Frailty of Persona

Frailty of Persona (excerpt)

By

Harrison Reid

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The frailty of persona.

I am tired of being me.

I am no longer me.

I no longer want to be me.

Just let me be my dissociative self.

____________________________

Ah yes, the redhead girl, whose name to this day I have absolutely no recollection of what it even could be. I simply put her name in my phone as ‘Girl’; watching High Fidelity on HBO motel cable actually got me to want to tell this story while I’m in central-ass Texas; nothing bad about Texas but I’m in Temple, with not much near me- while the sounds of whispers illuminate the midnight sky, as all these old terrors continue to cry.

It was in the middle or at the end of a bender in April of 2019, I believe. Yes, a lot of my stories involve massive alcohol consumption, substantial drug use, rock n’ roll, and women. And then of course the remorse, shame, and guilt; frailty of persona.

I remember I had called out of work that day, it was a Friday and either before or after 4/20 (the date or holiday to whomever reads this) -and fuck its thanksgiving next week, ugh. I do not want to see my family this year and I’ll be turning 30 soon, fml. I have an awful headache- but anywho I already digress.

I decided this day would be a great day to call out and continue my bender and go to The Sewer; day-drinking again, here we go. At some point I notice her there, a cute girl alone at a bar on a Friday afternoon, and she’s a redhead. I’m a fucking sucker for redheads.

We get to talking pretty quickly and it’s all just casual conversations. I’m buying her drinks, sharing each other songs on the jukebox we absolutely love. From Talking Heads to Merle to Lana; I could go on. Jamie the bartender on the shift is getting a kick out of watching me pull out all my tricks for this random girl.

At some point we decided it would be a good idea to get some blow, but we have to go to her house on the Avenue first so she can get her phone charger and change or something because she had a flip phone I think and I’m like “Yo, its the 21st century get an iPhone” or some shit.

Snapchat sluts trying to entice me with their scams again.

We get an Uber to her place because I didn’t drive to the bar since I live downtown and her younger brother and his friends are there, but they’re all fucked up. I’m entertaining them playing the guitar, talking about the music scene; showing to this Girl that I’m an interesting person and that I’m generating conversations with her brother while she gets ready; and this is all still before 5pm on a Friday. She’s finally ready to leave and we get another Uber to my place and we have to wait for her plug because I guess mine said he was out of town or wouldn’t be available until much later in the night; I don’t recall the reason exactly.

We wait around, start making out, conversing more and more, getting to know each other until finally her guy hits us back up. I’m pretty tossed already, but she’s willing to drive. We hop into my car and drive to the fucking Kohl’s on the east end of towns parking lot; all the while Billie Ellish is playing on the background… “cuz I'm the bad guy… duh”.

This whole time I’m thinking this girl is just going to take my money and run. I gave her enough for an 8-ball so we could have a wild time because I'm going all in; I don’t give a fuck. But still this seems just all too good to be true because everything is going too smoothly (when you're paranoid and have bad anxiety a lot of the time and something good comes your way, you tend to think that it’ll fuck up at any moment and you wait for something bad to happen; like waiting for the other shoe to drop). She leaves for at least 20 mins and when you are waiting for the pickup, and you're drunk, that’s a damn long time cause I’m an impatient drunkard.

But she comes back- success -we share bumps real quick and drive back high again to my apartment and it is on… or so I thought. Anytime I partake in cocaine the night shifts, something changes, I don’t know how to explain it but it just does. Conversations get more obscure, emotions get stronger, the vibes can just get on or off. And this whole time I still do not know this girls name for the life of me even though we’ve been spending the whole afternoon/evening together.

We are back to my apartment, I'm putting on records, and at some point she tells me she use to be an exotic dancer; which only intrigues me more because I am fucked up and I want to sleep with this girl. We still haven’t at this point but it gets even more weird from here. Then she goes on to tell me one of her favorite rap groups is ICP, while my shit is Tupac, but alright, then proceeds to play some fucking ICP for me, and still I'm acting like I'm into it because I just want to fuck this 24 year old; most men will know, that no matter how weird a situation gets with a younger girl you will still see it through because of that younger pussy. I was 28 at the time so 4 years isn’t a huge difference but my girlfriend before was 31 when we broke up, so when you find a younger girl that genuinely becomes interested in you its kind of a nice feeling; even though I later realized there was no genuine interest and she mainly came over because I had bought us drugs.

As the night progresses, we continue to share lines and tell stories and I just start feeling high, like really high, like a certain high I haven’t felt in awhile, so I ask if we could go grab some whiskey and walk to the store. She agrees and it’s getting late at this point but not too late in the night, probably around 11 or midnight. We go to the first store, it’s closed already. We walk a few blocks to the next and thankfully they’re open, I get a fifth of Jameson because that’s my go to; smooth Irish whiskey. We proceed back to my house and the night continues, I have a few shots and I started mellowing out and not feeling as on-edge because of the ‘blow’ (I'm putting that in quotes here because I'm starting to question the legitimacy of that coke since I feel so much more higher than normally).

At some point I finally ask her if she wants to have sex, she keeps saying she wants to take it slow because she likes me and most guys just fuck her and never talk to her again, which I understand because I’ve done that plenty in my life, but I'm pretty freshly single and I could go either with dating this girl or fucking and running.

Then she asks if she could take a shower so she could get more comfortable and we both can just mellow out and I say you know that’s a great idea and as she’s undressing and getting into the shower, she turns to me and says “there’s some thing I’ve been holding out on telling you because I was afraid this whole to tell you so please don’t judge me… but I have genital herpes.”

I pause, we both pause, and we share an awkward glance and in my drunken state, I say “I don’t care about that, we can be careful” and that excites her, we kiss and she goes into the shower alone.

I don’t follow her because I wanted to give her alone time and now I'm left to ponder my options with her stint in the shower. Should I go through with? Wait until I'm sober again to decide on this? What do I do? I want to fuck the shit out of the 24 year old cute redhead, but the risk of getting herpes?

As I'm pondering this, I'm still drinking, doing lines, and I'm realizing she’s in the shower for at least 30 mins; that’s kind of a long time for a ‘rinse off’. I knock and say, “are you alright?”.

Silence overcomes me for a moment and I knock louder and ask the same thing and finally she says back, “yeah, sorry I’ll be right out”.

Ten more minutes pass and she finally comes out and I ask, “What were you doing in there for so long?”.

“Oh.. I was just rinsing off” she says, as she started getting an impatient attitude.

I don’t know exactly but something in her changed as soon as she got out of the shower. She had mentioned earlier that she liked to smoke crack too; I forgot to mention that. Maybe thats what she was doing because she brought in all her shit with her, but I wouldn’t have cared either way at that point. I don’t know what she was doing in there for so long but whatever I didn’t care I had made up my mind and I wanted to fuck this girl.

I give her some underwear and a tank top and say “lets go to bed”. She agrees.

We go to my bed and we start making out. In the midst of us hooking up she says she wants to go to the living room again real quick, and I'm like, “okay, that’s fine”.

And then I hear her start snorting more lines alone, like what the fuck is she doing and doesn’t ask me to join her? And she just goes back to the living room and doesn’t come back?

Finally I get up and say, “what are you doing, are you just a coke fiend or something?”

And she’s not saying anything. I ask her back to bed and she doesn’t want to get up, like was she doing heroin in my bathroom? I’m not judging I am just trying to figure this girls deal this late into the night.

Finally I say, “you know what…. just… please leave. Get the fuck out my house…. this is bullshit.”

She looks as me, grabs all her shit, and leaves.

I also didn’t realize at this point its 4am, and now I'm thinking that that might have been really fucked up of me to kick this random ass girl out of my place in the early morning of the modern moonlight.

I look on the table and that baggy of drugs and some money we were doing it with were all gone. Mother fucker then robs me! It wasn’t a whole lot of money, probably a few 20 dollar bills, but I had got us an 8-ball of blow and we had definitely haven’t gone through that whole thing in the course of the night. I’m typically not a complete degenerate when it comes to drugs and all that stuff, but at 4am its a whole different ballgame.

So this redhead who I spent a whole day with, had the most bizarre conversations with, but seemed rather genuine and divine, who told me she had herpes, had robbed me in the middle of the night before I had kicked her out.

Does that make me a bad person? I don’t necessarily think so. Yeah, I made some bad decisions in the name of pussy, but that’s been my whole life, and if you think you would have done anything differently, then you don’t understand this story or my state of mind at the time or currently as I’m writing this. The gentle gods of the starlit abyss seems to enumerate of the mask-less trysts that I subtract through my mind and the culture of common is currently speaking all the while I'm frantically lurking on what’s best in life; but please judge me with your own inhibitions.

Why do I think it’s an okay idea to write this story? Maybe to share with my friends about some of the weird shit that’s happened to me in the past couple years while I’ve been on my own shit and why my frailty seems to persist and run it course upon my persona.

That may have just been one night, but then the aftermath and adverse effects of just that whole situation has lasting impacts on me that didn't make anything better even though I tried to play it off as if everything was fine.

An ex girlfriend; who was also a redhead, had asked me what I did the last weekend on the following Monday or Tuesday and I was still on my bender (and possibly still high because the longer the weekend lasted and the lack of sleep I had made me question that that maybe wasn’t blow) but I told her I hung out with a younger girl. I lied and said we fucked all night- even though we didn’t. But when an ex asks you that type of shit you lie to make them jealous because I was also was trying to fuck my ex again during this time. Yeah, I’m aware my mindset is fucked up but I really don’t give a fuck anymore. She had just recently became single and she came over a few times in the past couple months just to hang out again as friends which was completely fine, but I ignored her the last couple days and she worried about me, but obviously when I told her about the other redhead she lost her shit. Again, asshole move on my part, but you do what you got to do when you’re stupid, drunk, and high.

I had seen a buddy of mine the next weekend (and I think this was that 4/20 weekend, but the timeframe gets skewed after awhile) and was also over-exaggerating this story because I wanted him to think I fucked some younger girl just for the flex.

I had remembered I tried calling her or texting a few days later just to figure out what happened and I think she just responded with a, “fuck you loser hahah”.

No shit off of my back.

I have still never seen this girl around ever. I have no one who even knows of this girls existence. She came out of no where on a day I was feeling down and she came as soon as she went. Never have I had another moment with a girl like this. Was she my Lilith that I have been summoning? I mean will I even see this girl again? And even if I do see her will I even recall what she looks like? Maybe I have seen her. I had a daydream once that her and I would reacquaint ourselves in AA or some 12-step meeting type situation because we mainly talked about our drug & alcohol use and fucked up personas. Why am I so transfixed on this random girl? Shouldn’t I go after the good girls who would actually treat me right? Those good girls don't even exist anymore, it’s a fucking lie. I think it was the energy, the vibe and the conversation that enticed me so much in the early part of the day. If we didn't get the blow would we have woken up beside each other? Would I have been okay with wanting to fuck her? I know this story is so lackluster but it’s something I’ve been wanting to share for quite sometime now. I could say it right without any interruptions and negativity preceding my direction.

Maybe it’s because she was a cute redhead that actually gave me time, my attention, and I was seeking the satisfaction in the slippery sadness of my sudden sulkiness of a slumber that someone couldn't stand no longer. I'm willing to accept that from nearly anyone who even glances in my direction. I was that dissatisfied with the direction of my life that I was willing to fuck an ex-erotic dancer, with herpes, who smoked crack sometimes, all because she was redheaded and cute. Call me scummy or sleazy. I don’t give a fuck. It is what is. At least I tried to be a nice person and try and understand where she was coming from and listen to her side of her story and still accept her for who she was or what she was as a person because she, like me, was only trying her best to get by. I don’t judge and I will not judge. I am not a Christian in even the slightest form, but I'm not a fucking asshole and I still follow the golden fucking rule:

“Judge not lest ye be judged thyself”. Its fucking simple.

But so many people fail to realize that and act like a fucking asshole and judge everyone on a first impression. You know, my life has sucked, continues to suck, and will suck, and I feel a lot of people are in that same predicament, and I wouldn’t want it to be any harder on them for judging them before I even get to know them. So many people are so high-and-fucking mighty that they can’t look past their own bullshit and ease up on people lesser than them; we are all equals mother fucker and if you can’t get along with someone that doesn't look like you, act like you, or think like you, then you better take a good damn long look in the fucking mirror and reassess your goddamn beliefs you faux-christian asshole cunt.

I’m not a good person but at least I try. I have the best fucking intentions going into everything but they typically turn out to be negative, am I bitter about that? Sort of. But I try and see it as a growing up and learning experience. We all as humans have much learning and forgiving to expel upon one another. If you think you have it all together, wait until your shit becomes unravelled and you have to scramble in getting it all back together because you imagining your life never fucking up because you’ve had that privilege, the entitlement; must be so nice for you.

Fuck You.

Beer has just been not settling in my stomach so fairly lately but whatever; side thought. I’m only thinking as I’m drinking and as I’m sinking into another thing. I’m just lonely on my soft plane.

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If you read this story redhead girl and you ever feel the need to reach out, I will want to re-tell your story or even our story for that matter if you ever want to meet again. I am here and willing. You gave me the chance and I’ll give you the chance again. It’s only fair.

And that’s the story on the redhead known as ‘Girl’.