#as soon as the weather gets cold and rainy my joints and back act up and i can barely think let alone move

[lardguz]

You doing good?

Ah, yeah! I'm doing fine, I've been dealing with some health issues lately (mostly chronic pain stuff) so I've been stuck in bed trying to keep myself sane. Sorry for lack of writing or posting lately, I promise I'm still alive! I just haven't been physically able to write!

[firstjustgoin]

An (About to be) Overheard Conversation

4. Start with a conversation. One you’ve overheard, or at least pretended you have (you’re always doing that). Start with a sentence that can never be taken back or a l’esprit de l’escalier moment or whatever.

By the time I leave work the rain is coming down hard –– one of those mid-August deluges that makes New York seem small and humble, at the mercy of water that might just wipe it off to sea. I don’t mind when it rains like this usually because the restaurant gets slow, only a few huddles of folks ordering another glass to wait out the rain, and it takes half the time to close as usual.

Juan pretends to look away and polish the glasses along the bar while I turn the sign to Closed 15 minutes early. It’s a game we play, he and I. He might be running the joint now, but I know I can push him because I remember when he was just a kid bar backing after class. He’s grown now with kids of his own but we’re both still here, closing up on rainy August nights while the lights off Canal bounce across puddles and women in high-heeled boots skate along, giggling and screaming.

I like New York in the rain, but I’m never prepared for it. It’s been weeks of the sky holding its breath, the clouds heavy with moisture but stealing themselves against release. This heat has gotta break eventually, I hear moms whisper to each other on street corners, their faces full of the same kind of desperation I imagine on moms in cities ravaged by war. In the city of Broadway and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, it’s no surprise that we’ve got a penchant for the dramatic. Even the rain here wants to be immortalized in the neon signs above the Majestic.

After I say goodnight to Juan, I open the door with an extra force as if I’m pushing back a hurricane. In moments like these, I always wonder why I refuse to read weather reports. Daniel hated this about me, he always hated women who didn’t take care of themselves but then complained about the results. If I got Freudian on him, I’d try to make it about his mom, but he hated when I got philosophical too. Those were the days when I read Camus and Heidegger and quoted them in dark corners of the Brooklyn loft parties I never get invited to anymore.

Everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it. A truly New York philosophy. All of the struggle, everything Woody Allen romanticized –– the fifteen strange hands gripping the same sticky pole on the subway, the thick smoke of garbage that settled along every street during the summer, the fifteen dollar cocktails and twenty dollar hamburgers, the grime that lived between everyone’s toes no matter how much you isolated yourself on the fiftieth floor of a Central Park West co-op building –– this was the pain we had to work through to get real satisfaction from life. My friends who have long since abandoned the signal problems in the tunnels below the East River for sunnier, more temperate climates don’t ascribe to this philosophy anymore –– Why not just be happy? Couldn’t that be satisfying too?

All this to say, I find myself more often than not fast walking to the subway from the restaurant, as if I could outrun the pellets of water speeding down 1000 times a millisecond. So here I am, careening through the cobblestoned sidewalks, holding my apron above me like it can protect me from anything more than flour stains on my pants.

I don’t quote the Myth of Sisyphus too much anymore. After I dropped off the Master’s track and stayed working at Galli for eight years too long, thinking about why people don’t just kill themselves in the face of a cruel and unrelenting world hasn’t kept up the same appeal as it once did. None of it has really. The books and articles I was going to write, all of the shitty plans Daniel and I made to learn German and move abroad, bicycling around Brooklyn late at night in search of the perfect slice. I’m lactose intolerant now, like everyone who lives south of Greenpoint and north of Park Slope. I wonder what Sisyphus would think about higher consciousness if he was rolling his boulder towards a pizza parlor he couldn’t eat at.

It’s less than four blocks to the Canal Street station from the restaurant, and after almost a decade of taking those steps to the station, I don’t need any road markers to find my way there, even in a flash flood. It’s barely 11 and Mercer’s dead, which is eerie on a Friday but it makes me feel like I’m in a Murakami novel –– alone in a crowded city, a bubble of quiet amidst the clamor. I transitioned from existentialism smoothly into surrealist fiction for awhile, but I’d be lying if I said I’d read a book in the last 16 months. I keep them around me for show, of course, in case I get a visitor who asks me what I’ve been up to, I can just gesture to my dusty friends. The kinds of visitors I get these days don’t usually ask that many follow-up questions. It’s hard to pin down the irony of life as an adult in New York –– the same kinds of people who as kids teased me about being a book nerd grew up to be snobs who can’t wait to get their manicured nails on the latest Zadie Smith.

After I swipe myself through the turnstyle, I can feel the rumbling underbelly of the subway station as the J train spits its way away from the platform. It’s late enough that I’m certain another won’t be coming for at least fifteen minutes, so I prepare to settle in against a pole in this sauna. I’ve spent enough time leaning against this pole late into the night, I feel like I should get a plaque to commemorate its allegiance to me.

It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been living here, you’ve got to take the small things that you can feel ownership over, since most of this city feels like it could crumble through your fingers at any moment. When I first moved to New York in a fit of passion and wide-eyed idealism only possible in the first couple months after college graduation, I saw New York as a grand stepping stone. This was not a place you could get mired in. As soon as it no longer held any value for you, you could springboard out towards a million new points of light. Daniel used to say that he loved that about me –– how I mirrored the city’s frenetic energy with my own, desperate to see more, do more, be more than I had been the day before, how I wanted to be constantly reincarnated without having to die.

My world is much smaller than it was ten years ago and even five. My world is the 600 steps from my apartment to the subway and the 400 steps from the subway to the restaurant. It is the 10,000 steps I run twice a week going nowhere, overlooking a rare parking lot in Bushwick. The 500 steps from the gym to the grocery store where I walk a couple hundred steps in circles looking for the best price on whole grain bread and oranges and penne noodles. Even the worlds I live in while I’m sleeping are smaller than they used to be. I’ll be replaying the same conversation I had with the Italian family who are visiting New York only to eat at an Italian restaurant, helping them decide the best wine for the fish, except the children will be wearing matching light blue frilly frocks and pink bows tied around the middle instead of whatever sparkly I heart New York crap they actually wore the previous afternoon. I’ll wake up and remind myself to stop watching The Shining before bed, but at least it helped me decipher my dreamworld from reality.

I lean forward off the platform in search of a light. Sometimes I feel a great sense of adrenaline from this act –– shuffling the tips of my toes towards the past the cautionary yellow line, craning my neck over the edge so my head balances magically over the tracks a few feet below. It would be so easy to just fall, for a rushed stranger to bump my side or a gush of wind from a train on the adjacent track and then to become a member of a statistic displayed on every subway car.

In 2015, 476 People –– including A 32-year-old Woman Who Didn’t Really Mean To Fall, But Also Didn’t Really Try to Stop Herself From Falling –– Were Hit By Subway Cars.

I see the light growing from the cavern, coming into focus as it nears the station. I step back from the yellow line and wait like the good socialized New Yorker that I am for the train to come to a full stop before the crowding the door to scan for open seats. The train car that pulls up in front of me is nearly empty, which usually is the sign of a broken air conditioning system or the smell of death, but I step in anyways. Cold air and a neutral subway scent greet me. There’s only one other person in the car, sitting a couple sections away. As the subway doors close and I settle into my plastic bench, I hear a quiet muttering that first sounds like gibberish but I begin to pull out full sentences.

“To love, to life, to your happily ever after…”