Giving

Everyone on campus is trying to make me feel like I’m an asshole. In the centre, where those four roads meet, somebody is always hula-hooping for cancer, somebody is always teeter-tottering for refugees, and somebody else is always selling organic hot chocolate for war babies, but its by donation, and if you only have ten cents, that’s totally great, every little penny counts.  I want to know who raised these people.  My parents just told me to brush my hair and wash my armpits and that meant that I was doing just fine, but whenever I see these kids I feel like a fucking chump.

I don’t know why I’m such a selfish dick. I definitely smile and say nice things to these people, but I can’t bring myself to do “my bit” yet.  One time, as I was finishing up my second helping of a free lunch in the SSMU building, the volunteers that had cooked it for me asked if anyone in the room would be willing to help with dishes – I just sat there and mopped up my tomato-lentil-hemp medley with the last piece of bread in the whole building. I was chewing with my mouth open.

It’s getting to the point where I can’t hang out with IDS students or anyone that has been on exchange or is on a panel. Environment students send me right over the edge.  For that matter, anyone that has a recyclable water bottle stresses me out.  Being around them is like looking in an opposite mirror: I see my lazy, self-indulgent, non-recycling, kind-of- want-an-SUV-at-some-point-in-my-life personality staring back at me.  It is creating guilt within me that is starting to eat away at my soul.

My true nature is making it difficult for me to trick people into thinking that I’m culturally sensitive and politically aware: when I am hitting on a guy that seems like he is a good person, I end up getting all fake deep and lying. One time, I got talking about death fantasies with a guy that is most likely on more than one panel and that I definitely want to get with. He told me that he hopes to be chest deep in turbulent, hurricane-stirred waters, throwing children, of every race and ethnicity, size and shape, age and ability, into a helicopter hovering above him. Tears are streaming down his cheeks but he doesn’t notice.  His body has past its physical limit; he is operating on his pure love for others. The helicopter blades are whipping garbage and dead animals at him, the winds are beating his body with debris, the raindrops are like bullets on his cheeks, he is definitely bleeding from the temple – death is near, but he is ready. Out of the corner of his eye he sees an orange flotation device, like a beacon of life, bobbing in the distance. But then he sees a tiny, bright-eyed girl that would look like his daughter if he were to survive and reproduce, struggling in the current.  In a decision that his soul makes for him, he forces his body towards her, in the opposite direction of the buoy, and reaches her as she loses consciousness under the furious waves. He dives under, pulls her to the surface, performs CPR with his last breaths and hurls the little body into the helicopter, furthering her life as his own ends.

Then he asks me about mine – slightly caught off guard, I told the truth, expressing a casual desire to die while either napping or in an avalanche in which I get knocked unconscious first.  They are both painless. I think it’s safe to say we are not going to hook up.

~ Katie Burrell