What is a man?
from the slush pile:
i spent most of my childhood keeping secrets, and i've spent most of my adulthood bracing for a sudden, unforeseeable end to my life or the lives of the people i love. everything feels like i'm rolling on 99%, just waiting for the 1% to hit and collapse my head in. if i don't take a flash photo of my front door handle, i have to check the locks half a dozen times throughout my nighttime routine before i can lie down and go to sleep. my brain tells me, as i close my eyes and force my limbs into stillness, that i've forgotten to feed our pets for days at a time; that they're secretly wasting away due to my negligence. before i leave the house on my own, i check that my emergency contacts are still accurate, that my phone is charged, and that i have my state identification card on me -- so that if a car hits and kills me while i cross the single intersection between my home and the grocery store, at least they can figure out who i am and let my wife know.
yes, this bathtub is going to fall through the floor while i’m in it. surely. either that or the upstairs neighbor will come crashing through the ceiling mid-shower. i’ll be fired over a simple misunderstanding, or laid off out of the blue (again), or a police helicopter will malfunction and convert this modest one-bedroom apartment into a pile of smoke and ash. a firearm will be discharged somewhere nearby and i’ll be struck at random. i’ll end up wrongfully accused of something i didn’t do, my social circles will turn on me, and i'll be forced to start over from scratch. i’ll accidentally maim or kill a loved one through a truly unbelievable series of events, and then i'll be sent to rot in prison. i'll finally get on the right meds and discover, to my horror, that my baseline self is as wickedly narcissistic as i fear it to be.
i don't feel like a man or a person or a human or a friend or a spouse, i feel like a broken animal that has gotten lucky over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. sometimes people laugh at the things i say and write.
anyways it's probably not anything i should be worried about
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