Feedback Loops

Your feedback form is broken so let me share with you what I know, because dusk is settling across the skyline and I have to go home. I know somewhere in your dark ribcage is your metro card, your expired company ID, and the passport you needed to enter at 14th street. All lost. All missing, but not gone. There are traces of what remains of your youth all over the subway platform. The smell of thick, humid dread and the twisting scent of human and human and human. I know you were always good at the stairs. We went up ladders together until you couldn’t hold on, and I am left with a ghost. Remember me? I am the archangel of substance abuse and longing. It is dark now. I know you are there, I say, with my flashlight phone in one fist. I have the survey results. I am here to talk to your manager.

Deadeye

Here is a ten year challenge when the city takes hold and squeezes your savings, your sanity, you’re old. I could jones in the street for one more no-name bar. Look up: unfamiliar intersections littered with twenty year old young skin, taught and dizzy. I can memorize the maze. What is left for me? you would ask but you don’t write anymore. The magazines all shut down. The soft faced boys moved home. The city multiples like so many nights in a car, blurring into two or three, this quick-spinning universe of everything at once in deafening unrecognizable roar. Too much, stop, spit those adjectives. I swear I remember where I was when I left. Someone buzz me in. Deadeye, I want to go back. It’s been ten or twelve years, maybe less, maybe more.

Cavity

I was shot up with painkillers before she turned on the drill. She said the rapid heartbeat is normal. It’s an adrenaline rush, she said, which explained why my hands were shaking. My mouth was stuffed with gauze and tubes. My chest felt small and hallow. I looked out the window at the alley, watching the late afternoon sun spread shadows across the wall. If you need a shot anywhere, she said, always choose the upper-back part of your mouth. Then she turned on the noise inside my head, and I drifted. 

Hello, You

I had so many cups of coffee today that I think I’ve developed an ulcer. There is some sort of bloated knot in my stomach and all I have to show for it is bad breath. If anything, the weight of the acid had dragged me down, and I feel even slower than I did this morning when I sat on the subway, staring at my own face in the window across the way, thinking “Hello, 1 train. Hello, you.”

I wonder if this is what pregnancy feels like, the heft and the bloat and the drag. I’m not pregnant. I would know if I was. I have always been extra sensitive, always a feeler in the worst sense of the word. 

Everyone on the subway this morning looked drained except the tourists. You can always tell, because no one else could be bubbling over with such emotion, so much visible anticipation and zeal that it makes you feel sick to be awake so early to have an ordinary day. Their excitement probably cripples their ability to absorb anything real. “Hello 1 train!” their wide-eyes shout. “Hello, you!” 

I don’t know where we came from.

When we moved to New York we moved quickly, one after another, in what felt like years apart but was really week to week, our arrivals stacked together like holes in a belt. I don’t know where we came from. We were temp-to-perm assistants. We were broke. We were free — subsisting off of open bars and leftover lunches, crashing on one another’s couches, sleeping on mattresses hoisted above suitcases stuffed with clothes. We didn’t know much, but we knew our next apartment wouldn’t have mice. And we knew how to go and go and go, working and drinking and sleeping around through hangovers, through head colds, through deaths in the family, through all the strangers underground. We spent the beginnings of our paychecks on vodka and the last of it on a therapist, who gathered that we drank more than we would ever say, because she knew how to read our early on-set wrinkles and our breath, and she knew that everything we said was either too true or not really true at all.

Commodities

There’s a scene in the movie Office Space where our hero shows up to work late, only to flop a giant fish on his desk and begin to gut it.

Believe me when I tell you that I replay that scene in my head frequently, relishing his calm, easy where-with-all to debone that fucker on his pile of reports.

I thought about that scene today twice, reminding myself that the futility of life should not be determined by the frustration of your work. Work angst is such a spoiled, fucked up problem of the well-abled. It is practically a commodity, nearly a good as silver, almost as semi-precious as a gutted fish when you’re hungry.

Forward, forward, forward

Some things never change. Those things don’t exist in New York.

I walk down Columbus Avenue with the dog pulling against the leash, racing past drunks and couples and the old man who lives downstairs. We blow through the intersection, the dog frantic now, practically sprinting forward and forward and forward through the city. We get to the pet store, and she tries to go in. It’s one in the morning, I tell her. It’s not open. She wags her tail, an act of naïveté or defiance.

(Three years ago I ran down Avenue A drunk and bewildered and reaching out for everything and anything and waiting for someone to watch me fall. By the time I hit 8th Street, he was there, of course. I was running to him in some sped-up tragicomedic scene playing out in the movie of my head.)

The wind picks up and the dog’s ears blow back slightly. She whines and paws at the pet store. I gently tug at her, and then use a bit more force to try and yank her away.

The kids at the bar smile. They are outside, waving around cigarettes and hunting down cabs. One of them approaches the dog, already on his knees. She ignores him, desperate to go inside the pet store. The guy could be my age, but from the crowd at the bar, I assume he’s younger. His jeans are tight and torn. He pets the dog’s head and scrambles away, his cigarette stuck against his bottom lip, his tail between his legs. The dog looks away.

We begin the slow walk home, across the avenue, to our apartment. She will eventually lie down on the corner of my bed, her head pressed up against my ankles, the same happy-sad expression on her soft, sleeping face.

Overwhelming

Chest pain like this isn’t normal but neither is my career history. Six different positions in six different years. The shortest, a handful of months at a famous fashion magazine, may have been the best. The longest, two and a half years at a lesser-known weekly indie rag, may have been just as good, but I was too underpaid and resentful to know it at the time.

The resentment is usually what causes my chest pain. The overwhelming fury paired with raw, youthful frustration.

I also developed an ache in my jaw, and a stiffness in my neck.

My boss — my most current of the lot — told me the other day I come off like a know-it-all. He said I don’t have to prove myself in meeting. I already got the job, he told me. Sometimes it’s more important to listen.

He’s right. Of course he’s right. I’m bitter, but I’m no idiot. If I was an idiot I wouldn’t let the anger creep up my throat. I wouldn’t pick at my fingernail beds in meetings, trying to shut myself up, trying to remind myself it’s just a job.

It is, after all, just a job. And the economy is rumored to be miserable for the unemployed. Which makes me, what, overemployed? Overpaid? Overwhelmed? Overfed? It’s just a job, don’t forget. I tell myself that over, and over again, smiling and nodding, willing the heat in my cheeks to fade, waiting for that pain in my chest to give.