I haven't been sleeping well lately.
I haven't left my room in four days, except for when I go down to meet the delivery guy, or smoke outside for a change. I exist somewhere in here, between crumpled brown paper bags, the smell of fish and rice, dirty glasses on the table, tangled charger wires, here between the crumbles on my bedsheets. I eat, and after I'm done, I'm left to unwrap a small gift, a golden foil with a cookie inside, with a short message inside the cookie.
It reads:
"The world is full of beautiful things if you know where to look."
Or:
"Smile at a stranger today, and you yourself will be happier."
Or:
"Your ideas are great and inspire others.”
My ideas are great and inspire others?
Please, don't say such things to me. For how can I trust them? How can I take them for anything other than a personal insult, a reminder that somewhere there could be people so unlike me, living in a beautiful world, giving smiles to strangers, having their great, inspiring ideas?
I must have gotten someone else's thing by chance, but even if there is some entity responsible for spreading these obscure messages, say, Lady Fortuna of a cheap Chinese diner, I want nothing to do with her. But what I want is to have what they have: a message sent to me in my language, a little less forgiving, less simple, making less sense overall. I will now make it myself out of leftover words and letters. I will fold it, tear it apart and put it back together, until it is rude to others and not to me. I don't have so many words yet, and some are still reminding me of what they used to say before I changed them. They are still not perfect. But I'm spiteful, and stubborn, too; and I've decided not to participate in whatever paradise they've set up out there. I'm going to stay inside, creasing the little papers and cutting them, and starting anew and all that until they will say something that ears like mine can bear to hear.