Okay, well I found this on my computer. And I like it, and the way it reads makes me think I could have written it.

Read and review?

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He is lonely; he doesn’t have many friends. His job description has never lent itself to interesting conversations, and he isn’t interesting enough to have anything else to talk about. At least, he doesn’t think himself very interesting, and neither do the women he dates. Though “x-ray technician” sounds important and expensive, there isn’t a lot of excitement in looking at broken bones. Either a bone is broken or it isn’t; it’s very apparent on the x-ray. He sees the outlines of the bones, the see-through parts of the x-ray, the parts that lights up white on purple... jagged, sometimes, sometimes shattered. He thinks about broken hearts and wonders if hearts would shatter or cleanly snap like a twelve year old boy’s femur who has been injured in a ball game.

He sits across from a pretty girl he met through a personal ad, but this date doesn’t seem very personal at all. She said she was looking for someone with a nice smile who liked dogs. He doesn’t have pets but he thinks he wouldn’t mind them. He hopes that the nice smile wasn’t that important to her. His smile isn’t bad, but he has felt insecure about it ever since he hard her voice over the phone. He wants to ask her how many men with nice smiles have answered her ad, he wants to ask how to go out and meet people. He has the time.

He’s spent so many hours near electromagnetic radiation his skin must be see-through, he thinks. He imagines himself as very pale skin and purple veins, and very white bones, very obvious insides. He feels so transparent, but not invisible. You can’t be awkward when you’re invisible. He wants to disappear.

She is witty. He wants to smile but is afraid she will evaluate the straightness of his teeth, the curl of his lips, the wideness of his mouth, the absence of dimples. His hygenic habits. And by not smiling, he is petrified that she will see him as a cold fish, a humorless, boring, see-through man.

Somewhere inside him there is a poet, a dreamer, a dancer, an artist- someone who doesn’t study the bones of obviously broken things for a living. He wants wings like an angel, or adventures like a storybook knights or even just happiness; it seems like something most people have. He wants a reason why he can’t communicate with people; why he feels awkward in social settings. He wants answers for his tied tongue and clammy hands that shake so nervously. Explain that to this woman who likes dogs and nice smiles during the next silence, he tells himself. But he can’t, not ever. She likes smiles, which means she likes happy people, which means she won’t want to hear about how utterly alone he feels, nor how mundane his life is compared to what he wishes it were.

She will tell him that she had a nice time and that she will give him a call but she won’t call, and he would never think of calling her. He will daydream about her all next week while he looks at x-rays; he will daydream about her, and about hearts that snap in half.

The

End

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Don’t hesitate to tell me you’ve read this elsewhere; I’m kinda worried that I can’t remember even THINKING of this story.