There was a roller rink we’d go to for some hockey sessions with a slot machine pocket right at the oval head, behind the goalie. A cherry wood flooring bouncing off lights and sync’d with random 2000s pop hits that were channeled through cartoonishly big speakers. We’re talking neon-yellow, greens, hot pinks and may as well wear a sweatband to complete your assimilation into the venue. Of course no one did, but rollerskating has the 90s always clawing at its heels.
The slot machines weren’t strictly gambling, but instead sticker collecting. To a kid’s eye it’s one and the same. Lots of stickers, some with glitter, and the younger siblings of each clan – since the whole family was usually carted – would gather and talk about their latest scores. You’d never actually use the stickers, just wave them around and admire the SpongeBob ones since they glittered the most.
There was one sticker from such a venue. It rendered in a mustard yellow text and pasty tomato background: Nobody’s perfect, and I’m nobody.
The hockey died down. Who knows what happened to the bulk of the stickers. Probably stuffed away until a day to dispose, whether moving out or indifference overload – but that one sticker got taped on the bedroom door, along with a few unmemorable ones. Taped on, of course, because you don’t actually use the stickers.
Nobody’s perfect, and I’m nobody.
It’s a 5th grader wordplay, something you’d play along and exclaim “aaahhh” before pushing the conversation anywhere else. But some twenty years later, when you’re tracing over your paranoia and memory scars, suddenly you might wonder, how wonderful it’d be to start over. To be Nobody. But this time, stay as the Nobody roaming the mall, tutorial islands. Roaming and enjoying the house silence.
Don’t you see how all of your anxieties vanish in this state? Since all problems spring from being a Somebody. You could, of course, play the game again and entertain yourself, asking yourself, well if I really start over, oh what if I had the perfect body, perfect mind, perfect bank account – but the despair seems to come inevitably. A pressurized clarity if you condense the timeline.
Whatever provokes one to these ifs will only provoke more, until you devour the whole corporeal world. That is, what then? After these wishes, only more will come, it will never be enough, nothing ever will as long as you follow the signs in your mind. All sprung from the primary burden of being a Somebody.
Why not surrender then? To accept yourself as you are. Nobody’s perfect, and no one is garbage, and nobody is wonderful, nor horrible, nothing. Nobody to like, nobody to be liked by, nothing to strive for, slacker paradise. There are no more metrics and measuring sticks. We’re all a nobody eventually, same as those a hundred years ago.
There’s nothing to prove. There is nothing more to be worried about. The whole class of human concerns washes away, and everything that happens after is a bonus. Such as it is in our Eternity together.
Being nobody is perfect.