How The Hell Are You

The best proof that language is a scam are those moments when you feel absolutely terrible and someone asks how you are. You both know they must feel disgusting for asking, because they can see it on your face and also everyone feels terrible, at least a lot of the time, if we’re being end-of-the-day honest. But still, you stand there, like two lawyers caught in a case neither of you really believe in. Planning your next moves on the flowchart of Trying Not to Make It Hurt More Than It Already Does.

“Fine.”

Fine, as in there are large toothy demons having lunch on the floor of my soul but at least they chew with their mouths closed some of the time.

Normal.

A friend of mine was recently diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. What a great way to start a paragraph. I know it sounds like a lot when it’s all alone in a sentence like that. In reality, after about four weeks of being the truth, it’s a little choir humming in the background of every conversation we have. It sounds… nice? Fine? I don’t know. My friend is “fighting” it, and by “fighting” I mean following directions and occasionally Gchatting me about it. Eating donuts. Pancakes. Sitting on beige couches and scrolling through Facebook. Tweeting links to satirical blogs about Donald Trump.

The normalest.

Someone once told me everyone gets three things. Just three. Like strikes, or mathematical constants, they’re what you think about when you can’t distract yourself. Mental houseflies: they come when your head is unoccupied, or when something’s dying.

I think of my three things when I’m lying in bed at night, like someone just shot me with a tranquilizer dart. Weirdly persistent indigestion, regrets about misguided career choices, my parents’ health. Hands above my head as I tell stories to the ceiling. It’s comforting, in a weird way. You could call them worries, but they’re more substantial, and they’ve been around longer. Somewhere in my life, I convinced myself to take care of them. And I do. I do a pretty good job of it, most of the time.

“I feel better. I didn’t know I didn’t feel better before, but I feel better,” is something someone (a different someone) texted me recently. They were talking about a conversation they’d had with their ex, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is I immediately felt immensely jealous. What small, fledgling problems are hatching inside of me right now, growing maybe, and I just keep finding space for them?

I want that feeling, I thought. I really want that feeling.

I remember, in Kindergarten, there was this massive snot string that emerged from my nose during circle time. I turned around and let it droop onto the vein-y linoleum floor. My friend Ian (Kinder BFF, basically) looked on admiringly. Jealously. It was something to, like, aspire to. And since then, I think, I’ve been subconsciously wanting it to happen again. But metaphorically, where the snot is a combination of my unread browser tabs and everything everyone’s ever said about me behind my back.

Though we both know the answer, I keep asking — in the most eggshell-y way — how my friend is doing. It’s one of the paradoxes of politeness: people most want to know how you are when you’re at your worst.

“Fine.”

The situation is shitty, obviously. It’s *so majestically* shitty — the shittiness level has, like, eradicated emojis from our texts — but it’s also one of the things. You habituate, is what I’m saying. And habituation is cruel and quiet and pernicious and sneaky and, just as often, totally dandy and flatlined and weirdly alright. You can still online shop, you can still stress about your eyebrows, you can still complain and feel like you’re complaining too much.

We didn’t expect things to be clean and 100% all the time, did we? Nope. “Nothing’s perfect,” your Kindergarten teacher tells you as some Kinder frenemy scribbles green crayon all over the nose of the anthropomorphic sun you were just trying to color.

It’s always surprising, and comforting, and upsetting how easily we habituate to pain. Three things. Trying to sit on a beige sofa and eat sorbet while you’re scrolling through Facebook.

This is all just… it’s most definitely not fine but let’s say it is — the word is an empty bucket at this point, so let’s fill it with jokes about Donald Trump, sorbet and donuts and pancakes and nights getting chicken curry puffs at budget Thai restaurants. Let’s do that.