The Cake is a Lie (36 page)

I’m finally ahead of my time in some
ways. I don’t know any other 20 year olds that are meditating every
day and eating cooked veggies every day.

Our consciousness is so tiny in this
overwhelmingly complex world that all you can do is stay
relentlessly thankful and optimistic. Make your brain work for
you.

Some dreams you have to let go,
Portuguese breakfasts on yachts. “Our great war is a spiritual
war.’[30]

[30]
Fight Club.

Emma, my ex-girlfriend, calls me. I’m
late to our rendezvous at the lake. She asks bitchily were I am, I
tell her I’m a block away. She clearly still has some resentment
towards me. She’s standing against her car with her arms crossed as
I pull up.

My brains working faster than a click
farm worker and uneasy feelings are getting the best of me. This
isn’t right, I need to let her move on. Once I park, I jollily jog
over to her car, showing her that I’m fun loving and
energetic.

With a big smile I say “Hey you,” And
pick her up and spin her around.

“
Took you long enough,” She
replies. I wait while she goes back into her car to grab her
things. I look her over for the first time in a month, she doesn’t
look that pretty to me. That’s the way it’s always been though, one
moment she’s gorgeous and I’m so unbelievably lucky to have dated
her, and the next moment I’m in disbelief I dated her for so long
and I must be a loser.

Hot prickly waves of anxiety burst
inside my body with all the discomfort of someone suffocating. All
my instincts tell me I have to run away immediately, anywhere but
here. But I’ve battled this disorder long enough to know you can’t
give it a single inch. I’ve learned the hard way that any brief
relief you may gain from running away is nothing compared to the
permanent pain of letting this disorder control and define your
life.

This discomfort will pass, I reassure
myself. You’re pro at tolerating this discomfort. Just stay for a
while until this feeling passes, just give it a half hour, you can
always leave in a half hour.

Two weeks after we’d broken up Emma had
texted me asking if we could be friends with benefits, I’d said no.
Two weeks and three humiliating rejections after that, I’d texted
her asking if the friends with benefits thing was still on the
table. True strength isn’t breaking up with your girlfriend when
you want to be single. True strength is not running back to them
during the unbearably lonely months that follow.

She’d asked me what changed my mind and
I’d respond that it would be weird but also new and exciting. Emma
agreed and after some steamy texting we’d set up a rendezvous. My
mom’s words rang through my head, “Use your hand before you use a
woman.” My mom firmly believed women got the short end of the stick
in casual sex.

As we walk down to the lake together,
Kamizaki pilot thoughts begin nose diving in my head. I’m not
happy-go-lucky anymore, I’m not fun to be around, something’s
permanently wrong with me, my life’s ruined.

Stop. I take a deep breathe. This is
your familiar negative cycle. This isn’t true at all. You’re fun to
be around, you make people laugh all the time, people like
you.

I ask Emma questions and encourage her
to talk, and she does, about her friends and family. We get to the
lake and she asks me where to sit, I say I don’t care.

“
This is why we broke up,
you’re so indecisive.” She remarks. It’s a predictable comment; I’d
already considered she’d say something like that before I said
anything. Ho-hum.

“
I broke up with you.” I
shoot back.

We find a spot on the grass and she
lays out a blanket.

Then she gets into what she really
wants to talk about. The guys she’s been dating. My stomach plunges
at every word but I’m a helpless truth addict so I try to pry out
every terrible detail. The truth is better and more terrible than
an orgasm.

She is talking to three guys, but only
dating one. One of the guys she’s talking to is in the army. The
one she’s dating is a country boy, Don, from up north. Not the
pastoral, fetishized country. The country he’s from is full of
trailer parks, drugs, poverty and high school drop outs.

“
What college did he go to?”
I smirk, but immediately regret this comment. What a terrible joke,
not even clever at all, just bad taste. What happened to me? I used
to be funny. Why did I do all those drugs as a child?

I watch the crowded stream
of people walking around the lake. Truly happy people who’ve never
been scarred by a panic attack. So many people…All with their own
unique stories, thinking they’re special. Hundreds of nameless
cockroaches crawling all over each other…
How do you even make sense of 7 billion people? There's no
ideology or creed that can make sense of 7 billions people. Life’s
meaningless, where did the magic go? As I run through these
thoughts I can feel the panic starting to creep on. My heart rate
increases, my hand starts to lightly shake. The delirium claws at
the seams of my consciousness.

I’m having a panic attack, I worriedly
try to prepare myself for what’s about to come.

I’ve had too many panic attacks, I
panic, I can’t handle anymore, my brain’s slowly disintegrating.
The full-blown pit of frantic despairing thoughts begins to churn.
This is it, I’m going to crazy in front of all these
people.

I take a deep breathe. This is only a
moment, Marco, it will pass. Fear can’t hurt you, it can’t grow
arms. I reach out to start feeling the grass in order to take my
mind off the world turning inside out. I feel the slick, sticky
texture. I start searching for something that starts with an A, I
see an ant crawling in the grass. Then I start searching for
something starting with a B, across the park I see the baseball
field, C…

This isn’t normal, these symptoms are
too strong. Your brain is diseased and permanently broken. It’s
only a matter of time until you die, these panic attacks have
already riddled your life away.

F… Flock of birds.

Emma tells me the country boy is some
type of trade worker, cars.

“
He has a six pack,” She
brags. Ouch, she knows how to hit me where it hurts. I work out but
I have yet to get a solid six-pack–it’s absurdly hard.

I demand that she shows me a picture.
She agrees excitedly. He actually sent her a picture of himself
standing in front of a mirror with his shirt off. We both share a
laugh at his expense. We both think it’s a trashy. Why is it
trashy? I think. Who’s to say what’s trashy? More pings of madness
pull apart the grass underneath me into an existential
abyss.

G…Grey sweatshirt.

He has that stupid facial hair strip
running from ear to ear over the bottom of his chin. Emma’s having
fun making me jealous. She says he gets in fights a lot, a tough
boy. She says he’s my complete opposite. I ask her what pictures
she sent him back. She says she didn’t, she’s too afraid of it
ending up on the internet. I don’t believe her. She says I’m taller
than him to make me feel better. It does make me feel
better.

“
I’ve been talking too much.
How are you?”

“
You love
talking.”

She laughs, “I really do.”

I look at her, sometimes she goes off
on a tangent where she just talks and talks. It gets rambled and
uninteresting but you can’t help but notice how happy she is just
flowing, articulating one idea to the next. I remember when I was
that that excited to just plain express myself about
anything.

Marco, you still get excited expressing
yourself and telling stories. Even when you were younger you didn’t
get super excited to tell every story. And Emma doesn’t even get
super excited to tell every story. That’s a biased
thought.

I tell her how draining working 40
hours a week in a cubical is, how brain dead I am after.

“
Well, you’ll be no fun in
bed if you’re tired,” She whines.

“
I’m always fun in
bed.”

“
How’s your book
coming?”

I pause and smile awkwardly, not sure
what to say. “It’s going good.”

“
So what happens after you
finish? You and Oakley are just going to live happily ever after?
And what happens to the rest of us? We’re just screwed?” She says
bluntly, but smiling wildly.

“
Something like that.” I
laugh, turning my eyes uneasily off to the view. When I look at the
blue sky a hundred black flecks begin flashing alarmingly in my
vision. I’m going blind from staring at a screen, I think, my brain
is full of holes from all the stress. Marco, it’s just an optical
illusion, I counter. Lots of people see black specks when they look
up to the sky. You were sure you were going blind a year ago, and
your vision is fine. This is just how the anxiety works, it always
needs something to focus on and channel itself.

My eyes begins to wander to Emma’s bare
legs. She’s wearing very short shorts. The worst of the storm is
starting to pass, I feel better. They always pass,
always.

Emma’s texting someone while we’re
talking, I ask who and she says “no one” which implies it’s some
guy. This is why I can’t go back to her. I want a girl that can see
two steps ahead and realize I can obviously see she’s purposefully
wearing the necklace I bought her. If only she was better at hiding
her love for me. I know that all she means to say is what I want to
hear.

“
Your penis is bigger than
Don’s too.”

“
You’ve seen his penis?” I
accuse agitatedly.

“
Well I kind of felt it
through his boxers.” What a hoe, I don’t believe her. She probably
gave him a full fledge blow job.

“
We didn’t have sex,” She
promises, “Just some stuff. Anyways it’s none of your
business.”

My stomach rolls over again. Everything
is my business. My brother says you care less about a girl’s sexual
history as you get older. I hope this is true because when I meet a
girl I want to know everything about her, especially the sexual
stuff. I don’t just want to know who she has slept with, I want to
know what guys she has thought about sleeping with. I want to know
exactly what she’s thinking about before she orgasms.

I take a deep breathe. It doesn’t have
to be a mark of shame if a girls sexually experienced. I’m starting
to like the idea of it. Sex is just a pleasurable sport, that’s
all. Real relationships are based around so much more. Memories are
nothing anyways, they’re gone so quick, and everything’s forgotten
eventually.

But that’s not what I’m thinking when
I’m in the heat of the moment. I’m thinking about how I will
forever own a piece of this girl’s soul. Memories are everything.
They’re all we have.

Don will forever have memories of Emma.
I’m disgusted. Still focused on her bare legs though. It’s been a
month since I’ve seen her and I’ve never seen more beautiful bare
legs. So what if she hooked up with someone else? I broke her
heart. What do I care about this guy? His penis is smaller than
mine. Besides, after all the freaky things she said to me, can she
just tell every guy that stuff?

We go back to my apartment. She’s
sitting on my bed. I try to kiss her, she resists.

“
What’s up?”

“
Nothing, I just wish you
were more aggressive.”

I pause. It’s true, I do a terrible job
selling the dominant alpha male personality. A flaw yes, but it’s
who I am. At the same time, I’m far from the shiest, most unselfish
guy too, so I’m skeptical of the criticism.

“
Don’s aggressive,” She
says. Is this still about trying to make me jealous?

I ask for an example and she tells me
when he kissed her for the first time he just straight grabbed her
and kissed her. I tell her I don’t believe it and then she admits
he asked her friend first if she liked him before doing it. She
moves on to her next piece of evidence, when they were making out
on his bed he just pulled her thong off, out of nowhere.

Picturing him forcefully pulling off
her panties makes my nerves turn inside out. In most porn guys
dominate girls, getting off on the disrespect and power, saying
things to the girls they would never say to another guy. Cumming on
girls faces. I fantasize about getting my hands on these guys and
dominating and disrespecting them. At the same time, I envy and
admire them too. High on power, confident in their “might is right”
beliefs. All my broken hearts and misunderstandings of women are
channeled into the worst kind of anger towards those sluts. And it
doesn’t matter if they’re sexually empowered or not, because I
imagine they’re all desperate for money and naive.

I look at Emma, her chest and legs. I
could definitely play the dominating role, the thought turns me on.
Having power over her, complete control. I ask Emma if she wants to
play a game, where she teaches me how to seduce a woman
aggressively.

She smiles and says, “Oh fun.” Then we
do our best job of pretending to be sexy, cool people from the
movies. She moves my hands there and my lips here. But in a few
minutes the game has dissolved into our usual amazing
routine.