Matt had a style of walking, of dragging his feet and keeping his hands in his pockets, that’d always annoyed his mother (eh, fuck her). He shuffled the sidewalk, glazing his eyes over the others moving left and right of him while hiding behind a pair of sunglasses. He took a sharp breath in and ran all ten of his fingers through his red hair, pressing them as close to the scalp for him to feel each dig down into it.

Sure—it wasn’t like him at all to skip wearing his headset, but in times like this he knew it was best not to.

‘I didn’t drink enough water today, and then smashed these pills…,’ he thought back to it. ‘I’m three days post 4-day fast, and sum 1780 calories under my belt since. (They don’t show, so don’t worry). I have a failed gym session to add on top of that too. I got a five minute cramp, ten minutes in, after twenty two minutes of walking my way there. The pain in my shoulder came back too. What a joke.‘

There are two main types of people you see roaming the city in the middle of a heatwave on 8PM on a Wednesday: the ones coming from the gym, and these ones.

Matt watched a group of teenagers as they began to walk across from the other side of the street. Their eyeballs pinned straight ahead, with each to their individual ice cream and no sense of peripheral vision, much like a group of dazed out horses. The group cut his path at a distance of mere inches. The proximity failed to pull a reaction out of any of them, and neither did they seemed to break the connection with their cone to talk to one another.

‘My stomach hurts just thinking about it,‘ he thought and followed the zombed out, licking, slurping faces in his passing, then ran another hand through his hair to keep himself in touch with his surroundings.

*

Midway through his walk over to his bed, Matt had already emptied his pockets all over the floor and crashed knees-first across it. His head raised to look beyond the edge of it. A grin flashed across his face and hands followed in the same direction to drag this body forwards, inch by inch, until he’d reached the side table parked skewed by it (‘a present? For me?’).

(Plop.)
(Smash.)
(Tap. Tap. Tap.)
(Schhhrt—snort.)

“Thanks, earlier Matt.” He said in a daze. ‘Come to think of it, I’ve yet to come to the point where I actually remember whether or not I’d already taken the other half of the pill, haven’t I?‘ he thought, and puffed out air to dust his nostrils.

Had that table ever carried a greater purpose than it did now? As a child, his mother used to rest on it a tray of chicken soup with dumplings whenever he fell sick. Especially during early fall and late winter, he’d always catch a flu from somewhere and spend the next few days under the covers with a mountain of comic books and box of tissues for company. The soup would make its way in too eventually, and because he would insist on putting his snotty mouth to the brim to slurp it down, it would (nine times out of ten) also end up feeding Robin and the top-most edge of his sheets. And then he’d have to fall asleep to the smell of chicken dumpling soup for the rest of the week. So, no—he didn’t think it ever had.