Dejection of strange chameleon cool shrine

I received a package in the mail from a young woman. It was a beautiful package and it was very meaningful from me. It was the gesture I found meaningful. It was a small, beautiful gesture. The package itself was barely important. In fact, I forget what was in the package. In fact, I don't think I even opened the package. It was just wonderful to receive a small package from someone.

I quietly obsessed over the package for a while until my friends got tired of it and demanded I track down the young woman who had sent it to me. We searched the outside of the package for her name, but she hadn't put an return address on it. Finally we found her name scratched onto the brown paper on one side -- it was from something else, the paper that she had wrapped the package in, and that's how we found her name was Elizabeth. I had never met her before, which made the gesture all the more beautiful to me.

"I can't do it," I said. "I'm just a mixed-up kid."

"Aren't you like 23?" D. asked. He was sitting way back in his chair like he had been thrown into it at some incredibly high speed. The three of us got drunk on mouthwash and in the morning I decided to find the Elizabeth who had sent me the package.

We looked her up in phone books until we discovered she lived in Fairfield County. The phone book give us her address or phone number, but it did tell us she worked at a McDonald's, and precisely which McDonald's in Fairfield County was the one she worked at.

Elizabeth reminded me of a girl named M. I'd been around the block with a few times. M. and I were mismatched, but we shared an aesthetic. Neither of us were happy, but we weren't unhappy, which was a nice change of pace. "You're smarter than you look, sound, and behave," she used to tell me when I did something clever. We were both spiraling down the drain before I decided to end it, which I did by checking into a mental hospital and admitting no visitors. I only knew Elizabeth through the package I hadn't opened, but she reminded me of M. all the same.

There were several McDonald's restaurants within a few blocks of each other, but we knew which one Elizabeth worked at, because it was the one with the playplace in front. S. ran inside to ask, but they told him Elizabeth was now working in a Home Depot across the street. We cursed the phone book -- if it couldn't even reliably tell you where a person was working, then what was the point of it anyway? We stuffed it up the tailpipe of the woman inside the McDonald's who told us where Elizabeth was working, out of spite.

There was another girl named C. I went around with for a while. She had a head the shape of a neck. Her scissors were sticky from opening Freeze-Pops, which was the only thing she used the scissors for. Elizabeth did not remind me of C., thankfully.

We got into the Home Depot. There were seven of us boys there, counting me. We had come in two separate cars.

I didn't say anything at the time, but I was truly grateful to my friends for driving me to this Home Depot to find the Elizabeth who had sent me the package. It was downright sweet of them. It was downright considerate. I got a little misty-eyed. Do you hate your friends? Sometimes I do. Sometimes I think they are stupid and shallow and boring and hateful -- they are full of hate, sometimes. I think it is only natural to hate your friends, sometimes. It is healthy. It shows you are your own person. But not always. You won't last that way for very long.

We fanned out, with most of my friends working in small groups, but I set off alone. I felt that it was my duty to find Elizabeth, and that my friends were only there for support, and that when I did find her, I wanted to have done it by myself. I found several other girls, but none of them were Elizabeth, and I did not want to ask them about Elizabeth.

One girl who worked there told me "come with me," and touched my elbow to get me to follow her. We walked outside. This is no good, I thought. She led me outside. I realized what was going to happen and stopped in my tracks. She was going to tell me my clothes were too dirty and "help" me get new ones. She was going to show me how to get new clothes that weren't dirty and I was embarrassed and pissed the fuck off. I didn't need to be helped like this. I was no emotional charity case. "Come on," she said. She grabbed me and tried to pull me but I wouldn't budge until I spun out of her grasp and I ducked back and jumped the other way. She caught me. I ran off again and hid behind a pole. There were a lot of people around and she didn't see me. I ran back inside. It was very silly of me, I admit. I could have just said, "no."

I saw a group of three of my friends talking to someone I knew was Elizabeth. It was my Elizabeth. But I was embarrassed now, I was angry. I was angry at my friends too, who were just the same, thought the same things about my dirty clothes but wouldn't tell me, thought they were "helping." If this made them better or worse than the girl I didn't know. What I did know is that they were talking to Elizabeth (I didn't doubt it for a second) and that I didn't want to see her. She disgusted me. The thought of her disgusted me. If I had the package on me, I would have squeezed it with my two bare hands into some smaller shape. I walked past them quickly with my head down so my friends wouldn't see me and call me over to meet Elizabeth, and so that I wouldn't have to see her, because she made me goddamn sick. I wanted to walk out to the cars and wait there for my friends, but several of them were standing by the door, and I didn't know how I would get past them without them asking me why I was leaving, trying to get me to stay, looking at my dirty clothes and not saying anything. So I jumped up to the ceiling and stuck to it with my hands and feet, which are sticky enough so I can stick to the ceiling like this. I hissed at people walking around the store as they passed underneath me. I frightened a good number. I was going to stay up there all day, hissing at people until my friends went off and Elizabeth was gone and I could get home safely without having to be confronted by any of them (I would take a bus) but the thing about the Home Depot is they have ladders.