Why I’m spending Christmas with the sentient life form that emerged one day from a pile of my dirty underwear
This isn’t because I have no friends.
My life has never been traditional. I am a free spirit, and when people tell me to get married and have kids, or to clean up my festering underwear so a sentient life form doesn’t emerge from the fetid piles of filth, all I hear them saying is “conform to our way of life and deny what makes you unique.” Well too bad: I have never hewed to society’s narrow definition of what a woman’s life should be, and this Christmas season won’t be any different.
My story began a few months ago, when I decided to take the bold step of leaving my dirty underwear on the floor. Well, decided is a strong word….I basically just got super busy watching Jersey Shore and writing my book of life hacks for sapiosexual YouTube influencers and starting my artisanal candle-making business, and assumed I’d clean up later. But later never came. The piles started out small, then began to grow, until they reached the ceiling and made it nearly impossible for me to move around and breathe in my apartment. Friends and family expressed concern, telling me I should just pick up my goddamn underwear and do my laundry like a normal adult. Sorry losers: nothing normal about this chica!
After some time, I noticed the underwear had begun to bond together to form one giant hulking mass of some sort, and a few weeks after that, the mass began to move. I assumed that a family of raccoons was living in the piles and thought nothing of it until I came home one day from my Botox book club to find a giant sentient being slithering around my filthy apartment. This new life form told me its name was Titus and that I had created it by leaving my soiled underwear in a stinking pile for months. Titus explained how evolution can happen when disparate elements like cheap cotton panties and skid marks come together in new and unexpected ways to form a whole that is greater than their parts.
Titus and I became friends, and not only because he refused to leave my apartment. We discovered a shared passion for bucking the rules that society tells us to live by: me by not cleaning up the piles of underwear on my floor until they coalesce into a sentient life form, and Titus by evolving from a pile of dirty Walmart underwear into a sentient life form with hopes, fears, and dreams of his own. We are not so different after all.
Christmas is upon us now, and Titus and I will spend it together. This isn’t because I have no friends, my family doesn’t want to see me, and my boyfriend dumped me because I wasn’t “a good person.” Though all of those things are true, the real reason I am spending Christmas with Titus, the sentient life form that emerged from a pile of my dirty underwear, is because it just feels right.
Titus and I won’t follow your stupid rules. We are both non conformists, and we will make our own Christmas traditions together, whether those involve Titus swallowing me up because he is hungry and must grow, or me running around our apartment trying to avoid being swallowed up by Titus because he is hungry and I am wearing the underwear he needs to grow bigger. We do our own thing! Also as a side note, if anyone could please come to my apartment and let me out, I’d really appreciate that because Titus is blocking the door. He is so funny!!
I can’t wait to decorate the tree and wrap presents with my new best friend. Titus is getting a new pile of dirty underwear for Christmas — shhhh!! — and I am probably getting eaten by the sentient life form that emerged one day from a pile of my dirty underwear. That’s just how my life is now, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything, except perhaps freedom from the prison borne of my own slovenliness, and some new underwear.
Now if you’ll excuse me, the pile of takeout containers I’ve been meaning to clean up for six months is stirring, and I suspect I’m going to have a Christmas miracle on my hands soon. Merry Christmas to all, and please send help!!!!
