NaNoWriMo Freewrite Practice #1 – Human Connection

He sat every day inside his Los Angeles apartment, baking in front of the large HDTV that he used for a computer screen in the living room. Sometimes he imagined that his retinal nerves would become LCD screens out of habit. Sometimes he would temporarily halt the radiation of his eyes. He might rise to cook something, though he didn’t know much about the craft. He had just learned that oil was a good conductor of heat to food, and it enabled him to stop burning things. Extra Virgin Olive Oil.

And then one day he was hot. Actually, he was often hot, but he couldn’t come up with any recourse. But this day was different. He remembered his high school physics class, where he learned that wind occurs because of the difference in air temperature between two areas. And he also remembered that he had sat through many a summer in his South Central house, sweating like a dog, and had opened the front and back doors in order to generate circulation. So he tried to do the same in his new apartment in Silver Lake, sandwiched between on the one side Latinos blasting Jesus music and waking him up nightly at 4am with a truck that beeped while it reversed into the driveway next to his bed, and on the other side Latinos that might have been in a motorcycle gang and liked to host parties. Fuck them. So he opened the door to his apartment, exposing himself to full view of the entrance of the apartment building, as he was immediately to the right upon entering the structure. But fuck them.

When the door was fully open, he went back to sitting in the center of the living room, eating a poor college man’s diet of mixed mayonnaise and canned tuna. Poor man, he scoffed. Whoever told him that was a poor man’s diet doesn’t know what it means to be poor. But he didn’t know either what it meant to be poor. And so he sat, retinas ablaze, fixated upon the HDTV that served as his lifeblood, his primary means of interaction with the outside world. Indeed, he could have simply walked outside his apartment, but the fear was in him. The fear. The fear. So he just opened the door, and thought fuck it, I’m hot, and he baked, enslaved.

Not too long after, the most odd of circumstances was to occur, one that he could never have imagined in all his hours sitting in that lonely apartment: humans walked by his door, not quite flung open but rather jammed open. But when a human walked by, suddenly the door slammed shut. What? It was wind. Pressure differences. The same thing that generated the wind, closed the door. So he dared to rise again. He got up and placed his roommate’s shoe between the door and the door pane, as surely wind could not overcome a shoe. And it didn’t. At least not in the first few minutes. And the apartment was open. In a sense, he was open. The potential of human interaction was afoot, thanks to the shoe. It was something he did not quite fear but lived as though he did. It was easy to get into the habit of being alone, of not speaking with other humans. And he did think of them as humans, not people. Like similar members of a biological species, specimens that have similar conscious experiences and brains that make them move and dance and talk, but simply specimens of a kind of biological order. Not relatable, not like, not approachable. Unapproached, he sat, with the door ajar and humans walking by. He was on display, an exhibit in his own apartment: man who sat enslaved with baking retinas.

The humans walked by. They noticed an environmental shift. Something dark and ominous and counter to the social order of things had insinuated itself into their lives. An inconvenience on the level of distaste. Who the fuck would dare to disturb their universes by leaving his door ajar so that awkwardness could boil in the sun like a carrot. Fuck that guy sitting in the room, is what he thought they thought. But maybe it was just in his head. The humans would walk by, variable in their demeanors, appearances, and energies. Tall ones, loud ones, British ones. Fuck the British ones. Fuck them all. They hated him, he thought, because he made their lives inconvenient. Why couldn’t they simply pass by like they had always done, unconcerned with minor human interaction with a slave inside of an apartment who made their lives so inconvenient. The smallest of inconveniences metastasized into the biggest of inconveniences. The very portal to their domiciles was now sullied by the ruination of this petty slave just to the right when they walked in. And he listened to the most wretched of music. And his hair was disgustingly long. And he would cook and reveal his bare, pasty thigh. Fuck that guy. Who does he think he is, living in this city where looks are everything, to contribute a negative-sum game to their lives? A stain on the bubble of superficiality.

And then, around 3am one morning, as the slave wasted away in front of his HDTV in his awkward apartment with his terrible door ajar, a female human transcended the threshold to the apartment building. Her momentum carried her, but she counteracted it. And she stopped and gazed. He remarked that she was of a particular disposition of appearance that may be somewhat of interest to him, though she was slightly chunky or had least had some chunks or could run around a little bit. Either way, she gazed. For the first time, he was not just passed by by passersby. She attended. He attended. And he turned his head. The fear was in him. What if she spoke? What was she thinking? Did she want to have sex? He hoped so, but then it would be all of that shit he didn’t want to confront. Fuck sex.

“What are you doing up so late?” He subverted his desire for sex into a mere response, the first words uttered by him in centuries: “I’m working.” “What are you working on?” she fucked him with her eyes. Maybe she didn’t, but he imagined it. He fucked her. He hadn’t touched a human in millennia. Fuck her. Yes. She kept gazing. He whispered, “Work.” And she stood and gazed, guffawing. A dumb smile divided her face in two. She wasn’t going anwhere. And the fear in him settled, he got up. He rose. He stood up. He walked slowly toward the door.