River Teeth

My life is like all of the things that we don’t want to talk about, but since I do not have a reputation to maintain I can be the rare kind of person who will tell their real story. 

I drove myself to the gym today. By “drove” I mean haphazardly selecting songs by the Notorious B.I.G. while trying to maneuver a small, gray Ford CMAX around a blinking red light that hadn’t been working all day. It was night now, and the cloudless black sky left room for the anxious street lights to blur around my eyes as they created fuzzy outlines across my windshield. My windows rolled down and the warm wind calmly blowing on my loose clothes, I parked and entered the gym. 

My mind was numb as I scanned my access card to unlock the flimsy, see-through door, and I walked past the familiar red walls with poor signage that I could have better marketed in the fifth grade. Only a few people were in the gym, robots on a late Saturday night that, like me, didn’t have anything better to do. 

Well. I had something better to do. But my thoughts felt like muddy water at the bottom of a warm lake, just waiting for some form of life or activity. Like the warm lake, I was not, nor did I feel like, someone who people would want to waste their time with.  

I started my workout with my regular push-up warm up. One minute. Timed. Usually it feels like an hour but this time I paused between each push up. Up, stop, down. Up, stop, down. Easy. The minute flew by, my upper arms feeling warm with the rush of blood and lactic acid. I took the excuse of a successful first set to take a minute to select the sad music that sounded like how I felt at the moment. Like I was falling from the sky and plunging into warm water, holding my breath until I could relax. This is the way that I describe what most people call “sadness.” 

I moved on to a minute of tricep push ups, harder, but doable. I could feel my chest expanding and tightening with each movement, the split above my upper pecs undoubtedly becoming more prominent and developed the more I exercised. This is why I do it, of course. Exercise makes me look better, and if I look better, then maybe more people will like me. 

If that is the case, then why was I alone in the gym on the same Saturday night that my high school was having a football game? A football game that I really wanted to go to, too. 

Earlier that day, in the too-bright white LED lights of Kohl’s, as I waited impatiently for my brother to decide on a pointless article of clothing, I nervously texted my friend. “I am thinking of going to the football game later. Do you want to go?” A few silent, bored minutes later I got the response. “I am going with some of my friends.” 

Great. How I define friends is, essentially, not me. I am not a friend. I am the guy that sits in the corner, who is both too loud and too quiet at the same time, both annoying and spectacularly fun, intelligent but undereducated,  not alone but lonely. 

Before I went to the gym I looked up my only other friend, the one I consider a close friend of mine but who simultaneously only considers me a casual friend of his. I looked him up on Snapchat to ask if he wanted to go with me. I only like working out alone, pumping weight by myself with headphones playing the music that puts meaning into feelings I can’t describe. Other people at the gym are a distraction. I looked up this friend anyway, to see if he was home and if he wanted to go with me, so that I did not have to feel like the loner that I am. 

He was at the football game too. Never asked me if I wanted to go. I didn’t feel hurt because I am used to this. So I went to the gym alone, hiding my pain and determining my worth by lifting until I felt like I looked like someone people would want to be friends with. 

For the first time, this didn’t make me feel better. 

I spent thirty fast minutes pumping biceps, with my wrist straps straining the blood flow to my hands but making my biceps feel warm and tired as they contracted to bring the rough metal barbell to my chest and down. Over and over. I rotated with dumbbells for triceps, my elbows bending to nearly the breaking point as I brought thirty-five pounds behind and over my head until I couldn’t anymore. Usually the feeling of my heart pumping and the lactic acid buildup is enough to make me stop thinking. Not this time. Thirty minutes went by like a drive to an exciting party (not that I know what it’s like to go to a party), but four sets into a seated bicep curl I couldn’t do it anymore. 

I rarely spend less than two hours in the gym. My mind was both empty and full of every possible thought. Intrusive thoughts. I’m not one to do anything crazy but OCD is a funny thing. It puts things in your mind that you would never do but can’t stop thinking about. That makes it hard to distinguish what is real and what is for attention. My tics started going; I covered my face with my hand and walked out the door. 

I was hit with a smack of fresh air and the chatter of people grown-up and spending a night with their friends outside the brewery, the live music being packed up and hauled away. Soft turquoise LED lights blinking into a fuzzy lavender color. Soothing for my eyes, a color that mimics an ocean-like setting despite being miles and miles away from a beautiful place like that. The closest thing to an ocean here was the wave of unsettling thoughts that reminded me how bored and empty I was. 

I knew it was night and I knew it was dangerous to walk alone where few people will see me, but I didn’t have the energy to be safe. I walked around the multi-business building, the dull, yellow grass skittling with the movement of a small rodent. A few older girls, maybe seniors, in fashionable outfits and sitting atop a fancy white truck, pointed at me and said something. I glanced at them with a quick smile, ignoring them. I don’t like to talk to people. I kept walking, breathing in the stuffy air along a poorly-lit sidewalk, and I saw a tiny pink snake rapidly slither across the spot where I was just about to step; its scaly body squirming in big loops until it found itself in a bush. I made it to where I had crookedly parked, next to a pair of dirty white football cleats that some teenager had forgotten. Like me, discarded and left in a parking lot, forgotten. 

I then sat in the car and drank some cold, refreshing water out of my giant bright pink Gatorade bottle. Hot pink like Barbie's dress. Nobody can make fun of my pink water bottle. Pink is my favorite color, ever since I stopped caring what other people thought of a boy liking pink. 

I turned on a song that matched the mood of the deep feeling in my chest, like an abandoned puppy wondering why he has been left. I chose the song “Forgotten” by Green Day. It was bittersweet, reminding of the crowded, bustling concert I saw the band at last summer when I didn’t feel as connected as I thought I would. Green Day was the band I grew up loving like they were my own family, despite never knowing them personally… but that feeling had heartbreakingly faded away. 

21 Guns played next, which hurt more because it reminded me of a worse time in my life, when I began losing friends in middle school and this song had made me feel okay again. Or maybe it just sympathized with my pain. Whichever it was, it was my anthem at age twelve. To hear it again now is to relive those times. 

Yet it felt good. Better. Sadness is comforting as it allows you to give up. You can’t be lower so you can finally relax. At this time I was able to relax. I sat in my chair and I listened to Green Day in that same crooked parking spot, not caring about the man parked two spaces away who looked at me a few times uncertainly. Wondering why a sixteen year old boy was in a parking lot alone, not smoking or any other stereotypical parking-lot behavior, not talking to friends or watching a show, but just… existing. Sitting there, in the cool summer breeze of ten PM, and thinking. That was me. That is what I did for the next hour, sifting through Green Day’s first album and toying with my new Instagram account. Looking at the friends I have and don’t have at the same time. Friends who will respond to my messages but won’t ask me to hang out. Friends that go to games on Saturday nights and leave me alone to quit my gym session and listen to Green Day in a parking lot. 

That was my night. I am not telling this story for anyone to feel sorry for me. I am telling this story because it is the truth of what it is really like to experience something without a filter and without pretending to be a certain way to be more socially acceptable. At least when I am alone I do not have to worry about what other people think. And that is fine with me.