but the smell reminds me of home. With cream and sugar, it's tolerable. Two boxes of Shredded Mini Wheats, one nearly depleted, and a full gallon of milk complete the ensemble. I smile at myself for having timed my grocery shopping so perfectly.

A cell phone buzzes on the nightstand next to the weird plastic vanity that came with the apartment in the bedroom. It's a blue flip phone from five years ago. It'd cost me about twenty bucks to upgrade to a sensible modern phone these days, but I don't out of either stubbornness or a desire to be a hipster about something. Plus, my personality is too addictive to handle having all that idle entertainment within reach.

Cereal is more important than interaction right now, I decide, and pour myself a serving using the retchingly sugarcoated "Go get 'em, Tiger!" bowl I'd gotten with box tops in second grade. I reach the bottom, correctly assess that this is a problem, and rectify it.

The phone buzzes again. I'm irritated for a moment before I remember I set it to buzz every two minutes while I had an unread message. Wise move, previous me. I pour some coffee. 

I flip the phone open to see a text from a Detroit number whose area code I am only familiar with because I saw 8 Mile. I open it without really looking at it to get it to shut up and drop the phone in a decidedly laptop-free laptop case that's been serving as a manpurse since my backpack got lifted after I left it on the Metro. The sun's breaking out over the top of a misplaced strand of firs set in front of some art museum that's been leaning over my bedroom like a thick surgeon waiting to operate. It's orange through the smog.

I brush my teeth with the rest of the milk from my cereal since my sink's been mysteriously broken for a week now and the landlord can't be arsed to hire a repairman until I threaten to pack up. Swish swish. Waste of good milk.

Ray is limping down the hall as I shut the door behind me. He's retired, and jokes that he's hiding out here so his kids can't put him in a home. I think he retired 'cause he couldn't stand to work anymore, and decided he could live on whatever he had saved up 'til kingdom come as long as he didn't have to put up with The Man anymore. I respect Ray.

Ray and I exchange mumbled greetings and I clutch his shoulder in a tacit display of solidarity for whatever rebellious hijinks he'll engage in today. He's not so old yet that he can't give me one in return. I hope he stays that way. 

It's a mile and a half to the nearest bus stop where I live, a product of awful civil engineering and a general agreement on the city's part to screw over the residents of my particular habitat. We've got one of the highest crime rates in the city here in the Sponge. The Sponge is so named because its official, fancy title is "the Expo district," which caused some talking head in the eighties to label it the Expunge district, because the Expo is where all the things that upset the rest of the city's stomachs end up. People aren't fond of multisyllabic toponyms, apparently, so somewhere down the line Expunge was abbreviated to just the Sponge, and it stuck.

The bus stop is crowded with loners like me, waiting for the sun to duck back behind a skyscraper and provide them some semblance of privacy.

     From time to time it would strike me-most often during those stretches I spent in the fringes of society-how most people would consider it strange that I devoted almost all of my time to one companion. Love, they assumed, or else some sort of business agreement, like we were pool hustlers or petty thieves. We were pool hustlers and petty thieves, as a matter of fact, but that came out of necessity, and half the time we tried to hustle pool we had to run for it because we lost anyway; the real reason I kept only Cirrus' council was because I trusted only her to keep me alive.

I'm back. Because shut up, that's why.

May

The air exerted blunt force against the insides of our temples

and it was May and it was May (somewhere)

I knelt and proposed that we get dinner

and it was May and it was May

Blared silence out of my car's window holes like a ghostly hooligan

and it was May and it was May (in here)

Because it was too hot for sound to travel

and it was May and it was May

And my ears were too cold to receive it

and it was May and it was May (I think)

Burnt my cheekbones from staring at the sun with my eyes closed

and it was May and it was May

As claws clicked along the sidewalk pretending to be piggies

and it was May and it was May (I turned)

Mother ate some bad crawfish

and it was May and it was May

By the time I got there

it was May it was May (seventeen)

I got on here intending to say that I don't know how I'm going to post for a while, since my posts are only any good when I'm sad, but that's kind of completely pointless and a lie besides. See, I'm quiet happy right now, the kind of happy that is secure in itself and has come to terms with its own intransigence. Everything's just going to be okay, and that's wonderful. I think this is called self-confidence or something. All it takes is one morning where you wake up just knowing you can handle whatever today's going to throw at you because you know who you are and how to be him.

So anyway, if you're miserable, you'd get pissed at me for telling you things get better and you'd know I was insincere if I said I sympathized. Being brutally honest, human nature dictates that I don't sympathize, because I no longer understand you. Sure, I remember what it was like, but I can only view those memories through a filter that dampens the pain. I know it sucks, but I can't sympathize.