Worcester

“But you have to live a lot longer in order to know that, right?”

“Well, it’s all the same, whether it takes five years or minutes you’ll see,” so typed up my IRC compadre with the handle of stixmix. My cursor blinked for a few minutes or more, and then I wrote, “Maybe so. Gotta go, see ya.”

After closing the IRC client I slouched in my chair to stare at my wallpaper. How many times have I stared at this wallpaper? Well, I guess it was a two wallpaper staring, one on screen and one behind the scenes. Courtesy of my landlord, lovely old lady, though a tad reluctant to touch much of the duplex. “You just don’t tarnish memories willy-nilly,” she’d offer meekly before switching subjects, like due rent or weather. But if you saw the wallpaper yourself you’d agree it needs something: the tan greens and cold peach was the best description you’d ever muster. Anything, because if I stared too long I felt the memories encroaching toward me. This was the room her grandmother knew, and sometimes I swear I saw the silhouette of a grey bun head.

Second floor of course, and a silent 8:30 night. Before the brunt of summer, the still of spring thaw. And I was fidgeting about wondering whatever’s next in store; a ruminated pit in the green-tan cell, staring out the main road. It was a good buy and good call for the university I had since graduated from. And since then I was wondering a way out, a way to avoid a return to my childhood streets, all friends missing and awkward greetings amongst the neighbors who still had some humanity.

Stixmix lives somewhere in South America. He never specified where, but I always picked at him until I figured it to be somewhere in Uruguay. He had this Uruguay air to him whenever we did correspond; perhaps the patience. I figured you had to be from Uruguay if you’re patient. I told at least ten times a heartfelt goodbye before crawling back and he never razzed me too much for it. And I knew that if he offered the same goodbye, he would mean it, and it would’ve destroyed me. Why did I hurt people this way if I knew it hurts?

Toward the end of my final college year I started flipping around older imageboards because everyone I knew already graduated and flew across the country. There was an IRC channel on one imageboard About Page, and that’s the history. Flunked a few semesters, so while on campus I was amongst the bright-eyed in a Computer Architecture hall feeling the world move past me, stixmix as company. I kept up with those that did fly away, but felt so ashamed after awhile that I let the conversations die. Voicemails from months ago waited for an open; the red notifications served as a sigil for my incompetence.

But I was graduated then, staring at the wallpapers again, and wondering was there any way to redeem myself from this? The idealism had been brutalized out of me with the few fast food jobs, few library volunteerings, and I hadn’t seen my family in years either. It’s Worchester after all, managed to deceive all the scholarship bestowers into thinking I was a good investment.

The computer screen taunted me, if anything. It taunted the hell out of me and I was sick of it. Taunted that if you knew the right keystrokes you could get to the bottom of it. Right keystrokes and you could find a fiancee, winning stock play, crypt knowledge buried. Some days I found myself flicking through Usenet archives and wondering if I could’ve fit in then, maybe.

But I was too much of a fidget to figure out the right keystrokes. All I could do was subject stixmix to my inanities, assuaging that perhaps this was all I could do to fight the shame strangling.

Everything accumulated on that 8:30 still spring night and I found myself broken, swaying between the wallpapers and realizing whether I raged in the machine or away the results came the same. It was all worked out in my head in that moment. I knew it wholeheartedly, to a religious fervor, I started a slouched trembling in my chair bound with anger and realizations, heavy breathing.

That whether I kept in contact with my cross-country friends or avoided them, they were only pixels anyway. Didn’t mean anything other than to suggest, possibly, we could share a Christmas party — one out of three hundred sixty, and that wasn’t enough. It never was enough. Even if I lived in the same apartment then I’d get sick of them and nervously enter and exit my room hoping to never run into them save for a spare Sunday when I’m struggling with a worry I may miss out on the idea of something happening, like a club outing.

Whether I made it big or made a family I still had that inclination to rip the wallpaper apart, even if I was the wire connecting the machine to tragedies.

In the height of this flurried delusional divine messaging I shuffled down the stairs, out the door and away from a foreign grandmother’s chambers. I could never make any room to feel like mine anyway. And on reflection, this was the walk that sincerely formed up that invisible portal to which, maybe, had some answer amongst its ghastly howling.