When I drank, I clung to men. When I drank, I refuted religion. When I drank, I surrendered to any carnal whim.
The particular night I’m going to describe is when I drank and took my primitive understanding of feminism too far and called him….but I couldn’t reach him--instead I got a hold of his his aloofness...and it broke me. When he hung up, stared at the dot matrix screen on the Nokia thinking it would ring any second because maybe he’ll call back? He really wants to see me...he just needs to check his schedule.
When your self-worth is based around a phone call, things can get pretty dark, pretty fast. I’d been waiting for weeks. Had he thought about me even once since my hangover and I crawled out of his dirty bed in this dirty desert town? Of course he did! We had so many laughs, right? Every second looking at that puke green screen waiting for it to light up slathered hurt atop another layer of hurt...so, I hurt the phone back. I responded to its abuse by taking my power back and broke it into 7 spiky pieces of plastic--each piece telling me, in a very specific way, what a fantastic piece of shit I am.
When I reached for my phone the next morning to check the time, my nightstand only held the sleeve of an unwatched Netflix movie (it’s weird to think about DVDs). Where’s my phone? Oh yeah, I broke it. The clock in the kitchen told me that I had hours before my teaching job (I was a doctoral student in the Middle East Studies Dept and I paid my tuition by teaching Persian 101 to a bunch of Iranian jack-offs who wanted an easy A). The day unfolded as usual; while on campus, I futilely reached for my phone to check the time, went to class and gave those dickbags their lesson on the Persian past continuous tense.
Because of my untiring habit of checking the time, I realized the primary function of my phone: to display how many anxiety-filled minutes remain between “now” and “the next thing”. I appeased/contributed to this anxiety by asking strangers on campus for the time—scary and peculiar strangers. I hate strangers. Yet, when I walked away from each of them (three total) I liked it.
It was like we shared something--our world space interacted with our shared world time; right now, in this location, we are both here. You stand in front of me and I see you; I can touch you (but won’t), you can touch me (but don’t), if there was a flood we’d be washed away at the same time, if there was a car accident we’d probably see the same thing, if it started to hail, we’d feel it at once, and if someone was baking bread we’d smell it at the same time. I can’t explain the solace I felt in that moment...or in those three moments, but they were there. Shaving layers of the ennui away. They were there connecting me to people, even though we were just exchanging common minutiae. And I realized that THIS was the source of my ennui. Isolationism. I needed others and I only looked for them at the bottom of bottles or fleeting and flittering men. I suddenly realized how lonely I had been and how filling it with dick and whiskey was making it worse.
But the encounter turned sour; once the stranger told me the time, the power dynamic shifted. It was like I could sense their pity--like they were offering some paltry thing called “time” that meant nothing to them and everything to me. They had something I didn’t have: information; it belonged to them and it was in their control to offer it and because of how little it meant to them and how much I needed it, it felt like charity. And i wanted to stop feeling this way. Then I wanted my phone back.
I didn’t buy a new phone for nearly two days. I liked the quiet and felt lighter. Those seven spiky shards of plastic were stepping stones...to a new me? I'll fall in love with myself now! Nah, I didn't buy a new phone because if it didn't exist, I wasn’t forced to see the zero missed calls on the screen from him, breaking my heart upon every screen unlock. I was able to delude myself into a power shift with the mindset that he called me back that night and I’m too busy to talk. With no phone who’s to say I was wrong? It gave me relief, so I guess the demolition was worth it. And for a minute, it was.
When I got the new phone a few days later and saw two missed calls and three texts my heart jumped a bit with hope, and immediately plummeted with disappointment when I saw my father, sister, and former college roommate’s names on the Missed Call screen. What a funny little brain fuck is this thing we call perspective. Despite the lovely tone of my best friend’s voice or my sister’s dry wit and compassion, nothing but ugly and dark stomach aches circled my belly when I saw their names on the phone screen instead of his. In the company of my phone, I’m ugly, undateable, unmarriable, unwanted, and boring. That’s why I took a hammer to it, but then I bought another one and repeated the cycle, eagerly giving away my power...like a modern Mrs. Havisham...cell phone collecting dust next to the wedding china in that cobwebbed room.
When I got the new phone a few days later and saw two missed calls and three texts my heart jumped a bit with hope, and immediately plummeted with disappointment when I saw my father, sister, and former college roommate’s names on the Missed Call screen. What a funny little brain fuck is this thing we call perspective. Despite the lovely tone of my best friend’s voice or my sister’s dry wit and compassion, nothing but ugly and dark stomach aches circled my belly when I saw their names on the phone screen instead of his. In the company of my phone, I’m ugly, undateable, unmarriable, unwanted, and boring. That’s why I took a hammer to it, but then I bought another one and repeated the cycle, eagerly giving away my power...like a modern Mrs. Havisham...cell phone collecting dust next to the wedding china in that cobwebbed room.
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