The kids at the late, great Borders store 81 exchanged and evolved a particular, peculiar verbiage, a hipster nomenclature touched with abject nerdity, pop culture and veiled attempts at honest expression of feelings and love within the clunky clucking of haughty Vegas booksellers. Among these favored and favorite terms of endearment I found myself repeating words of enthusiasm as “fancy”, disdain “Lamer McLamerston” (and variations thereof), and appreciative personality with the subject's name and the appended suffix “face.”
I called my boyfriend by this, telling him I didn't like it when he abandoned me on Sundays to play games with his loser friends because I miss his Martin-face.
The problem is, I'm getting lost behind my own face. I hit the ground running at my new Borders store and in doing so affected a potent bookseller-face for both our customers and employees in order to win acceptance, engender trust and adapt to the 534 vibe on each side of the counter. I listen, I learn, I tell jokes, I accept tasks and offer service. I am beyond the place at which my excitement and raw charisma exuded by recent relocation to Las Vegas will carry me into teambuilding and upsales. I'm at one year, one month as a local and nearly reached my Borders anniversary. If I'm going to keep meeting my own and exceeding all others' expectations, I've got to work smarter and harder. I can't let my natural reclusive tendencies make another Nationwide – great work but no social support to help grease the administrative wheels – or God forbid another Jain – awkwardness met with derision and disdain.
This far in, I've learned that making friends here in Las Vegas is not as simple a matter as it was in Ohio. I can't just hope that other like-minded nerds and intelligent outcasts will catch onto my drift randomly and general forays into friendship evolve naturally, if sideways, and eventually my expressions and extensions of pleasantries and movie quotes, dotted with homemade dinners and mild movie-going adventures, will net me a small if serviceable circle of friends. Vegas is rough. No one talks if they don't have to, forget making efforts to visit each other, and everything costs more in time, talent and treasure. That I've managed the few friends I have found is the result of many, many experimental attempts (i.e. failures.)
Further, the deck stacked against me before I got here. Martin's friends reacted as any social group would to the sudden unbalancing of his role in their lives with the inclusion of mine and took to a steady hate-on to me. I can't blame then entirely. I did the same thing in my own history when one of my single male worshippers got himself a girlfriend and dropped me like a sack of potatoes. I'm not proud of any of that, so I can't really claim moral majority. But it hurts to know that all that effort I put in to being a part of Martin's social life was rejected without a thought by his friends because I “stole” him away.
The fact I am writing today is a minor feat as the very idea of expressing myself in written word or artistic rendering recently leaves me depressed. My dreams are vividly marked with broadly painted metaphors of my life changes and desires. Just the other night, my first love fell down an elevator shaft and I undertook a dangerous mission to recover him only to come to the understanding, much too late, that even when I got him back, he wasn't mine anymore. The dreams about being tortured and ruined by children came after spending the most delightful afternoon with two pregnant ladies. I want to write letters of thanks to recapture that sense of joyful humility, but so few people write back anymore. My cognitive distortions sup greedily and now I can't be sure if anyone really wants to see me when I visit Ohio, or if I'll just be scrabbling at the shadows of memory instead of making any real connections.
I've lost my face. I don't know who I am anymore.
