Entity, Entropy, ennui

I’m a restless heathen pacing the corridors of my mind. I’m a greying teenager wanting to forgo responsibility for role-playing and fantasy. I’m my own comic book character, and I’m stuck in the clutches of my arch nemesis, whose name, he has claimed, is Mundanity.

Mundanity stands in the corner of every room, right in the most annoying area of my periphery. He, because of course he was a he, is checking boxes off a list long enough to reach the ground, spilling past his feet into a tight coil, a bastardized naughty or nice list.

“Tomorrow will be the same as today,” Mundanity says. He was a he because all imperialists oppressing their subjects always were. “What you’re doing now will just repeat itself.”

“Can it, Dan.” I say with sounds that don’t hit any other frequency than his. I’m brushing my teeth, clockwise, for forever, not needing the use of my actual mouth to let the thorn in my life know how little I care for his commentary. Teeth clean, mouth gargled, I go to don the clothes of the day. They’re the clothes of every day. Donning the right sock always precedes donning the left.

“The left side of your brain is the side that speaks. That’s why you write right. Why your right foot is favored by the left.” Dan leers down at me from atop my dresser, his legs crossed, his expression even crosser. “How can anything matter when every possible thing happens?”

I look up at Dan, and I don’t have time for this. “I know, Dan. Thank you, Dan.”

My apartment is the ramshackle, bachelor thing of every parent’s nightmare. Clothes lay where they’ve been discarded, because a basket is for something I’ve never understood. My studio underlooks Manhattan’s street level, and the buzz of feet taking one worker bee to their deskination is a steady staccato mixed in with the buzz of another’s. Soon my feet will add to the concerto of hive-minded New Yorkers carrying out menial tasks they’ll insist are anything but.

My bike chain will ratchet a solo through ever-busy pathways and building-lined tunnels to the place I’ll do the thing that lets me stay in my foot traffic-facing studio.

“Your toast is burning,” Dan says, interrupting the reverie, that, given the choice between it and Dan’s inevitable presence, was still a welcome one.

“I know,” I say. “Only one of us actually has a nose to smell with.” Dan raises an eyebrow, as if he’s offended by the retort. As if he has the capacity to be offended.

“I suppose that only leaves one of us to care if that burnt toast sets off the alarm. An alarm, which, unbeknownst to neither of us, would surely bring down Miss Lowry, who we both know would be only too eager to remind us of our last eviction warning.” He pinches his nose with two fingers gloved in white, as if it made a difference. “You remember the favors you still owe that got you this place.”

“As well as you,” I say, trashing the toast and pulling a clif bar from the lone cabinet adjacent to what would ordinarily be called a kitchen sink.

I pack my pack, stuffing in what always gets stuffed in. There’s my lunch - another clif bar - a set of Allen keys for when, not if, my bike fails me before my commute ends, and the only thing that lets me go anywhere or do anything, even if only in a sort of self-imprisoned way: It’s not quite an urn, but it’s shaped like one. It’s green and slick and doesn’t appear to have any lines or creases that would indicate an opening, but inside is whatever makes Dan aware of himself. Whatever’s inside is part of the deal I made to get the place I’m in that lets me work close to the place I do that in turn lets me keep said place.

Dan hovers as I stuff it to the bottom of my pack. I unlock the series of sticky deadbolts that release me from my cage, which let me escape into the larger cage of my life. I shimmy between my bike and my stove to actually get it open, then shoulder the bike to hike the flight and a half to street level. Dan is at the top of every step, not quite in my way, but most definitely not out of it, either.

I get outside and breathe the ozone. It smells like my mountain of student debt and a lifetime of decisions that brought me here. It looks like it looks every day. And in my ear, on a cue I can’t quite hear, there is Dan, softly whispering behind me, a not quite white glove on my shoulder as he says, “This is exactly what you asked for.”

He’s right. It is. What escapes him is that what we ask for is only ever enough until we get it. What doesn’t escape him is the never-ending supply of those like me. I straddle my bike and wade into the teeming sea of people, each of them a bee clutching tight to some sort of Dan of their own. Each of them trapped in the only cage there ever was. Each of them trying to distract themselves from the knowledge that there is no way out, and that for many, that is just fine.