I am not Colin Farrell falling in love with Rachel Weisz in the 2015 mediocre absurdist dark comedy, The Lobster.
By: Megan Cassiday
Instead, I am thinking that it is better to be alone than to stab myself in the face with a cheap butter knife in a local diner’s bathroom, of how I’d rather be stuck in a fish tank in the living room you share with your new girlfriend, “this is my ex, she’s a lobster now.”
Instead, I am thinking about walking outside after the credits wrap and you repeat one more time that it’s just “not your kind of movie”, of stripping all of my clothing off in the front yard, buying a ticket to the zoo and slipping into the flamingo enclosure–at least there would be more than one of us here.
Instead, I am thinking that I might like to forget how to read, blink away everything from Kafka and Metamorphosis, on identity and what it means to be someone, on existentialism and the TV static I get in my hands when I think about the universe swallowing me whole.
Instead, I am thinking about taking seven pink feather boas from the gift shop and caking them to my body with mud, about practicing my balance and how to fall down and if the other birds would really care that I wasn’t organic, authentic, homegrown.
Instead, I am thinking that when it’s late at night in this zoo, when the janitors have swept past and the keepers have long gone home, I might crawl out of my strawberry skin, slither over to the ponds where the koi and the turtles and the frogs are, float on my back and look straight up – I am thinking about if I will think about what it might be like to truly exist.
Megan Cassiday is a creative writing student from Michigan. Her work has been featured in Versification, CLOVES, Roi Fainéant, Bullshit Lit, and others. You can find her on Twitter @MeganLyn_