How To Never Leave Your Apartment

Feel depressed. Feel like the world isn’t worth it anymore. Feel too tired to deal with anything.

Cancel all plans, or honestly have no plans anyway. I mean, come on, right?

Head to the supermarket and get a bunch of snacks. Stuff you normally wouldn’t even eat like marshmallows and weird Dutch cookies and cheese cubes.

Spread it all out on your counter like a bounty from the saddest pirate ship.

Get into pajamas. Make sure it includes sweatpants and some gross T-shirt you’d never ever let outside society see you wearing. Maybe it’s from some frat party freshman year of college and has a terrible sexual pun on it. Put on stained, ripped underwear. Just make sure you won’t even be slightly tempted to go outside.

Wrap yourself in blankets. Put your comforter over your shoulders. Pull the blanket off the couch and wrap it around you. Stuff pillows under your arms. Whatever. Just swaddle yourself like a newborn babe.

Open Netflix. Pick a show with eight seasons, none of which you’ve seen. “The Wire” is on HBOgo. Now’s as good a time as any to start that.

Bring the food into the bed with you. Surround yourself in different food options. Start eating them in gross pairings you never would have considered otherwise. Just shovel it in in groups. Don’t cook meals.

Do not shower. Do not brush your hair. Do not shave. Do not tweeze.

Don’t talk out loud. If you do, make sure it is only to a cat or stuffed animals or something else that can not talk back.

When you run out of food, order from the closest local restaurant. Get the same thing every time and start to become on first-name terms with the delivery guy. Let him see you pantless or with boogers in your nose. Ignore his judgmental face when you order for the third time that day…at midnight.

Become too familiar with the sounds of your apartment building. Know that at 2:13 p.m. every day the guy above you is going to blow his nose like an elephant and that the couple below you fights every night. Pretend the creaks and yawns of people walking up stairs or someone flushing their toilet. Start to enjoy this predictability.

See things. See a roach scurry out of the corner of your eye but then when you look there’s nothing. See someone looking in the window but you’re on the fifth floor so that’s impossible right? Swear you heard a woman’s voice in the other room, but you’re alone. You’re haunting yourself.

Are you human? Or are you dancer?

Don’t look out the windows.

Get dirtier and dirtier and further and further from being a human who walks outside and more like a rat creeping in the subway rails.

Let your legs fall asleep from never leaving your bed. Wake up, stay in bed all day, and then fall asleep in the same position.

Fart. Surround your body in your own farts. You answer to no one!

Cry.

Sleep.

Hiss at passersby.

Go on Tumblr. Hate everyone on Tumblr.

Watch more Netflix. Find some dark, scary documentary and stay up all night watching it. Watch “SVU.” One with gritty details and where Ice-T has to say “anal contusion” or something.

Order more food. Eat with your hands.

Leave all laundry and clothes in piles on the floor. Dub it Mt. Crymore.

Turn off your phone. You’ve long since stopped responding to emails and texts.

Look up. Look around your filthy kingdom. Consider briefly that it may be time to leave. Consider yourself unworthy of human interaction, but know that escape-time is over.

Stand up.