Strip

A little blurb from a novel I’m writing called Strip, taking place in 2001 during the Dot Com Recession. After a fallout with her friend, a lonely accountant seeks companionship in a cold, sterile world, so much so that she turns to an eccentric male stripper named Hugo for relief.

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Despite their differences, Annette was company and a friend in an incredibly lonely world. A world where people were prone to chasing the next best thing and would do anything to avoid living in the moment. Maybe it was due to survival, maybe it was only human nature, but Chroma found it all pathetic regardless of the reason and found herself slowly becoming distasteful of the world around her and the people within it. It was sickening to witness, hence Chroma found it enjoyable to never truly engage.

Instead, she opted to stand as a ‘wallflower’ as some called it. People saw her, maybe commented on her, but she didn’t interact with people aside from that. She had nothing to say, or rather, she had nothing to say to those people. Nothing they’d particularly like anyway. Bitterness had seeped beyond her skin and into her bones, by God, it absolutely killed her to have to leave her townhouse, her safe haven. That bitterness made Chroma feel borderline crippled whenever she’d ready herself for work or if Annette insisted on going out.

Those were the environments where Chroma was subjected to the types of people she hated the most. “You’ve got a people allergy,” Annette would joke when she saw how her friend scowled at everything she looked at. She’d ask Chroma how she could be so unhappy when she didn’t really have much to worry about, she had money and a stable job, wasn’t that enough to always have it all?

People allergy indeed, Chroma would not pretend to like people she didn’t, and that was just about everyone. She wasn’t the type to complain about her discomfort though, her face said it for her. Besides, people don’t listen and if they do, it’s only to the things they want to hear. If you dare go off script, you’ll be stuck wishing you’d said nothing at all. You can’t point out when someone is being arrogant because you’ll be told you’re intimidated by their confidence. You can’t not talk about yourself because you’re certainly hiding something, but don’t talk too much about yourself because now you’re gloating. If your friend asks you what you think of a shirt that clashes with their shoes you’re supposed to approve, and anything that’s not praise is criticism. Be yourself until ‘yourself’ is not enough, or too much.