Something inside you keeps saying, What the hell am I doing? You open doors, close them, greet everyone with the same false smile, the one where you raise the right side of your mouth more than the left, in a near-smirk, like Tom Cruise’s wife, What’s-Her-Name, the one with the pretty hair and pretty features and a nose smaller and straighter than yours. The kind of face you’ve always wanted.

But this isn’t about looks. There’s more going on, the fact that there’s not much to celebrate, of course, where your life is concerned, certainly not while something in you keeps saying, What the hell am I doing inside this small life with its picture-framed windows, retractable shades? This cubicle of a life, where nobody takes your picture or even notices that you’ve arrived. Where is the red carpet, the studded high heels you’ve longed for since childhood? Where are the rabbits that get pulled out of goddamn hats?

You knew a man once when you were young, a friend of your father’s, who could tie a knot in a cherry stem using only his tongue. He showed you and you laughed, his tongue sticking out with the knotted stem wrapped around the end. That’s when you knew magic existed in ordinary people. You believed you’d grow into that magic, like the women who got sawed in half then walked away whole, or like girls whose breasts exploded into double Ds practically overnight. You looked through catalogs from JC Penney at the lingerie section hoping someday magic would find and transform your body, make you into something remarkable and or at least wanted.

Your father had magic, walked into a room, his footsteps lighting it up. He soared on a combination of Marlboros and Bloody Marys, his every gesture illumitated. Power does that for people, makes them funnier, more engaging. But who cares if the attention is feigned? Didn’t someone once say appearance is all that matters?

But back to you. Dull, idle, wasted potential. Never amounted to much. And why does all that matter? Because of the promise that was made implicitly and explicitly — that you would be something, that people would notice you. But there’s nothing much to celebrate, other than your survival. And what does that amount to? Millions have done no less and against far greater odds.

You wait for the clouds to part, for something deep within to be churned up like water in a lake, its nutrients rising to the surface.

You wait to celebrate yourself.

* * *

This letter to myself uses or plays on the following lines from poems by Charles Bukowski:

Something inside you keeps saying / what the hell am I doing?
There wasn’t much to celebrate / of course
I was only celebrating myself