The other text is from a friend. It’s a photo of a stuffed animal that she had washed and was hanging out to dry.
There’s still more than an hour before I’m supposed to be at work. It’s too early to call, no one’s there yet. Although someone could have gone in early. My phone is already in my hand.
The hum of the refrigerator is insistent.
The weather’s changing and there’s a virus going around, so I decide to use that as my excuse. I cough, and then I flip open my phone. The sound it makes, ka-chik, even though I’ve heard it a million times, I still think it’s a great sound. Sometimes I get in the mood to hear the sound and I pop the phone open then shut it several times. But now I just open it once.
My body makes a curve, bent at the hip like a bow. I wriggle against the futon, lift both arms over my head and stretch them back as far as they can go, like I’m trying to turn my armpits inside out.
I’m thinking that when I get a real buzz on my phone, I should pay close attention to exactly what it feels like so that I’ll know to react only when there’s a vibration that meets or surpasses that level of sensation, and any time the vibration doesn’t meet that level of sensation I’ll know that it’s just a phantom buzz, and that I can ignore it. But I know that at the moment I’m not up to worrying about it.
It’s when I stretch lying down like I just did that I can feel how my spine isn’t straight. I spend a moment wondering whether people who keep their ringtone on for when they get a call or a text do it because they’re trying to avoid being bothered by phantom buzzes like I am.
My laptop is where I left it on the nightstand, still on, still open, but the screen is dark, sleeping. I twist around to look at it, kind of rotating, ending up on my stomach. The sheet under me gets pulled along and ends up a little bunched.
The white body of my laptop is not exactly in mint condition. I’ve had the same computer for nearly three years. But I still haven’t named it yet.
I catch sight of my nails, which are painted white. I’ve never once got any illustrations or decorations done on my nails. They’re just all white.
Before my laptop went to sleep, it got pretty hot but now it’s cooled off. I strike a key and the screen wakes up. I was up late reading blogs, dozing off and waking up to read some more, and now the last one I was reading gradually returns to the wakening screen. When that happens, the flecks of dust that were visible on the dark surface of the screen vanish.
The page I have open is the blog cache of someone with the username “armyofme”, who according to the profile is a twenty-eight-year-old woman (that makes her two years younger than me) who “works as a call centre operator at a company that provides outsourced help-desk services, currently dealing with enquiries for an internet service provider in the process of transitioning to fibre-optic cables”, and she blogs about all the callers with their claims that annoy her day after day, and about all her co-workers who are just as bad as the callers, stringing her words together like a stream of curses. armyofme writes a new blog post almost every day.
I just stumbled upon her blog today, I mean last night. How I found it is because there was this guy in my class at art school who used to do comedy stuff, and somebody told me he and another guy have an act that’s been getting them on TV, but since I don’t watch much TV I never knew about it, so I started searching a bunch of things related to my friends from back in school, trying different combinations of words, and after maybe three hours I found myself on armyofme’s blog.
I can hear the garbage truck coming around again. I now realize that when the song on repeat in my head switched off earlier it was because of the garbage truck music.
armyofme had an entry from a few months ago where she wrote about how watching the guy from my art class perform on TV was encouraging for her, but then she got used to seeing him all the time and she stopped feeling encouraged and thought about how he must be having fun, but also that maybe it looks like fun but it’s probably hard work, and in any case he has to be making good money so she doesn’t feel bad about being a little jealous.
It’s pretty normal for me to go looking for websites or blogs or whatever that are about people I know and to end up spending hours surfing. I always feel sleepy, it’s been so long since I’ve felt fully clear-headed and awake that I’ve basically forgotten what that’s like, so for years my whole waking life has been powering down, and now that’s just my body’s default mode. But when I look for blogs and I find a good one and my eyes are glued to the screen, some substance starts flowing from the LCD and pumping into me, and my sleep threshold shoots up, like blood sugar when you’re munching on sweets, so no matter how tired I feel I can still stay awake.
I stretch my body so that I can feel the crook in my spine. I think about people I know who are armyofme’s age and who might write something like this, and I picture the faces of a few girls who could be armyofme. But I can’t say which of them it could be. I mean, I can’t even remember their names.
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