Last Meal

by natprance

The tangy salt of the soy sauce bounces off of the bland, rubbery texture of the egg. The wet noodles are soggy and over-boiled and they fall apart before I can slurp them into my mouth. There are no combinations of flavours in this dish. There are no undertones. There is the overwhelming saltiness of the soy sauce that bounces off of the bleak, vulcanized texture of the egg.

I am eating in my bed, surrounded by four bare, bone-white walls. It is cold, but I am sitting on top of the blankets. It doesn’t matter that it’s cold. I like that it’s cold. I like the numbness that builds up in my toes and I like stretching them and rubbing the numbness out with my hands. I like how brittle and useless my fingers feel in the cold. It feels like I imagine being old would feel like. I would like to feel old at least once. Not old in the way that people use it to refer to nostalgia or when talking to a younger person. Old in the way that you feel when you can’t have kids anymore and you know you should have retired years ago but you’re still working your dead-end job and living in a sad bachelor’s apartment and you think back to that girl you loved way back in the day and you break down crying because you can’t remember her name. I want to feel old. I want to forget her name and feel sad. I want to feel like I’ve earned my right to feel sad.

I shouldn’t feel this sad. I should feel happy or angry or miserable or something youthful and energetic. But I don’t feel any of those things. I just feel sad. The saddest feeling is acceptance. When you begin to feel sad, I think that you are a little shocked by how sad you are for no reason. It’s surprising to one day wake up and you just aren’t happy to see the world. You get out of bed anyways, but you just can’t shake this feeling that there’s something wrong with you and there’s something wrong with everyone and there is just something so inherently wrong about everything. It’s upsetting and confusing to not feel the way you did yesterday. You were happy and hopeful yesterday, and now you aren’t.

And then you get angry about being sad. Maybe you punch a hole in the wall. Maybe you call your girlfriend names she doesn’t deserve to be called. Maybe you scream into your pillow until you fall asleep when you know there’s nobody in the house. But you’re angry, and you don’t contain it. It’s impossible to contain. You’re so sad and nothing you do works, so you get frustrated and become bitter. And that bitterness stays inside of you forever, nestled in your pathetic, broken heart.

You’ll hurt someone you love, and then you’ll realize you need some help. So you go to the doctor and you ask for pills. The doctor gives you pills, tells you to take one a day at breakfast. So you do. Maybe you feel a bit better after a few weeks. Maybe you don’t. You go back to the doctor and say that the pills aren’t working. They give you new pills, and you go home and everything gets a little brighter. Then it dulls down. Then you take all of the pills and when you walk out of the hospital with a new bottle of pills, you realize that nothing is going to work. You’re stuck like this for the rest of your life.

That is truly depressing. But you can’t kill yourself. You already tried and it didn’t work and now you have a hard time looking your friends in the eyes because you’re deeply ashamed of yourself. You know that they love you and now maybe they even love you a little more, but you’d rather sit behind a computer and make jokes than actually sit down with them for a cup of tea. You cry. A lot. More than you should. You even drink more water because of how much you cry. You cry so much that you actually start to think it’s pretty funny. But even if you’re laughing, you’re still crying. You are always crying.

That’s when you give up. You stop crying and when you look in the mirror you notice that your eyes are a different colour. Were they always that colour? Were they always so dark? How are you sleeping? Who cares? Who cares. You shamble around your apartment that you used to be terrified of losing. That terror has faded into a dull ache in your back. Sometimes you play guitar, but singing is hard for you because of the cigarettes and alcohol and your vocal cords have atrophied from disuse so your voice cracks when you try and hit the high notes. Sometimes you write little stories, but nobody pays you to do it. You just want to have some kind of record that you existed. You just want to know that you exist because there are so many days when you find it so hard to know that you exist. There are so many days that just seem like one long day that won’t end.

The saltiness of the soy sauce lingers in my mouth and the churning of my stomach makes me feel nauseous. The fork rests in dirty, undrinkable slime at the bottom of the bowl. You miss her, but you can’t remember her name right now. You lie back and smile and cry and smile and cry as you fall asleep on top of the blankets. You are so happy to be so cold. You have never felt so cold in your life.