Saturday 3/22/25
Doing some prose. This is from a story called "Just Pants." Could be for Become Your Own Superhero: Intrepid Exceptions to Modern Fiction. Could be for something else. It's a man who has owned a pair of scrubs for a long time. One night he goes out in them, and something happens.
***
A man who was in a relationship with a doctor asked her during the early stage of their time together if she could get him a pair of scrubs—just the bottoms.
“They seem really comfortable,” he said. “I think it’d be nice to sit around in them once I’m in for the night.”
She brought home a pair from her hospital and playfully told him he needed to make an important decision: He could wear the scrubs so that the tie for the waistband was on the outside or the inside. One way was considered traditional, the other cooler by those in the know, but she didn’t tell him which was which and he really didn’t care, save that he imagined—and felt some envy for—a hot-shot surgeon who had everything in life going on to the max, right down to how he wore his scrubs.
What was his life like? Had it always been that successful? What kind of place did he live in? Was he automatically liked by everyone? Probably.
But for the most part, as per the playful game about the important decision, he just wanted to keep the pants from falling down so that he wouldn’t look ridiculous with his ass hanging out and for them to be comfortable.
And if anyone wanted to assume he helped people in a certain manner, there was no harm in that because it wasn’t like it’d be at odds with his character, so he wouldn’t call it a mistake, necessarily. He wished he was a bigger help than he was and wouldn’t have turned down an offer to become someone who could do twice as much or any amount of times as much if that were possible. But you can’t play a hand you weren’t dealt.
Their relationship ended, but many years later he still owned and wore the scrubs. Sometimes he wondered whether his ex would be surprised if she knew about this particular factoid, were it somehow to be made known to her, or whether it was as unusual as he figured it was for someone to own and wear—practically daily—an item of clothing for as long as he’d worn the scrubs, or what the average amount of time might be. It was probably a year or two, at tops.
He’d feel ashamed—more ashamed—if anyone was aware of the true circumstances and provenance of the scrubs, but considering that he was alone each evening and no one possessed this information or would unless he volunteered it, he continued to wear them. Life was a mess. One more dust ball in a corner didn’t matter if eventually everything could sparkle, which was an idea he tried to keep around so that someday he might believe it and get to witness the payoff.
The scrubs were comfortable on the one hand and it wasn’t like that had changed over the years, and on the other hand was the very real issue that he often felt like it was hard to do anything, including wearing different clothes every day and people couldn’t tell that a given pair of scrubs wasn’t a fresh pair of scrubs, which made them like camouflage after a fashion.
And why shouldn’t he wear what he wanted? he thought, when you get down to it. You can’t make decisions based on what you think people may think about you. Hell, it’s not like you can’t think what you preferred to think about them if you were able.
Everyone, he tried to believe, has what they want to hide for fear of being compromised, but if people just knew that that’s how it was from person to person, they wouldn’t worry about these things and if they didn’t worry about these things they’d have a lot less to worry about in total and if people had a lot less to worry about overall maybe they’d be better at going out and finding happiness and if that’s what everyone was doing and you knew they were doing it and they knew you were doing it, then he wouldn’t be so unhappy himself.
He’d say words to this effect to himself from time to time, accepting that they were probably true, but also rejecting them—in his gut—as relevant to him. He probably was some horrible exception. There’d have to be a whole different set of rules for him. Bad rules.
Others may not have had viable reasons to hide what they did, but the same couldn’t be said about him. Nothing ever changed in his life. Right down to what he wore at night. Last he checked, the ex wasn’t even a doctor anymore. The most recent result for her and her practice that came up in one of his online searches was from years ago.
People don’t stop being doctors, though, unless they retire or they’re dead. She couldn’t have retired already. Maybe there’d been a horrible accident. An icy road. A truck that misjudged the turn. Or a disease that wasn’t known about at all on a Tuesday which was revealed as being stage four on a Wednesday. Or a heart attack. Woman have heart attacks, he reasoned.
Was he wearing the scrubs given to him by a now deceased medical practitioner? That would pretty much say it all, he thought. But this was a horrid train of thought. A death train of thought. He needed to get it together. Regroup. Deep breaths. No—slower breaths. There was a difference; the latter assured the former but the former didn’t guarantee the latter. Get it right. Today was a waste but that didn’t mean tomorrow had to be. It was guaranteed to be every bit the new day for him as anyone else. That’s it—start tomorrow.
But each time that tomorrow came and he awoke and realized that his back hurt again, he immediately felt that this was just another day and it didn’t stand out as a start seems like it should, but was instead another entry to the endless middle that felt the same as any he might have remembered if there was anything to remember about them. Or not actually endless, because he’d eventually die, thus bringing the events of the middle to a close without ever having a natural winding down period or him knowing that he was in the last phase. Which made him wonder if that was the only way the days might change—by being all over.
He realized somewhere in the middle of them that these weren’t helpful thoughts, so he’d try to relax as he waited for the remainder to taper off, give up on the day that just was, put it down to an experiment that hadn’t worked which didn’t mean that the next one wouldn’t, take the deep and slow breaths, say the same words to himself that he did every evening while wearing his scrubs because the day was a loss anyway so what did it matter, existing in a kind of between-days state of not being in this one or that one, and hoping tomorrow would be different.
But just because he was no longer in the day that was and yet to be in the day to come, didn’t mean he was inert. Actually, having entered into this in-between state, he’d notice an uptick in energy, and a weight come off of him, such that he felt almost peckish for life, as someone who responds, “I could eat a bit,” despite not being especially hungry.
He’d go to the cafe near where he lived wearing his scrubs after dark, and thus wasn’t in for the evening after all. He was still free to venture, he told himself. It wasn’t as bad as all that. There weren’t ever many people at the cafe at night to notice that much about him like how lonely he was and that he only came in alone, but at least now he could see other humans and there were four walls that were different than his usual four walls and the excursion also served as a form of what he considered airing himself out without anyone having to be too close to him. He could keep distance on all sides, which he wouldn’t be able to do, say, at lunchtime.
But everything that ends somewhere good—he reasoned with the logic that was prevalent to this between-days state—by definition starts somewhere else, unless the end-spot was also the beginning, and that’s not how it’s supposed to go. The important thing is to start. And here he was, not giving up yet. Small victories, slow breaths.
