Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(24)

> Knock knock.

> Why would you even want to take a picture of stars?

> Who’s there?

> To remember them.

> Not six million Jews!

> ?

> Dying laughing.

> Anti-Semite!

> Dying, anyway.

> I’m Jewish!



No one ever asked Sam why he took a Latina as an avatar, because no one, other than Max, knew that he had. The choice might have seemed odd. Some might even have thought it was offensive. They would be wrong. Being Sam was odd and offensive. Having such prolific salivary and sweat glands. Being unable not to think about walking while walking. Backne and buttne. There was no experience more humiliating or existentially dispiriting than shopping for clothes. But how to explain to his mom that he would rather have nothing that properly fit than have it confirmed to him, in a mirrored torture chamber, that nothing ever would fit? Sleeves would never end at the right place. Collars would never not be too pointy, or rise too high, or angle improperly. The buttons of every button-down shirt would always be spaced such that the penultimate one from the top made the neck opening either too constrictive or too revealing. There was a point—literally a single location in space—where a button might be positioned to create the natural feel and effect. But no shirt had ever been made with such button placement, probably because no one’s upper-body proportions were as disproportionate as his.

Because his parents were technological f*cktards, Sam knew that they periodically checked his search history, the regular sweeping of which only rubbed his blackheaded nose in the patheticness of being a preteen with a Y chromosome who watched button-sewing tutorials on YouTube. And in those evenings behind his locked bedroom door, when his parents worried that he was researching firearms, or bisexuality, or Islam, he took to moving the penultimate buttons and slits of his loathsome shirts to the only endurable position. Half the things he did were stereotypically gay. In fact, probably a far greater proportion, if you were to remove the activities, such as walking an average-size dog and sleeping, that had no quality of straightness or gayness. He didn’t care. He had not even the smallest issue with gay people, not even aesthetically. But he would have liked to correct the record, because he had the largest of all issues with being misunderstood.

One morning at breakfast, his mom asked if he’d been removing and resewing the buttons on his shirts. He denied it with nonchalant vehemence.

She said, “I think it’s neat.”

And so from then on, the upper half of his daily, all-seasons uniform shifted to American Apparel T-shirts, even though they broadcast the tits mysteriously sprouting from his otherwise collapsed torso.

It felt odd to have hair that never once, despite repeated and generous applications of product, rested properly. It felt odd to walk, and he often found himself slipping into an over- (or under-) stylized catwalk stride, whereby he swung his ass out to each side and pounded his feet into the ground as if trying not only to kill insects but to perpetrate an insect genocide. Why did he walk like that? Because he wanted to walk like nothing, and the extreme effort to do so generated a horrible spectacle of horrible perambulation by someone who was such a human cowlick he actually used the word perambulation. It felt odd to have to sit in chairs, to have to make eye contact, to have to speak with a voice that he knew to be his own but did not recognize, or only recognized as belonging to yet another self-appointed Wikipedia sheriff who would never possess a biographical entry visited, much less edited, by someone who wasn’t him.

He assumed that there were times, other than while masturbating, when he felt at home in his body, but he couldn’t remember them—maybe before he smashed his fingers? Samanta wasn’t his first Other Life avatar, but she was the first whose logarithmic skin fit. He never had to explain the choice to anyone else—Max was wide-eyed or righteous enough not to care—but how did he explain it to himself? He didn’t wish he were a girl. He didn’t wish he were a Latina. Then again, he didn’t not wish he were a Latina girl. Despite the near-constant regret he felt about being himself, he never confused himself for the problem. The problem was the world. It was the world that didn’t fit. But how much happiness has ever resulted from correcting the record on the culpability of the world?

> I was up until 3:00, cruising the Google Street View of my neighborhood, and I saw myself.

> Is there going to be some sort of party after this?

> Does anyone know how to manipulate a PDF? I’m too lazy to figure it out.

> My celebrity memoir title: It Was the Worst of Times, It Was the Worst of Times.

> What kind of PDF?

> We’re going to run out of maple syrup in three years?

> Is this going to be in Hebrew? If so, can someone less lazy than me write a script to stream it through a translator?

> I read that, too.

> Why do I find it so incredibly sad?

> Anyone have a NexTek thumb drive?

> Because you love waffles.

> My celebrity memoir title: “I Did It Your Way.”

> I skipped right over the article about Syrian refugees. I know that shit is horrible, and I know it in theory makes me sad, but I can’t find a way to have an actual emotion about it. But the syrup made me want to hide under my bed.

> They only work for a few weeks.

> So hide and cry your maple tears.