Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash
Once you immersed yourself in Netflix and chilling. Prime and HBO too, actually. Once it was fun to just scroll through lists, looking for comedies. Once you knew how to laugh. Your sister Nan says you laughed like Adam Sandler.
Said.
Then home became a foreign word. Something distant, unpronounceable. Shelter-at-home, safe-at-home. What exclusive, precise terms.
You’re twenty-six. Alone. You need something to watch. Nameless neighbors complain about your daily regimen of Tchaikovsky and you don’t want to incur your landlord’s wrath. But if you can’t have wailing strings, you need something.
You need the world of Netflix, dreamscapes, you think psychiatrists would call it. But at least dreamscapes give you some semblance of control. You can consciously or subconsciously craft your own narrative.
Stop. Pause. Start.
Now you scroll Netflix on a late fall evening, trying to drown out statistics and images which leap to your consciousness. The Crown? No, monarchies are a reminder of family trees, replete with leaves which invariably drop and fester, crushed by nature. Crushed by sickness.
It’s cold tonight. Cold with hints of winter.
Even the Queen’s briskness conveys a kind of precise, piercing comfort. I am the Queen, I am your mother, all will be well, because it must be. Because I am the sovereign.
No sovereigns in your family tree, alas. Just Merlot-drinking method actress sisters who thought themselves invincible. Who ran without jackets, hugged when they shouldn’t. They promised it’d be fine, that you were a Debbie Downer, a cynic.
“Curb your negativity, little brother,” Nan always said. “Trust the world.”
They trusted idiot fellow actresses, they contracted things.
And you couldn’t stop it.
You turn back to the Netflix queue.
The Ranch? Too many families. Again. Families with accidents on farms. Their accidents are ones they could avoid with careful planning. Sam Elliott soothes you with f-bombs, but he still holds visible pain beneath that mustache. If only he didn’t actually cry in a few episodes.
Fargo? Comedic dysfunction. A dead wife. A woodchipper.
What’s with the women always dying? Mothers. Hausfraus. And sisters too, now that you think of it. You’re almost sure there are a couple dead sister movies on Netflix. Although, in some ways, maybe there aren’t enough.
You banish that cold thought.
At least on Netflix, you can skip over the worst parts.
You’ve cried enough in quarantine. Neighbors pounded on walls, called you a motherfucker. Some told you to sleep. Not a soothing sleep, but sleep, an edict, a pounded command. An exclamation point stabbed right into you.
Your sister, good, sarcastic Nan would have offered a thousand retorts in response. Douchewaffle, hipster, philistine. She once tried to teach you her insults, a language in which she’d become fluent for her acting career. And for her roles, she claimed, with a smile.
“Each insult,” she said, “has its own weight. Its own level of intensity. You don’t start out with the most intense, but work your way up. And it depends on the person you’re insulting.”
“Maybe I don’t want to insult.”
“You have to be ready to throw rocks back,” Nan said. “You’re sweet, little brother. But I don’t want the world walking over you.”
All you can do now is pound back, weak little pounds. Once or twice, you really hammer the wall, but you get the same responses from the neighbors.
And you get no hugs or mumbled sorries from these mysterious beings, girls in tank-tops and oversized pajama bottoms, assholes in sweatpants. You’d take the mumbled insincerities, hold onto them, and inevitably crumple them like old paper. But it’d be something, however trivial, something all your own among statistics and corpses.
In these unseen rooms with unnamed neighbors, you can only imagine the shape and scope of invisible actions. Ordering take-out, watching Netflix themselves, or HBO. Masturbating. Writing poetry about the banality of life. Perhaps they’re crying beneath their covers, trying to control the volume. Becoming constipated emotionally. Constipated with tears.
That sounds like a band your sister would have loved. Constipated Tears.
But back to Netflix.
You can’t watch a thing tonight. Plus even if you skip the worst parts on Netflix shows, the ensuing episodes always hold more darkness. And what of the unborn episodes, the episodes that have yet to be uploaded?
Wait. There’s Monty Python’s Life of Brian. But how can dozens of crucified souls sing about looking on the bright side of life? Your sister would have loved it. Dark humor was her style, especially Bad Santa, which offered drunken relief. At least you think that’s what she said.
You turn off Netflix. Feel the evening chill rushing through you, the full moon casting her sorrowful glance. The stars arrest you, silver eyes.
Dreamscape just seems like a flirtatious word, now. Something empty.
Soon you’ll stare at the emptiness of walls. White, blank, and oddly soothing. No tender blues or seductive lavenders, promising the unattainable. They are precise spaces, things that will greet you every morning, every evening. They will not say they love you. They will not promise words like forever, abiding, or speak nicknames that convey bicycles and laughter.
They will not say they’re fine.
They’ll speak nothingness. And you’re good with it.
Pretty soon, the moon will dart between clouds and you will marvel at the play in shadows, light, dark, light, dark. You will marvel at how fast things can change and wish you could control the moon.
Soon, you will be glad that you didn’t decorate your space. A marker of your past. You can only imagine what neighbors hold in their spaces. Old trophies, family pictures with crooked grins and oversized eyebrows. Brownies and chicken, which Mom sent. Or maybe fish and rice, something you once savored and which your sister made so well.
You just have onions and Vienna sausages. Some Diet-Coke and Fat Tires too. You ate all the fish months ago. Perhaps that’s for the best.
With mementos, you’d just throw everything out anyway. Carry them to the dumpster with heavy hands, stare into the vast, garbage-filled abyss. Then you’d turn and regret it, turn back, regret the regret, and turn forward. Truth be told, once you beat the dumpster for ten minutes straight. Felt your fists striking unpliable steel. Cold steel that held a kind of chill, something intense and vast. You wanted to destroy the damn thing, expose someone else’s secret, at least leave a discernible dent.
Like so much else, it didn’t happen.
Quite soon, you’ll vow not to watch Netflix again. Not until you find some programming without families. You can only hope vampires make a comeback.
Very soon, you’ll pull up blankets. Try to fight the chill. Succumb to slumber, because there’s always tomorrow. But you say the same thing tomorrow. But you can’t help it if you still look for something in that word. Tomorrow. Even if you don’t know quite what it is. What would luck look like? What could the world give you? A long-lost relative? Would you find out you’re actually King of England?
All too soon, you’ll have dreams. Some painfully pleasant. A laugh, a hug, another nickname, the odd scent of perfume and pot will pepper your mind. And too soon, morning will wake you with train horns and neighbors shuffling upstairs. You’ll throw off the covers, heavy with heat. Walk into the chill, shiver, walk a little more.
And a little too soon, you’ll try to control your days more. Control your dreams. You’ll contemplate vampires, monsters, other evil beings that can be distinguished easily. You’ll dream about monsters eating you, but at least it won’t offer anything false. It won’t offer hope.
You’ll cast off the blankets.
And not soon enough, the chill will sink in and you won’t feel a thing.
Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University's MFA program. His stories, "Soon,” “How To Be A Good Episcopalian,” and "Tales From A Communion Line," were nominated for Pushcarts. Yash’s work has been published in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Write City Magazine, and Ariel Chart, among others.