Reruns

History, like an old Seinfeld episode, repeats itself.

As loudly as we could without making a sound.

Some of us rested our fragile little heads over the perfect porcelain toilets and wondered what would become of us.

Some of us sat back and thought as loudly as we could without making a sound.

Body Armor

He wrapped his warm arms around my torso again, turned the light off, and went back to sleep.

His arms around my chest feel like armor.

I counted backwards in my head from one hundred until I drifted off like a log on a river, slowly and drunkenly falling asleep in a current down the navy night. I dreamt of bathroom fixtures. I tried to take a bath but the entire shower was filled with jutting metal accessories for holding razorblades and soaps and toothbrushes. I tried to angle my body to fit in the tub, to wet my hair, but there were too many metallic fixtures. They took over the walls, forcing me into awkward positions, folding myself into a corner surrounded by dull silver brackets caked with mildew and soap scum.

I dreamt I was pregnant.

I woke up in a drugged panic that I was forty and had aged into tragic housewife character in a Yates novel.

I traced my stomach with my left hand while he slept soundly. It was flat.

Don’t waste it!

She behaved badly in the bar, but when we got to the sidewalk her eyes widened again and she kept her head up off her shoulders. She was the type to kiss women in college dorms or spread rumors about a man for losing a hard on in bed. Her nose had been redone and her cheekbones, our friend swore, were redone, too. I wondered how anyone physically redoes cheekbones for a living. I wondered if a doctor had to open up her face with micrometers of explosive and close it back up again, stuffed with cotton and fat, wrapped up for weeks in tissue papers like a sad, sick, fairy tale of a birthday present.

She painted storefront glass with her lipstick, writing her name in blood orange, looping the lowercase l and e and striking the x in two long streaks. She drew pointy stars around her name. I thought about how much her body must cost. She very could have been drawing waxy red dollar signs.

She leaned her body into it. Hers was the sort of figure created out of well-disciplined starvation punctuated by a small diet of ejaculate and passed foie gras canapés served at undeserving open bars.

The lipstick broke and she broke with it, her knees buckling into the window and her leg smacking against the sidewalk. Our friend cursed under her breath and grabbed onto her, who was laughing, her hand smeared with what looked like thick blood. Her knee was scraped up from the pavement. She looked down at it and her grin twisted into a sob. Our friend chucked her cigarette at her feet wedged into shiny yellow sandals, and cursed again. She pulled a box from her bag, dabbed her two fingers in and pressed them against her bloodied knee. White powder flaked off onto the sidewalk.

She started to laugh again, lightly, through muddy tears. “Don’t waste it!” she said, laughing harder. “Fucking idiot. Don’t waste it.”

The world is very different now.

Did you think things were going to be different? Did you really think anything would change?

Ask not what your connections can do for you.

My fellow romantics: ask not what New York can possibly get you, make you, fix you like magic.

There are no magical unicorns. There are no silver-shelled mermaids.

These are the laws that are never amended. These are the rules that are never broken.

Maple Syrup

There are two smiles you give, and maybe no one told you, but one of them is a big fat lie. One of them is a stage-whisper. One of them is as real as soapy snowflakes or one of Chekhov’s guns. There is no maple syrup in your maple syrup, I might say. Or maybe I squeeze your hand extra hard and say something like “now make me a muscle” until you flinch. That’s alright, too. Look: I just want that other smile. And it’s not the one when I’m on top, or the one when you’re snapping a photo of me with your fingers in the air. It’s the big, sloppy grin in the morning. It’s untraceable. It’s defaceable. It’s fucking maple syrup.

99%

“99% of the head’s thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself”

—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Without Making a Sound

Some of us rested our fragile little heads over the perfect porcelain toilets and wondered what would become of us. Some of us sat back and thought as loudly as we could without making a sound.