zero comments

i have been lonely. very lonely. not very, so recently, but i have been. read something in a book the other day: a woman looks at her answering machine to see if there are any messages. there's a big red zero. she presses play anyway.

i have been that lonely.

and it strikes me that, if several years ago, i had looked at this thing of mine and seen '0 comments', i might have cried. the kind of crying that gets the tears smeared all over your face, and you try to take a huge breath in through your nose, but you find that your nostrils are completely blocked. the kind of crying that always makes my forearms feel empty. and i would keep checking and checking, obsessively, many more times than the already pretty obsessive once an hour.

but. i don't think i care now. is anyone reading this? hello? maybe i would have once thought, it's like being the invisible man. but NOW i think, it's like...being the invisible man. whereas before i might have though, oh, poor invisible man, woe is him! no one can see him, no one loves him, he can't even collect himself a houseful of cats and become a crazy cat lady, because the cats would be afaid of him, and he's not a lady. but now i am more inclined to think, oh, the joy of the invisible man! since no one can see him, he can sneer derisively! he can stick out his tongue at ugly children and mean people! he can leer suggestively! he may never get seen, but he will never get laughed at. he will never get caught.

i don't like cats anyway.