Ordinary Daze
By Akilah Brown
You wonder exactly when you started hating your life.
Things were fine in undergrad. Graduation was six months ago, and you were excited about what the future held, you felt like your life was finally going to begin. But you realized quick that the different world promised on TV isn’t college. No, it’s real life, the world outside of college. It’s the world of bills and work and deciding not to go out with your friends on the weekend because you know you’ll be a mess on Monday and you can’t afford to sleep in and miss work.
You can’t sleep through life like you slept through class.
But you want to.
There is a tired monotony about your life. You wake up, you go to work on windows on an assembly line, you take your breaks, you come home, you lie down in a dark room to recover from the drilling and the whining and the other noise of the factory, you watch The Simpsons, you go to sleep. And every day you do the same thing.
You wish you could stay up on the weekends and maybe go out, but your body has gotten so adjusted to your work schedule that it takes everything in you to stay up past ten-thirty. In college, you were the queen of all-nighters, the master of partying. As an official adult—as a college graduate—you understand routine, you know routine, you own routine.
You hate routine.
You have become everything you hate.
In your haze of familiarity, in your daze of ordinary, you managed to get yourself a boyfriend. You met Gary during your weekly grocery run to get lunchmeat, bread, and cheese—the only meal you can squeeze into the twenty allotted minutes of your lunch break. You had tried bringing warm lunch but realized after three missed chances at the microwaves that it was a fruitless attempt. Because you know where everything is in the grocery store, you often feel like you could do this errand with your eyes closed, and in a fit of boredom one day, you tried. And that’s when you ran into Gary, literally. It was embarrassing and cute and he had dark hair and blue eyes and he cracked a joke and so you exchanged numbers and now he’s your boyfriend.
Three months you’ve been together and you gave him a key to your place.
This is a big step for you since you’ve only ever been in relationships that last from one night to three weeks. And you wish it were a sign of your maturity, but really it’s a sign of your laziness: you can’t be bothered to try to fit your schedule with his so you can go out and date, so it’s easier if he just comes over after work or whenever he feels like it.
Gary, too, is safe. He fooled you with that hard body and that smirk. That ability to laugh at himself. The way he said he always wanted to try new things.
Now you know this is a lie. Gary refuses to watch porn with you, even though you know he and his dumb friends do their weird MST3K circle jerk movie night, and you told him that you think it’d be fun. You gave him a nudge and a wink, but his face shut down and he went still, and you realized that it would never happen. And one night you wanted to spice things up and told him to pull your hair and that you wanted to try anal, and he asked if you had been with someone else and said he thought you were a nice girl.
So it’s back to safe and boring sex with Gary who is safe and boring and likes his routine. You want to break it off with him, but you’re kind of lonely and he does watch Bridgerton with you without complaining and you’ve gotten kind of used to the extra warmth in the bed when he’s there and you feel colder when he stays at his own place.
But you hate your life.
You thought you would have been out of Iowa by now, you had big post-graduation plans, but you learned that your big plans and hiring practices didn’t always mesh. But you have to do something or your body will get soft and your heart will harden and you’ll be line manager and then production manager and if you don’t get out of that factory now, now, now, your skin will explode.
But you don’t know what to do.
So you start running again. In high school, you were a track star. You could do distance, but you loved sprinting and the short bursts of energy and power it provided. You gave it your all, all at once, and the race was finished, your adrenaline pumping long after making you feel alive and spirited.
But you could have done distance if you wanted to.
You start your new running regime by jogging around the track at the local high school. It’s slow-going and takes you a week until you can make it around once without being winded. After that week, you realize that running in circles is not what you want. So you start running through the neighborhood, through downtown, up and down the streets, back by the cemetery.
And as you run, you think. And you plan.
You have kept in touch with a few friends from school on Facebook, some of whom went back to their small Iowa towns, but there are others who went to Chicago, to the East Coast, down South. And while you barely check Facebook anymore, you start to private message them asking about the area, asking if they’re happy. Until finally you get up the nerve to ask if they’d mind if you crash on their couch for a few weeks just until you get settled.
One person says yes. Linda, in Arizona. There is a branch of Pella Windows in Tucson, Arizona. And it’s not factory work, but sales, and though the thought of being in sales scares you even more than staying on that line for the rest of your life, you apply for it anyway. You won’t know if you have the job until after you get there.
But you have savings. And for the first time, you bless that you couldn’t go out, that you were too worn down to do anything with your money. Because you have some. You, who couldn’t save. You, who never wanted to.
You start throwing things away, clearing out your apartment. Gary notices that things are gone, but you don’t explain to him why you’re getting rid of them. You don’t tell him about the notices you put up to sell your stuff.
You leave without saying good-bye. You wonder how Gary will react when he goes to your empty apartment, but not enough to prepare him. You are running the ultimate race. You’re finally free.
Akilah Brown is an award-winning professor at Pasadena City College where she teaches first-year composition, creative writing, children’s literature, and mystery and crime fiction. She received a Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; a Master’s degree in English, Creative Writing (Fiction) from Iowa State University; and ABD status at the University of Florida in English, Children’s Literature. In 2023, she won a fellowship to be Writer-in-Residence at the Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency and. Since 2009, she has kept an eclectic blog, where she posts primarily about books, TV, movies, and teaching, and occasionally participates in the Slice of Life and Blogging from A to Z challenges.