Blasé

She gave up on the date three seconds after he came into the restaurant. There was just something so stylized and predictable about his entrance: the way he paused, swept the room nervously, saw her where she was sitting, mentally matched her to her online pics (which she just knew he’d spent hours clicking through), and broke into a grin (before he remembered to play it cool and dialed it down). Everything so unswervingly on cue that her brain immediately began shutting itself down.

As he made his way over, a familiar low buzz started in her head, muting the sounds of people chattering and cutlery clinking on plates. The light grew brighter and began to turn gauzy. She stood up and shook the hand he offered. “Jade, wow,” he said, his voice fading and reverbing, like he was climbing down a manhole. “So glad to finally meet you. You look great.”

She thought to herself, You, on the other hand, do not do your photos justice. It wasn’t that he was bad looking, but he exuded geek. Even from across the room she had caught a whiff of it. And just as she’d suspected, he was tubbier than his pictures had led on. She was confirmed as to why he mostly posted head shots.

All she said aloud, though, was “Evan, hi.”

They took their seats. Her thoughts turned viscous. The buzzing kept getting more insistent, until it crested some obscure tipping point, and she got up from her body and moved to one side, a few feet away.

The buzzing slowly faded away. She observed the scene: herself nodding and smiling noncommittally across the table; Evan starting in on his opening spiel. Yeah, I’m going to kill Courtney, she thought. Her overly solicitous roommate had taken it into her head to play matchmaker and had pushed this dork of a co-worker of hers on to Jade. Jade had given in to her nagging and included him in her online social circle, but that hadn’t satisfied her. Courtney got on her to respond to his messages, kept at her to say Yes to his invitations to meet. “Evan’s a great guy, Jade,” she’d said. “It wouldn’t hurt you to step out of your comfort zone now and then.” Which, okay, Jade had to admit was ironic. Worn down by her persistence, she’d finally agreed to have dinner with him.

Jade looked around the restaurant, antsy. She didn’t feel like staying and watching people stuff their faces, so she decided to wander around outside for a while. She waited until someone left and followed him out before the door swung shut. She went up the street, weaving between pedestrians who were not even aware she was breezing by past them.

So, yes, this was something she could do. Or rather, something that happened to her now and then, since it was not something she could control, exactly. She’d learned over the years that the buzzing and the blurring of her visual field were precursors to these out-of-body states, but she couldn’t will them to take place. It just happened that on certain occasions, when things were at their most soporific, she would get bored out of her skull – literally.

It had happened a lot at school. She’d be trying to follow the droning of her teachers, trying not to nod off, when she’d come awake upright beside where she was sitting on her desk. It scared her the first few times it happened, so that she immediately jumped back and re-occupied herself. But later on, she realized this was her chance to escape. She would take off and hang around the playground, or nap in an empty room. It made school a little less enervating, though of course the downside of her spectral absences was that she was always behind in her schoolwork. She’d barely managed to graduate high school.

It still happened, nowadays. Her job as a stock control clerk at a dental supplies wholesaler was so deadly dull (and beneath her, really; but she had to make a living somehow) that sometimes she found herself dispirited away from her cubicle. And so she’d bail, play invisible hooky, with no one the wiser. Again, price to pay: her performance reviews always just drifted above the passable minimums, and her employee file was littered with descriptors like “unfocused,” “inattentive,” “careless.” But what could she do when the place she was in was just so soul-numbing?

Anyway, she would never stay away for very long. After a while, being out of her body inevitably became even drearier than being in it. After all, she couldn’t really do anything in ethereal form. There was only so much diversion to be had hanging around playground swings she couldn’t swing on, or window shopping at stores near work that displayed things she couldn’t touch. She supposed she could have distracted herself in other ways, perhaps eavesdropped on people, but as she found most people vapid and tiresome, it didn’t seem worth the effort.

So, after about an hour of roaming, she finally got weary of the drab sameness of the streets and figured it was time to head back to herself and the tedium of her date. At the restaurant, she found that her body and Evan were just finishing dessert, forking the last bites of cake from a plate between them. She moved closer, but her body got up and went to the restroom, so she followed herself there.

Her body leaned over the sink to wash her hands. She hovered behind, preparing to re-enter herself, when her body looked up at the mirror, flashed a startled expression, and whirled around, facing her squarely.

“You!” her body cried. “You’re not getting back inside, not this time.”

Wha –? What? her mind jabbered.

“You think I don’t know how you skip out when things get tough?” her body demanded. “Well, you know what? I feel better when you’re gone, so how about you stay out from now on?”

Wait a sec –

“I’m tired of carrying you. I’m tired of feeling so apathetic all the time. I’m tired of coasting through life. I let you back in, you’ll make me blow off Evan, like I do every guy I meet, like I do everything in my life. Well, he’s actually kind of funny and sweet and smart – which you’d know if you’d stayed around. And things are not always as bad as you make them seem. So piss off!”

Dumbfounded, but moved by an impulse to take control before things spun out hand, she lunged forward. But her body twisted away and walked quickly out, looking back just once with an angry glare before slamming the restroom door behind her.

She stared at the door, stunned. She wanted to open it and go after herself, but she couldn’t turn the knob: her hand had no substance with which to grasp it. She would have to wait until someone else came in – but by then her body might be long gone.

After a while, the stupefaction diminished, allowing the full implications of her predicament to sink in.

Huh, she thought to herself. Well, this is interesting.

(March 2013)