Social distancing when you live in a two hundred square foot apartment was certainly not the kind of life he would intentionally design, not something he would recommend. It’s bad enough he only had the distance of two or three steps back and forth from his desk to the bathroom, but he also didn’t have his stove hooked up to the gas, and his refrigerator was a two-foot by two-foot cube — just enough for some leftover take-out and a six pack of beer.
Not that there was usually any take-out or beer left, and he was tired of microwaving the stuff anyway.
With all the bars closed he really didn’t have a life. He hated social media. He was tired of every single video game imaginable, felt nauseated each time he went into the App Store on his phone. So he tried reading some of the books he promised himself he’d finish eventually.
Wasn’t Infinite Jest like the pinnacle of late twentieth century novels?Gravity’s Rainbow? These were things his professors had raved about. A page or two and he’d fall asleep. He needed to move around more. He was beginning to feel like a piece of furniture left in storage.
What he really wanted was to see people, but there was nobody around. After what happened with Amy, a rift had grown between him and all of his old college friends. Not anything really dramatic, just a simple, fuck it, who needs it.
There were about three bartenders and five wait staff at his favorite hole-in-the-wall whom he felt closest to now, that is, besides the other jerks he worked with coding educational software. Yeah, right — tell me another. It was merely a way of selling a mishmash of snake oil psychobabble to supposedly increase one’s charisma and leadership qualities.
He’d go for walks, but there was nobody. Plenty of people scattered here and there, but none he’d imagine talking to, and they all swerved around him as he passed. Except for some bratty kid on a skateboard who almost took him off his feet.
No, it was best to stay inside, wash his one pair of socks, underwear and a teeshirt in the bathroom sink and hang them over the shower rod.
He stared at the wall, held his old beat-up guitar, and wiggled his fingers around the fretboard while his pick plunked the dull tones from deadened rusty strings.
Each sounding made the wall seem more brittle, liquid, or perhaps translucent, as his eyes fuzzed and he could imagine seeing through it into the building next door, and through that into another, and so forth, so many rectangular spaces one after another, he could imagine, going on indefinitely.
And the spaces would move back and forth as his fingers moved, and other dull tones were made, dancing in his head like a wind chime.
But there were no people.