Scary Monsters

The pleasures of a walk home on a cool summer night are lost on me as I ruminate about my future. I don’t notice the soft scent of jasmine, because I am worried I might be making a mistake in thinking about changing roles. I neglect the shimmering street lights reflected in the puddles in the street as they are stirred by gentle breezes, because shadows of my past rear up to frighten me with memories of times I was not so skilled or smart.

Then, crossing from one corner to another, I realize that, yet again, I’m actually just kind of hungry, and all my worries disappear like nighttime scary monsters in my childhood bedroom that turn out to be some clothes on a chair when the morning comes.

The Mist

It doesn’t look like it’s raining, exactly, but the ground is wet, and people are walking with umbrellas, so what I mean is that you can’t see the raindrops shivering the puddles, or see the trees getting hammered with giant drops that shudder the leaves. We figure we’re okay to walk to the post office without rain gear.

But it turns out it’s less rain, and more walking through a very low cloud, not quite so fine as to be fog. Our hair is soaked before we even get to the end of the block.

Collider

Sirens are commonplace on the block outside our front window, so we don’t look up from the video we’re watching as they wail down the street, growing louder as they go.

The heavy crash that follows startles us out of our reverie, though, and we leap to the window, only to have our view blocked by scaffolding.

In an instant, Katie is on her feet, shoes on, keys obtained, and out the door to see what’s up. 

By the time I get down to the corner where the two ambulances collided, into each other and then one into a building, she’s already taking videos and making friends with other spectators, while lights flash angrily  and twisted, exposed engine blocks steam into the night.

A Blessing

She opens the door between the train cars and pulls herself through, only to stop, captivated for some reason, and stare at Katie, who is resting her head on my shoulder with her eyes closed. She stays that way for a few moments, staring with some deep emotion in her eyes, then shakes it off and walks to her customary spot and begin her spiel: “Good evening everyone, sorry to disturb you but I am homeless and I need a few dollars...,” etc.

After she has collected her money from a few kind people up and down the train, she comes back to where we’re sitting and stares at Katie for another few moments. “Are you okay?” she asks Katie, and when we assure her that Katie is just resting, she smiles and exits the train, blessing us as she goes.

Anxiety Has Been Reduced

The sale shoes are on several free standing racks out by themselves on the floor, and because humans when confronted by a sale tend to behave like savages, they are often in terrible disarray at the end of the night.

One of my salespeople and I are putting the bombed out sales racks back together, him on one side, me on the other, and the rattle of leather and rubber against the metal and plastic of the racks in the quiet of the empty store is sort of soothing, if that’s your thing. I hear, through the racks, my co-worker singing quietly to himself, not loudly, not particularly well, but nicely, just singing a tuneless little tune to pass the time.

My first thought, whenever I hear someone singing, is to remember how wonderful it is to sing, and to want to sing along, because singing is one of my life’s true joys, but I stop myself, and simply listen, enjoying the sound of his simple tune. 

Always Go To Weddings

“It’s just, I have all these events,” she says in mild exasperation, “and I’ve been wearing nothing but comfy clothes for the last two years, but now I have to dress.”

“Well, maybe it’s better to think of it, not in terms of what you have to do,” I say, boxing up the shoes that she’s going to buy, “but what you get to do. Like you really haven’t been able to dress up for, what, two years now, but now you have these fun events that you get to go to, and you can kind of get fancy, and that can be fun.”

“A year ago, I would have been dreaming about going to a wedding,” she says, nodding.

Cry Havoc

Children strike heroic poses with cut up boxes for shields and nerf swords as their camp counselors herd them into two opposing groups facing each other across the park lawn. 

“Back up, back up, back up!” one of the counselors yells, to little effect, until finally he gets his miniature battalions lined up behind their starting lines. 

“Okay!” he shouts dramatically. “Five..., four..., threetwoonego!” and the spindly little kids on both sides scream bloody havoc and race toward each other to the resounding thwacks of duct tape covered foam beating on cardboard, and then it just sort of disintegrates into a bunch of little arguments about rules, and who’s out, and why.

Rethinking Ambition

Five-and-a-half hours floor watching in the shoe department - talking to people, solving problems, greeting customers, running back and forth. 

At the end of the day, almost nine o’clock, I sit down for the first time in hours and lay my head on the counter. One of my employees who has aspirations toward management sits down next to me and contemplates my weariness.

“You’re starting meke me thing that maybe I don’t want to be a manager,” she says.

Panic! On The Shoe Floor

The DJ is playing “Dancing On My Own,” a true banger, but this version of it is... off.

Is it the tempo (a hair too slow, not enough to notice if you’re not paying attention, but enough to bum me out), or the incessant swooooOOOOOSH of phase effects, or the st-st-stutter of the vocals looped and repeated?

A bad DJ can make you hate a song you love, just by playing it wrong.

As I walk around the sales floor of the shoe department, I find myself singing a phrase over and over from the song “Panic” by The Smiths: “Hang the DJ, hang the DJ, hang the DJ....,” but no one hears over the blare.

Tyrannosaurus SEX, amirite?

This faux nature documentary about dinosaurs is remarkably well animated, and the textures on the dinosaurs’ skins are so realistic that it’s easy to forget these animals died millions of years ago.

So when the tyrannosaurus rex male and female begin to nuzzle each other by the side of the river, it honestly starts to feel a little voyeuristic. And the artfully placed palm fronds do nothing to decrease our discomfort, despite concealing all the important details, when they actually show him mounting her.

"This is like the time I watched two pigeons mate while I got a root canal,” Katie says as she looks literally anywhere in the room but the screen, while David Attenborough narrates the murder of our childhood innocence.

Miscommunication

Traffic along 7th Avenue in Brooklyn is thick, this time of day - cars double parked, drivers pulling out into intersections and blocking cross-traffic on red, all kinds of shenanigans. So it isn’t that big of a deal when the bus driver of the bus I’m in honks politely at the guy with his door open into traffic to let him know that we’re passing.

But instead of taking the honk as the gentle warning that it was, the guy scowls, glares at the bus as it passes, and then stalks alongside it to stand in front of us. He waves his hands angrily, then continues on his way, easily outpacing us due to the sluggishness of traffic.

Early Shift

I finally find the contact case I’m looking for in my dream when the alarm goes off, and I am wrenched into a dark room. I can hear a light rain on the air-conditioner, and thunder grumbles as I tap the screen until the gentle tones of piano and chimes designed to awaken me cease.

Standing is a bit of a trick these days after I’ve been lying still for hours, and I reach out for my shelves to steady myself. My hips and knees and heels all protest with varying volume, and I make my way out of the bedroom and down the hall in the dark. 

Breeze

A warm day in late spring, and the whole world is breathing out sweetness. Trees that held their breath through the long winter exhaling green, sultry roses seducing the neighborhood with perfume, vines lifting their leafy faces to the sun - everything scented and filling the air with life.

We walk by an apartment building, and all the bins are out for garbage collection, and even that smell, the ripe pong of trash, isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever smelled. I don’t inhale too deeply, of course, but there’s a pungent flash of rot, a momentary spike of unsavoriness that’s almost immediately swept away in the gentle breeze, leaving nothing but a waft of dust and the smell of sun.

Cabbie

“Get the fuck out of my cab!” the bicycle cabbie yells, but the man at whom he’s yelling does not budge. Now the whole park is watching, all of us on the sunny late spring lawn, under blue skies and rustling green canopy peering up from our picnics or books or phones to watch the drama, which has now escalated to the bike cabbie shaking the cab and shouting curse words.

But in a few moments the man has quieted down, and now the two of them are speaking earnestly for a while, then embracing, and the bike cabbie gets on his bike, the passenger at whom he was screaming only seconds ago still in the cab, and rides off. The park collectively sighs, goes back to what it was doing, and the day proceeds as if nothing at all had happened.

Timing Is Everything

“Do you remember startling awake to my sneeze last night?” she asks from the shower.

“Yes,” I answer.

“It was not that loud.”

“Yes, but your timing was impeccable."

‘Fess Up

Someone has left a mess on the cash wrap by the register, boxes and display shoes strewn everywhere, and I’m pretty sure I know who it is.

But when I ask her, she denies it, so, without accusing, I say, “Okay, you’re still going to be cleaning it up for your closer before you go home.”

A few minutes later, as she’s putting the boxes away, she says, “You know, I just remembered, these were mine.”

“I know,” I say, smiling.

The Blow Up

Seven o’clock, quitting time for me, comes and goes without the other manager coming to replace me on the floor. Traffic in the store has settled into a pattern, these days, with everyone coming in after their offices close around six o’clock, and we’re always short-staffed, leaving the final two hours before closing at eight a mess of running around, attempting to find salespeople, irritated customers, and stressed out managers, in this case: me.

Five after seven, then ten, and every minute seems like an eternity, because I have allotted exactly the energy required to get me through the day, through my last hour of the day, and my irritation festers and blossoms into a red-hot anger in my stomach, and then, finally, she shows up.

“I know you’ve asked me to be more direct,” I say quietly to her, “so let me tell you, I don’t like ten minutes late."

Sus

I put the penultimate load of things we’re moving to storage in the truck and, as I’m walking back, I pass a man staring down at his phone, and he’s doing the typical zombie shuffle of the hypnotically online, sort of meandering back-and-forth across the sidewalk, but I pass him much closer than a typical New Yorker would deem acceptable without any reaction from him, which automatically makes him suspicious. He continues to linger a little too close to the truck, so Katie stays downstairs to keep an eye on our stuff while I run back up to the apartment.

A little later, after we’ve finished loading and are driving the truck back to the storage place, Katie spots him again, this time crossing the street several blocks away from our house, and even as he’s crossing the street, he’s still staring into his phone, walking like he's mildly intoxicated. We decide that our suspicions of him were entirely unfounded, and he’s just really into whatever he’s watching on his phone, and, while his behavior is kinda creepy, he’s not a criminal or anything.

Nobody But Us In Here

“Watch out,” the man mumbles as I swing the exit door outwards, nearly hitting him on my way out of the market. The syrup I was looking for was no where to be found, and I only have a couple of hours before my guests arrive, so I’m in a bit of a rush.

And anyway, I didn’t touch him, or even mildly inconvenience him, so what’s the big deal, and what was he doing walking on that side of the sidewalk anyway?

I’m a block away before I realize I’m having another argument with a person who isn’t even there, and who has likely already forgotten about me, to boot.

Trying

We’ve gone back and forth on these shoes for almost a half-hour, and she still can’t decide. As she tries on the sandals one more time (never mind that they haven’t changed, color, size, or shape in any way since the last time she tried them on) I can feel my shoulders ratcheting up toward my ears, and a cold dislike creeping into my chest. 

But what if she was Katie, or my sister, or my mom? I would hope that someone would be patient with them, and I realize that every person I sit with to try on shoes, every person I meet on the subway, all my co-workers and bosses and friends, are all just going out into the world, looking for things, trying to get stuff done, and all of them do this with various degrees of faith that people will be nice to them, patient with them, kind and understanding, and so I take a breath, smile, and say, “So how do they feel?"

Bodies at Rest/In Motion

The train is stopped between stations - somebody pulled the emergency brake and it takes awhile to reset it since apparently the whole thing has to be done manually - so here we are, waiting to move.

Katie holds my hand, her fingers tracing my index finger knuckle, ruffling the sparse hair and then smoothing it down again. This is the shape of my body, I think to myself, this boundary of skin in which my consciousness currently resides. 

The guy across from us stomps his foot in frustration at the delay, but when I look up, he looks completely bored and still, as if he never moved at all. 

A Splash Of Cold Water

The water in the shower runs warm down my body, and I close my eyes to feel it better. I flex my fists and breathe in steam and feel the boundaries of my body against the air and the water and the world.

The thought intrudes suddenly, bringing with it a certain regret, that one day, without a doubt, I will be dead, and that one day shortly after that one there will be no one who remembers that once I was alive.

“I really should start writing my Four Each Day again,” I think, and turn the water as cold as I can make it.

What A Time To Be Alive

I stay on the sunny side of the walk to the subway for as long as possible, glorying in the soft blue sky and the cool air. Of course, my brain won’t let me stay in this blissful state for too long, so I inevitably start thinking about the fact that it’s going to be warmer earlier every year until the world is totally uninhabitable. 

But we just sort of live like this, creeping toward destruction without knowing how to stop it.

That being said, the cherry trees have already blossomed, and the gingko trees, cryptic and angular like certain melodies from Japan, have already begun to bud, and I love them enough to put aside my gloomy thoughts. 

Different Solutions

It’s not so much fog as a cloud that’s lost it’s ambition, and all the streetlights and stoplights are simultaneously hazed and brightened, refracted into sharp electric halos that make me squint. 

Two men walking down the sidewalk come upon a puddle. One steps around it, the other detours up on to the steps of the brownstone, effectively walking over it. Neither breaks stride, both seem perfectly content with their own way of handling the problem, neither seem to be perturbed by the way the other dealt with it.

Volatility

Katie and I set up her art today for an exhibition this weekend, so of course it rained. When Katie asked me why it always seemed to rain whenever we were setting up for shows, I said that I thought that it was because the shows are always at the beginning of the unsettled seasons, spring and fall. Summer and winter are the settled seasons, long periods of the same or almost the same for days or weeks at a time, but spring and fall are the seasons of quick changes, highs and lows, glorious days chased quickly by gloom.

An old man named Jim helped us in the parking lot as we loaded in, and I think he really took a shine to Katie, not that she was trying to manipulate her, just that few people are immune to the charms of a pretty redhead, myself included, which is why I ended up here in the first place. 

Cat Dad

As soon as the new cat tree is in its spot in the corner, the cats are checking it out. Wallace, the more intrepid of the two, grapples her way to the top with a grim resolve, while Davis sniffs tentatively at the base and lets her sister do reconnaissance. As their bravery increases, they slink between levels with athletic grace and occasional stubbornness, fighting small feuds with one another, parkouring to seemingly unattainable perches, and attacking the scratching posts with savage ferocity.

It takes us a good hour to get the thing fixed up so that it's stable and won’t fall to rubble under their delicate ministrations, and as I watch them finally sleep at the top, Davis slit-eyed and content, Wallace crashed out in oblivion, I find myself thinking about how Dad would put together my toys for me on Christmas, and if the singing in my heart is any indication of how he felt, I get why he tried so hard for me.

Why We Work

I look over from where I'm working on the computer to where Katie is sitting at the table in our living room prepping materials for her business creating sculptures made of butterflies. There's light from the window next to her, putting her in silhouette.

"Thank you," I say, and she looks up, confused.

"I never expected to have any money," I explain, "like ever, so the fact that we have enough money to live here and do things, it's just awesome."

West Side Story

After the movie we walk the west side of the park toward home, strolling in that blissful clarity that often comes after a really good film, like you’re in your own movie, everything in focus and magically lit. The snow and the streetlights help, too, and the warm light from the brownstone windows glowing contentedly out into the cold night air. 

Katie asks, “Is it hand-holding time?” which of course it is, almost always. It’s just a moment, the two of us together, her small hand in mine, walking down the sidewalk, forever.