Veronica's Antlers
On pre-birthday anguish
I will tell you a story but for it to work you must really picture some girl called Veronica.
Veronica’s birthday is a week from now. She has been having weird dreams; they’re not disturbing-weird, not even weird-weird, more like annoying-weird. There’s a clear layer of transparent sugary symbolism and then there’s not much else beyond that. In one of the dreams, a deer was shedding its antlers. Veronica was sure he could not do it on his own, so she helped him by pulling them off. The deer looked relieved and then it was not a deer at all, but Veronica’s childhood dog who’s been dead for eleven years.
Then there were dreams about rain and flooding. Veronica’s whole building was taken over by water while people were just going about their day: the intercom would ring, food would somehow get cooked. She floated on dirty water at her ninth-floor apartment and then it all just gradually disappeared, the water and the filth until everything was dry and normal again. There were other dreams, but those Veronica could not quite remember in a straightforward way. It was just a collection of random sequences. The usual stuff: teeth falling, missing keys, ugly arguments with people she hasn’t seen in years. Some random thing she posted on TikTok went viral and this boy she loved over a decade ago liked it, but that wasn't a dream at all. Then a bad Bumble date sat on the table beside her and had another Bumble date right there while wearing an ugly t-shirt. That wasn’t a dream either.
Veronica very much enjoys the mystery of existence. It never seems normal to her that she too is a person who wakes up and does stuff, has a name and a role to fulfill every day. People know her. She must send e-mails and go to meetings for things to function properly. Chores and stuff. It seems delusional. To have a body and a face that acquaintances will recognize and go: hi, Veronica. When she thinks about her own consciousness, she wonders what it feels like not to have it anymore, if it’s similar to the dirty-water floating of her dream or simply like not dreaming at all.
There’s remarkable joy in being alive and in dancing to her favorite songs but also some resentment over the fact that this means there’s so much she must care about and so much hurt she cannot account for. Veronica senses that people are often a lot worse than they allow themselves to acknowledge. It is a sense of sheer indifference that will not rarely irritate her to the verge of tears, then she will collect herself and go about her day. She wonders if it’s a class thing and usually concludes that yes, it is a class thing. Even if maybe it isn't, the thought that the various difficulties of her life - past and present - afford her some clear sightedness is mildly soothing.
Upon waking up, Veronica looks up antler shedding on her phone and finds out that the blood comes from the skin around the antlers - which is also shed. They call it velvet, not flesh and not skin, and that sounds more elegant. The whole process is supposed to be painless but some of the deer seem slightly anguished in the photos. Life seems mysterious to her again, this whole thing where you think and dream and resent a lot of things but you’re ultimately a functioning machine that exists under machine rules to which you submit or die. She goes into a Reddit rabbit hole and finds out that some biologists speculate deer shed antlers to blend in with females, so predators don’t target them during winter.
Veronica’s mind begins to wander towards her birthday again and she ponders upon the silliness of her committing to an actual party this year. She wonders if the people who will be there eating her cake, as well as the people who won’t be there eating her cake, as well as the ones who won’t even bother to respond to her RSVP request care about her in a proper way. The thought makes her anxious and then she's the deer, but she knows they would not pull away her dead antlers even if she asked. Better not to dwell on it too much. But then again. It annoys her so much that she knows she’d remove theirs. That’s stupid imagery anyway, but she feels herself grinding her teeth again. Her dentist has told her she must fix whatever makes her anxious if she wants nice teeth. Thank you, Doctor Something. I hadn’t considered that.
Veronica misses her dog again, dearly, and dreads future deaths. She can see herself entirely alone in the saddest moments of her life. How grim that you are put upon earth to blow out candles and make wishes that may never come true, to get your heart broken over and over. To throw yourself a silly party you stress over when you could have simply done what your best friend advised you to do: forget about the people who would not remove your antlers and just fly somewhere on the day. Why are you spending so much money on biodegradable glitter and paper plates.
It makes her want to scream, just how casual they can be about it. She’s incompetent at fathoming it. Veronica won’t digest it. She also knows it’s on her. She allows people to treat her in a way that can only be effectively described by the word badly, but it seems too dramatic (and inarticulate) to put it like that so in her mind she just calls it carelessly. But then she feels that's even worse because bad requires intentionality and careless presses nothing at all upon you. And then someone will always tell her that she is looking at it all wrong. Nothing is owed her and that is the truth, but if loneliness is a place she must embrace, isn’t it better to be actually alone there? She often feels like they are not speaking the same language though. Seemingly impossible behavior is inevitable in an anthropological study in progress. They’re antagonistic species locked together in an aquarium for entertainment purposes. Archer and prey.
Veronica’s antlers are nearly ready to fall off her head but she doesn’t feel any wiser. Deer usually bolt after shedding because they are at their most vulnerable without their antlers. Shedding means losing their primary form of defense against predators. Isn’t it sweet then, Veronica thinks, the way that one ambiguous little creature trusted me so much. It cared, it really did then. She hates, hates, hates herself for that nurturing streak.