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If you’re thinking of reading this, don’t bother.
This isn’t exciting nor interesting, just the story of a lonely man’s bittersweet life.
If you have enough free time to read this, surely there’s something better you could be doing with your time.
But then again if you’ve made it through the warning, perhaps not.
Perhaps you’re a lonely skitty-minded fool looking for his/her/its (delete as applicable) calling on an Internet forum.
Maybe you’re tired of life’s monotony, sick to the stomach of the samey samish same-old, being a pertinent prop in some nine-to-five genetic office block. Living in a low maintenance flat, or as they’re called by the advertisers “apartments” because you’ve already accepted the fact you’re going to die alone and don’t need to consider accommodating children or a significant other.
If everything I’ve just said is a jargonistic faffle of nonsense, give up here. If you want to carry on, take a deep breath and take the plunge.
See things from the other side.
I always arrive home from the office at six thirty seven, on the dot. I finish at five thirty, but it’s hell driving across town at this time. I don’t understand why they don’t have a staggered time for finishing and starting work, so people can get home quicker. I pass the same faces as I stroll up the stairs to my apartment (32 x 56 feet of dingy cold bricks filled with unbranded furniture and cheap food). I wear a beige raincoat to work, despite the fact I’m never outside. The car parks in my life are underneath the apartment block where I live, and beneath the Stattingham Accountancy building where I am employed. I carry a £200 leather briefcase to work containing nought but an empty diary, a gold-plated fountain pen and 25 business cards. The classy kind.
Elliot Finshaw
Apartment 36A Lincoln Towers
5559584
A delicate mint-white background and embossed black letters, a gift from my father when I first got the job 17 years ago. He bought me twenty-five of the cards, I’ve never needed to give one away.
Every evening, just before I unlock my apartment door I see an old lady leaving her apartment, taking her pet poodle out for a walk. She’s outside my door, everyday, like clockwork. We smile, nod, acknowledge each other, but we’ll never speak. For the past 17 years of my life she was the closest person to me. Each day after I smiled at the old woman, whose name I didn’t know, I would enter my apartment, hurl my raincoat over the kitchen counter, click the door closed and cry.
It sounds lame, I understand, it truly is. I am a weak person, well, I was. I would sob because I hated my life and because nobody understood me. I would sob because I had nobody to confide in and didn’t dare seek help. I would sob because I had neither courage nor motive to kill myself. I would sob because I was sobbing.
The nine-to-five charade I put on was killing me. I was fine from the outside, but I was rotting from within. Without purpose the human form goes into shut-down mode. Whilst other people have a wife to pour their affection out onto, I had a rat problem. Other people had hockey at weekends or a garden to prune and pamper, I had an overdraft and mildew. Movies and books make it seem so easy to meet women. It isn’t. Don’t think I haven’t tried. You’re not able to pass that judgement on me. I’m just not an interesting person, I don’t know how to hold a conversation. I’m not a fan of music, and films depress me by showing how good my life could be. I don’t enjoy wine, or Italian culture, or politics or sport. The world is better off without me.
And no, before you ask, this isn’t a hyperbole, I am actually that dull. This story doesn’t get more exciting. That wasn’t the build up, that was the main part. The scene being set for seventeen years to prepare for the plummet nobody expects. The way a roller coaster takes forever to chug up the incline only a second to rush down the huge incline prepared for it. And it’s always a thrill. Whether its your life rushing past, or you’re safely strapped into a metal carriage. Permanence is an illusion created by mortgage providers and animal rights spokespeople, nothing really lasts forever, it rarely lasts a lifetime. Except a lifetime, which inevitably lasts a lifetime.
I fantasised about coming home after work and drawing a nice hot bath. Dismantling my razor and slashing deep into my wrists with the cusp. Tearing angrily through veins, slicing into arteries and chewing through tissue; and then, when my fingertips drip crimson onto the crack-tiled floor, I will slide nakedly into the hot bath and watch the flaps of dead skin from my wrist whiten and die whilst the pump-pump of my heart sends cloud after misty cloud of blood into the hot water. My left atrium would dry up when blood stopped being returned to it, but it would still keep pumping, until nothing but air would pump from my veins. I would either die from lack of oxygen getting to vital organs, or from an airlock in my veins. I liked my chances. I tried it once, but it didn’t work too well. I did it correctly, not deep enough though. Nobody would ever realise, I always wrote long-sleeved shirts when I was acting in the outside world.
You could say my transformation, as I like to call it, begun with a phone call from one of those companies who ask if you’re happy with your long distance.
‘I don’t know’ was my abstinent reply.
This wasn’t, obviously, one of the answers on the touch-screen system the young clerk was using, so she fumbled for a while.
‘How much are you paying for a long distance call at the moment?’ she chirped
‘I don’t know’ was my honest answer
Baffled, she replied, ‘How come you don’t know? It should be on your bill.’
‘I’ve never made a long distance call’ I lied. I once had to ring up the manufacturer of my washing machine, but I used the work phone for that.
‘Don’t you have friends? Family, maybe?’
‘No’ was my flat reply. My father died 15 years ago, the business cards and gambling debt his parting present to me. My mother shortly followed, the body can’t live without the head for long. I hadn’t had a friend since I was 14 years old, but he abandoned me for a girl. I haven’t trusted people since.
‘My goodness’ the young woman began, ‘Can anyone really be that detached from reality?’
I didn’t respond; I just hung up. But it got me thinking; I really was detached. Human contact more than anything keeps us sane. Perhaps seventeen years of nothingness and nobody wasn’t normal. Maybe I am strung out and a little bit psychopathic. Some of the all-time-best serial killers were recluses like me. Building up an antipathy for society and then stalking victims in the night, killing prostitutes in their basement and making jackets from their skin. ‘I could do that!’ I exclaimed aloud to an empty room, which replied with a disapproving silence.
For the first time in my dull little life I reached a crossroads. Three prongs. I could go to a DIY store and buy an imaginative signature killing tool and butcher carefully targeted people, I could drink some false courage and end it all in a more effective manner (after much deliberation I decided that jumping from a high building was foolproof. Or the final prong, to go on as I had being doing for the sub-bland 17 years preceding this moment of truth. Obviously I took the easiest option, to carry on as I was going. But something between destiny and a sign from God changed all that.
I arrived home the next day at six thirty-six, a minute early. The usually quite hall where my apartment sat was filled with a dull squeak as a stretcher on wheels rolled towards me, a paramedic at the front and the rear. I stood, arms pressed against the wall, at the end of the corridor to let the stretcher passed. A white-grey sheet shrouded the identity of the lump underneath. The pasty look on face of the young paramedic at the rear of the ambulance told me it was gruesome. Once the squeak, squeak, squeak had passed me, I made my way to my door and fumbled with my keys. “Excuse me” a deep male voice cut in. I turned to see a heavy-set bearded man in a suit clutching a struggling poodle in his arms. “I’m afraid your neighbour, Mrs Grace, has passed away. Would it be at all possible for me to leave her dog here until we can arrange for someone from the pound to come and collect it?”
I didn’t like to say no to people, I liked my neutral stance in society. I pushed the door open and said “sure.” The guy set the poodle down and it scurried in a rat-like manner into my apartment to chew on my cheap furniture. “What’s your name, sir?” the man asked me, “I’ll need to tell the pound where to come and college the dog.” And for the first time in seventeen years I drew a crisp mint-white card from my briefcase and held it out in outstretched fingers. “Thanks” he said, smiling warmly as he took the card, I’ll send someone round soon.
I clicked the lock shut and looked vacantly at the poodle, who was panting and staring up at me needily. “What?” I asked, half expecting an answer. “Are you hungry?” It barked. I put some expired tuna into a bowl for it and set it on the floor. I watched in a degree of awe as it munched hungrily through the tuna. It looked up at me with an empty bowl, and if I wasn’t mistaken I’d have said the dog was smiling, then I was smiling. Not fake charade by-the-coffee-machine-passer-by smiling, but genuine happy smiling. Something in this world was dependant on me, and I felt a warmness inside where I previously felt nothing.
A man in a pale blue uniform knocked at the door later asking if I was Elliot Finshaw. I shook my head. He asked if I knew where he lived, I told him ‘Sorry, no’. He didn’t knock back.
The next day I didn’t wear my generic beige raincoat. I strolled to work through the cloudy-but-warm city. I stopped putting my money away in the bank for a future I didn’t have planned and bought a television, a home computer, and a radio. I stocked the bare cupboards with real food, not ready meals, and taught myself how to cook. I can now make a supreme lasagne, which goes down excellently with a nice glass of chateaux bonheur.
I broke my social mould and was instilled with confidence enough to speak to people on the Internet. I met some rather like-minded people who related to my distanced lifestyle. All of a sudden I stopped feeling alone. I named the dog Grace, after the old woman whom I never spoke to. I took pleasure in taking her for walks. I cut time by walking to and from work in the rush hour, and could take Grace for a walk at six thirty-seven, the time she was accustomed to.
I don’t think I’ve found my calling, but then again I don’t think many people do. I’ve wasted 17 years of my life; I’m not prepared to spend the rest of it looking for some holy grail. Human contact is what keeps us sane, whether it’s from a corridor smile, a screename on a chatroom, or man’s best friend chewing your slipper. It’s all contact. The though, the certainty, of dying alone is somewhat distant now. To mean something to someone, anyone, is motive enough to exist.
And if you bothered to read this, all the way to the end, without getting bored or clicking away, then you have to ask yourself if you’re content. Are you searching for a holy grail that doesn’t exist, or being content with what you have? After all, reading this is a form of human contact. I’ve served my purpose, serve yours.
This isn’t exciting nor interesting, just the story of a lonely man’s bittersweet life.
If you have enough free time to read this, surely there’s something better you could be doing with your time.
But then again if you’ve made it through the warning, perhaps not.
Perhaps you’re a lonely skitty-minded fool looking for his/her/its (delete as applicable) calling on an Internet forum.
Maybe you’re tired of life’s monotony, sick to the stomach of the samey samish same-old, being a pertinent prop in some nine-to-five genetic office block. Living in a low maintenance flat, or as they’re called by the advertisers “apartments” because you’ve already accepted the fact you’re going to die alone and don’t need to consider accommodating children or a significant other.
If everything I’ve just said is a jargonistic faffle of nonsense, give up here. If you want to carry on, take a deep breath and take the plunge.
See things from the other side.
I always arrive home from the office at six thirty seven, on the dot. I finish at five thirty, but it’s hell driving across town at this time. I don’t understand why they don’t have a staggered time for finishing and starting work, so people can get home quicker. I pass the same faces as I stroll up the stairs to my apartment (32 x 56 feet of dingy cold bricks filled with unbranded furniture and cheap food). I wear a beige raincoat to work, despite the fact I’m never outside. The car parks in my life are underneath the apartment block where I live, and beneath the Stattingham Accountancy building where I am employed. I carry a £200 leather briefcase to work containing nought but an empty diary, a gold-plated fountain pen and 25 business cards. The classy kind.
Elliot Finshaw
Apartment 36A Lincoln Towers
5559584
A delicate mint-white background and embossed black letters, a gift from my father when I first got the job 17 years ago. He bought me twenty-five of the cards, I’ve never needed to give one away.
Every evening, just before I unlock my apartment door I see an old lady leaving her apartment, taking her pet poodle out for a walk. She’s outside my door, everyday, like clockwork. We smile, nod, acknowledge each other, but we’ll never speak. For the past 17 years of my life she was the closest person to me. Each day after I smiled at the old woman, whose name I didn’t know, I would enter my apartment, hurl my raincoat over the kitchen counter, click the door closed and cry.
It sounds lame, I understand, it truly is. I am a weak person, well, I was. I would sob because I hated my life and because nobody understood me. I would sob because I had nobody to confide in and didn’t dare seek help. I would sob because I had neither courage nor motive to kill myself. I would sob because I was sobbing.
The nine-to-five charade I put on was killing me. I was fine from the outside, but I was rotting from within. Without purpose the human form goes into shut-down mode. Whilst other people have a wife to pour their affection out onto, I had a rat problem. Other people had hockey at weekends or a garden to prune and pamper, I had an overdraft and mildew. Movies and books make it seem so easy to meet women. It isn’t. Don’t think I haven’t tried. You’re not able to pass that judgement on me. I’m just not an interesting person, I don’t know how to hold a conversation. I’m not a fan of music, and films depress me by showing how good my life could be. I don’t enjoy wine, or Italian culture, or politics or sport. The world is better off without me.
And no, before you ask, this isn’t a hyperbole, I am actually that dull. This story doesn’t get more exciting. That wasn’t the build up, that was the main part. The scene being set for seventeen years to prepare for the plummet nobody expects. The way a roller coaster takes forever to chug up the incline only a second to rush down the huge incline prepared for it. And it’s always a thrill. Whether its your life rushing past, or you’re safely strapped into a metal carriage. Permanence is an illusion created by mortgage providers and animal rights spokespeople, nothing really lasts forever, it rarely lasts a lifetime. Except a lifetime, which inevitably lasts a lifetime.
I fantasised about coming home after work and drawing a nice hot bath. Dismantling my razor and slashing deep into my wrists with the cusp. Tearing angrily through veins, slicing into arteries and chewing through tissue; and then, when my fingertips drip crimson onto the crack-tiled floor, I will slide nakedly into the hot bath and watch the flaps of dead skin from my wrist whiten and die whilst the pump-pump of my heart sends cloud after misty cloud of blood into the hot water. My left atrium would dry up when blood stopped being returned to it, but it would still keep pumping, until nothing but air would pump from my veins. I would either die from lack of oxygen getting to vital organs, or from an airlock in my veins. I liked my chances. I tried it once, but it didn’t work too well. I did it correctly, not deep enough though. Nobody would ever realise, I always wrote long-sleeved shirts when I was acting in the outside world.
You could say my transformation, as I like to call it, begun with a phone call from one of those companies who ask if you’re happy with your long distance.
‘I don’t know’ was my abstinent reply.
This wasn’t, obviously, one of the answers on the touch-screen system the young clerk was using, so she fumbled for a while.
‘How much are you paying for a long distance call at the moment?’ she chirped
‘I don’t know’ was my honest answer
Baffled, she replied, ‘How come you don’t know? It should be on your bill.’
‘I’ve never made a long distance call’ I lied. I once had to ring up the manufacturer of my washing machine, but I used the work phone for that.
‘Don’t you have friends? Family, maybe?’
‘No’ was my flat reply. My father died 15 years ago, the business cards and gambling debt his parting present to me. My mother shortly followed, the body can’t live without the head for long. I hadn’t had a friend since I was 14 years old, but he abandoned me for a girl. I haven’t trusted people since.
‘My goodness’ the young woman began, ‘Can anyone really be that detached from reality?’
I didn’t respond; I just hung up. But it got me thinking; I really was detached. Human contact more than anything keeps us sane. Perhaps seventeen years of nothingness and nobody wasn’t normal. Maybe I am strung out and a little bit psychopathic. Some of the all-time-best serial killers were recluses like me. Building up an antipathy for society and then stalking victims in the night, killing prostitutes in their basement and making jackets from their skin. ‘I could do that!’ I exclaimed aloud to an empty room, which replied with a disapproving silence.
For the first time in my dull little life I reached a crossroads. Three prongs. I could go to a DIY store and buy an imaginative signature killing tool and butcher carefully targeted people, I could drink some false courage and end it all in a more effective manner (after much deliberation I decided that jumping from a high building was foolproof. Or the final prong, to go on as I had being doing for the sub-bland 17 years preceding this moment of truth. Obviously I took the easiest option, to carry on as I was going. But something between destiny and a sign from God changed all that.
I arrived home the next day at six thirty-six, a minute early. The usually quite hall where my apartment sat was filled with a dull squeak as a stretcher on wheels rolled towards me, a paramedic at the front and the rear. I stood, arms pressed against the wall, at the end of the corridor to let the stretcher passed. A white-grey sheet shrouded the identity of the lump underneath. The pasty look on face of the young paramedic at the rear of the ambulance told me it was gruesome. Once the squeak, squeak, squeak had passed me, I made my way to my door and fumbled with my keys. “Excuse me” a deep male voice cut in. I turned to see a heavy-set bearded man in a suit clutching a struggling poodle in his arms. “I’m afraid your neighbour, Mrs Grace, has passed away. Would it be at all possible for me to leave her dog here until we can arrange for someone from the pound to come and collect it?”
I didn’t like to say no to people, I liked my neutral stance in society. I pushed the door open and said “sure.” The guy set the poodle down and it scurried in a rat-like manner into my apartment to chew on my cheap furniture. “What’s your name, sir?” the man asked me, “I’ll need to tell the pound where to come and college the dog.” And for the first time in seventeen years I drew a crisp mint-white card from my briefcase and held it out in outstretched fingers. “Thanks” he said, smiling warmly as he took the card, I’ll send someone round soon.
I clicked the lock shut and looked vacantly at the poodle, who was panting and staring up at me needily. “What?” I asked, half expecting an answer. “Are you hungry?” It barked. I put some expired tuna into a bowl for it and set it on the floor. I watched in a degree of awe as it munched hungrily through the tuna. It looked up at me with an empty bowl, and if I wasn’t mistaken I’d have said the dog was smiling, then I was smiling. Not fake charade by-the-coffee-machine-passer-by smiling, but genuine happy smiling. Something in this world was dependant on me, and I felt a warmness inside where I previously felt nothing.
A man in a pale blue uniform knocked at the door later asking if I was Elliot Finshaw. I shook my head. He asked if I knew where he lived, I told him ‘Sorry, no’. He didn’t knock back.
The next day I didn’t wear my generic beige raincoat. I strolled to work through the cloudy-but-warm city. I stopped putting my money away in the bank for a future I didn’t have planned and bought a television, a home computer, and a radio. I stocked the bare cupboards with real food, not ready meals, and taught myself how to cook. I can now make a supreme lasagne, which goes down excellently with a nice glass of chateaux bonheur.
I broke my social mould and was instilled with confidence enough to speak to people on the Internet. I met some rather like-minded people who related to my distanced lifestyle. All of a sudden I stopped feeling alone. I named the dog Grace, after the old woman whom I never spoke to. I took pleasure in taking her for walks. I cut time by walking to and from work in the rush hour, and could take Grace for a walk at six thirty-seven, the time she was accustomed to.
I don’t think I’ve found my calling, but then again I don’t think many people do. I’ve wasted 17 years of my life; I’m not prepared to spend the rest of it looking for some holy grail. Human contact is what keeps us sane, whether it’s from a corridor smile, a screename on a chatroom, or man’s best friend chewing your slipper. It’s all contact. The though, the certainty, of dying alone is somewhat distant now. To mean something to someone, anyone, is motive enough to exist.
And if you bothered to read this, all the way to the end, without getting bored or clicking away, then you have to ask yourself if you’re content. Are you searching for a holy grail that doesn’t exist, or being content with what you have? After all, reading this is a form of human contact. I’ve served my purpose, serve yours.
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Thanku sleepy, otherguy and Mav, who plugs a film more so than the producers.
That really was wonderful. Charming and gentle.
That was wicked that story I really liked it!
That was rather good.
Am I right in sensing some inspiration from About Schmidt?
Am I right in sensing some inspiration from About Schmidt?
Thanks for all the feedbacks.
I got a little tingle after I'd finished this, that I haven't had since I wrote Spice, which went down quite well too.
Sorry about the spelling mistakes, I didn't proof-read very well.
I got a little tingle after I'd finished this, that I haven't had since I wrote Spice, which went down quite well too.
Sorry about the spelling mistakes, I didn't proof-read very well.
FinalFantasyFanatic wrote:
> Although the first bits don't fit in - seeing as you've put this story
> up on an internet forum, and you know full well why people will be
> reading it.
I know. It was my starting point when I was going to have the story a little bit different, I took them away but it didnt seem right without the intro.
I also read something similar at the start of Choke by Palahniuk which I thought I'd try myself. I really like the concept of it, even if it doesn't work great here.
> Although the first bits don't fit in - seeing as you've put this story
> up on an internet forum, and you know full well why people will be
> reading it.
I know. It was my starting point when I was going to have the story a little bit different, I took them away but it didnt seem right without the intro.
I also read something similar at the start of Choke by Palahniuk which I thought I'd try myself. I really like the concept of it, even if it doesn't work great here.
Although the first bits don't fit in - seeing as you've put this story up on an internet forum, and you know full well why people will be reading it.
After making so many posts about your "position" in society in LIFE, I'm most surprised that came from you.
Anyway, you're back. That was exellent.
Anyway, you're back. That was exellent.
Nice. Very much so.
I just read the last bit a few days ago and it seemed all preachy - but with the rest of the story behind it, it was calm, gentle and nicely uplifting.
A few spelling / punctuation mistakes by the by.
I just read the last bit a few days ago and it seemed all preachy - but with the rest of the story behind it, it was calm, gentle and nicely uplifting.
A few spelling / punctuation mistakes by the by.
That was great, Paradox. Really enjoyed it. Not a boring story at all.
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