Yoghurt

“I’ma eat some motherfuckin’ YOGHURT up in this bitch!!!!”

My roommate, Chris, half-shouted this while bent at the waist, head inches from the top shelf in our fridge, left hand resting on the open french door as he peered around to the bottom right hand corner where the yogurt was usually kept. I don’t know how he managed to pronounce “yogurt” with an “h”, but he did.

“Wow, man...congratulations. I mean, seriously. I think you managed to speak a completely original sentence right there, you know, one that no one ever in the HISTORY OF THE WORLD had ever spoken before.”

He already had the foil cap off and was now rooting around for a clean spoon. “What?”

“I’m serious! Do you know how rare that probably is? I mean, just think about it...there are billions of people all over the world, talking about god knows what 24 hours a day, and it’s pretty likely that no one in the world had ever said that before you did, and might not ever again! I mean, even if you get strict about it and discount anyone who might have said the equivalent in a language other than English, that’s still a pretty cool thing.”

We had been living together for almost a year, which was the longest I had ever lived with anyone besides my mom and dad, at that point. He put up with my total lack of interest in housekeeping, and I put up with his total being a stupid fucking asshole. It was, as we say in the corporate world these days, a “win-win”.

I wasn’t being sarcastic, though, with the original sentence thing. Milan Kundera had this idea that there are so many people in the world, there aren’t enough gestures to go around. So every time you see your little cousin hold his head cocked slightly to one side when he’s confused, it’s not that he looks just like his grandpa when he does that, it’s that he looks like thousands, perhaps millions, of people; people scattered all over the globe that have stumbled, through some combination of nature and nurture, into that same gesture.

At least, that’s an idea that’s in one of Kundera’s books. I don’t have any idea whether he believed it or not. But I have to think that language works the same way. There’s a spectrum, I know; if you text someone “OMG LOL!”, that’s gonna be the high end of the spectrum, right, and if you say to someone at a party, “Yeah, my Aunt Gertrude’s dog Mr. Sniffles died of bone cancer too...it sucked,” then you’re pretty much pegging the other side, but still. The chance exists...there are a lot of fucking people out there.

Chris sat heavily on the couch and kicked his feet up onto the coffee table. “Deep, man. Deep.”

“It wasn’t my idea, really.” I ran my right hand through my hair, a few millimeters to the left of where I parted it, starting about an inch and a half above the top of my nose and continuing until my fingers cleared about three-fourths of the length of my hair as it swept backward, in a gesture that I knew, intellectually, belonged to millions, but that felt as intimate, as peculiar, as UNIQUE to me as anything I could imagine, and then I grabbed the remote before he could watch Springer “ironically” at me again, because I fucking hate that more than anything.