Happiness

He sat alone on the couch in his living room, staring at some stupid show on TV with actors who barely deserve the title, a bottle of beer left forgotten on the table, long turned lukewarm with the heat from the fan in the side of the laptop he had absentmindedly set the bottle down next to almost an hour ago.  He didn't even like booze.  Didn't understand why anybody would want to muddy one's mind - after all, nobody spins in office chairs to voluntarily induce vertigo, fuzzy vision, and the urge to vomit.  He hadn't showered in two days, and even in a T-shirt and shorts, his hair was flattened with grease and his nose and forehead were shiny and oily from dried sweat.  The stubble on his face wasn't stubble anymore, it was about to start grade school.

Tomorrow was Monday.  He'd get up around eight, take a shower, take care of his facial hair, shampoo his hair, hold his breath and lather his face.  He hated soap on his face; hated it getting in his mouth, his nose, his eyes.  He would get dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, shove his books in his bag, turn his computer off and throw it haphazardly in among his books, and head off to school.  He'd rejoin civilization as a normal member of society, a mere dot in the middle of a Gaussian distribution curve, smiling and greeting and paying attention in class and participating in discussions and hanging out with friends during lunch to keep his mind off the lonesome, boring, uninteresting, eventless monotony his private life had become.

Once upon a time, he'd taken a chance.  He'd thought she was amazing, that he was incredibly lucky that he'd found her and that she liked him and he liked her too, that when he closed his eyes at night he could almost see the two of them commuting to the same college from the same apartment, graduating uni and commuting to work from the same house, surrounded at home by puppies and sofas and a large flatscreen TV and an electronics setup to be envied by a thousand geeks, and maybe, just maybe, a bunch of little kids with her eyes and hair and ears and nose and lips and little mannerisms...

But then he found out what she was really like.  Fiercely private, she rarely let him in, and only then by the emotional and romantic equivalent of forced entry - voicing his concern for her constant broodiness, the way she hid everything, even from herself, internalizing everything so nobody could ever tell there was anything wrong in her life.  Outside of those rare moments when she opened up to him, the only topics of conversation were irrelevant inanities and filler material - their equivalent of the weather and the previous day's sports scores; those happened in alarming infrequency, usually five or ten minutes after a class they both shared, because she always seemed to pick her own friends over him and never had time after school or on the weekends to sit and chat or let him take her out on dates or dinner or a movie.  There were none of the usual things a normal couple would do, such as intercepting each other on the streets of campus and catching up on each other's day for fourteen minutes in the fifteen-minute breaks between classes; or calling each other at night and staying on the phone for hours at a time, eventually falling asleep together; or waiting outside of each other's classes at the end of the schoolday to hang out for five minutes before one had to reluctantly leave the other because of work.  Soon, she stopped replying to his texts unless it was something important, like a question about classwork or a message passed on from somebody else; then, she even stopped replying to the important ones, and not long after that, she stopped picking up his calls or calling back.  She became even busier, not showing up to classes, so that their after-class conversations stopped happening, and he never saw her except glimpses as she passed him on campus.  By the time she finally came back and promised to work on making the relationship work, he'd already lost that excitement he'd felt when she awkwardly held his hand and kissed him lightly on the cheek in response to his equally awkward declaration of affection.  He withdrew for awhile into himself while he tried to decide whether to trust her promise or just end the relationship right then and there, trying to weigh the pros and cons in a rational self-argument that ultimately failed because romance isn't rational - he knew he wouldn't be completely happy in any relationship with her even if she changed, because people don't change, and yet, there was something that made him decide to give her a second chance - give the relationship a second chance - because the following week they were back together and 'happy'.

His prophetic insight turned out to be terrifyingly prophetic, because he wasn't happy.  Eventually she used the incredibly sappy but ultimately useless "I want you to be happy" line to break up with him, which only seemed to push him further down the spiral.  He started self-administering shots of ethyl hydrates and pro-opiomelanocortin, quietly withdrew from his friends, turned his personal life into a dull, repetitive, day-in-day-out ritual involving sitting, the box, and no lights, despite what bright TVs in dark rooms do to one's eyesight.  He thought he'd learned not to get too involved in romantic relationships, not to get too emotionally invested because it only results in disaster for his secretly thin skin; yet there he was, jumping head-first into that exact situation, twice, despite his perfect 20/20 foresight the second time around.

Maybe next time.