Thursday

       They’re dead. The image lolls through your mind, shoving its weight through barely-tethered synapses. Its heft is comforting, like a kind man’s head on your chest in the morning, freshly washed hair tickling bare skin. You’re outside yourself, phone ringing at an ominous 5 am. Caller ID is sophisticated now. It tells you when the cops are calling. The man asks your name, calls you ma’am, delivers the “difficult news.” You thank him before hanging up, a wretched submission to a guiltless messenger. They’re dead. Both of them. Mangled in a car accident, swallowed in a fire, murder-suicide, robbery gone wrong, tornado, drowning, overdose. It doesn’t really matter. In this fantasy, you get to wake up to a phone call declaring them gone, for good. In this fantasy, you get to split the value of the house, the car, the 401K, the CDs they never mentioned. You get to spend a year at a kitschy retreat, life insurance and health insurance propping each other up onto a facility-issued bed. You get a therapist, and she helps you recover. From the guilt of not minding that your parents are dead.

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It feels cruel, and it is. Imagining them evaporating into the darkness of a random Wednesday night. The freedom is tantalizing enough to loop the scene. Your phone twinkles with sound, easing into a firm blare. 9 am has never felt so welcome. The morning light cuts through cheap curtains, strained eyes accepting an overcast sky. The fantasy lingers, painting a border around today’s memories. The day you spent imagining your parents’ tragic end, and feeling not nearly guilty enough about it. Some part of you hopes your fantasies may manifest, that by imagining it enough, the phone call will come. You don’t imagine that the guilt might hit a little harder afterward.

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You think about it later that night, when your fingers search the back of your throat for just the right spot. The half-digested mountain of matter in the toilet mocks you. “Oh, sure. like you wouldn’t  still be doing this if they died. Like you wouldn’t be a vain, self-destructive, unlikable bitch again tomorrow.” The flush doesn’t wash it all away, and the humiliation of a toilet brush in hand is just enough to crumple your withering self-esteem. Go ahead, call yourself a bitch again, like it helps.

You avoid making eye contact with yourself in the mirror. Isn’t this supposed to be sexy? You’re tortured, frail, desperate, twisted, all the best qualities a young woman can have. But your reflection doesn’t get any prettier the longer you look. If anything, the anger has made you ugly. Gnarled edges and hateful eyes and sallow cheeks and belligerent venom. All the glamor of a miserable twenty-something plagued with violent fictions. You take comfort in novel after novel about women like you. The unlikable ones who take hundreds of pills and offend their best friends and push away the kindest lovers. You like thinking of yourself this way, denying your own sentimentality. This caricature of yourself is unencumbered by the desire to be loved. If you cram yourself into her silhouette thoroughly enough, maybe you will be too.

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Your dreams clear their throats in smug correction, forcing your eyes onto unfelt moments of tenderness. You dared to deny your desperation. You toss and turn to visions of your mother’s soft hands through your hair, a lover’s gentle touch, their sleeping form, a friend’s soothing voice. These hauntings feel karmic, a bleeding mirror of your harsh, guiltless fantasies. You wonder if the dreams evidence your descent into a full-blown identity crisis. You’re not nearly middle-aged, but you’ve always been precocious.
 

You sit at a decade-old laptop, the kind that looks the same as all the new ones, but with a slightly different charging port. The cluttered desktop seems as unimpressed by your presence as you are by its arrangement, never pausing to consider your culpability. You made this mess, like all the others, but you’ll be damned if you care enough to fix it. Your inbox chirps with emails of which you’re never the primary recipient. You wonder if you’ll always be CC’ed. The ultimate afterthought. Your vanity bristles at the thought, the homely, aging, unremarkable version of your painted face thrumming against its cage. Like Tanya in marketing is thinking about your burgeoning crow’s feet.

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You glance at your phone, the screen black with inactivity. It doesn’t ring, no matter how hard you wish. Or manifest as the white pseudo-gurus on your feed would encourage. It’s all a fucking scam, you think before flipping the device over. You don’t care to investigate what kind of call you wanted. (Spoiler alert: you wanted your parents to be dead, again.)

The work day bleeds into a smoky cloud once your 5 pm joint is lit. The illustrious joys of  hybrid work. As you pace, crumbs adhere to your foot through the hole in your off-white sock, a cruel reminder of the untouched broom in the room’s back corner. You balk at your mind’s suggestion to clean. Can’t you tell there is important work to be done? You scold your neural pathways into submission before scrawling half-formed thoughts into a too-neat notebook:

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i’m scared that feeling is cumulative
that i’ll have to feel it all forever
every new memory stacked onto the last
cymbals crashing with disparate feelings

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It’s mediocre at best, a stroke of unbridled genius to imagine that maybe you’ll have to remember how things used to feel. You cringe at your own ink stains, ripping the page from its binding as quickly as you recorded such humiliating vulnerabilities. You wonder if everyone else feels things as deeply, then resign yourself to your ice queen fantasies. The desperation buzzes through your teeth with every drag, smoke filling your lungs with a soothing swirl. You resolve not to feel it all forever, to cleave things from your mind before they have the opportunity to seep into your bloodstream. You know that if that really worked, people wouldn’t do drugs.

You leave the notebook on the floor, instead opening the Spotify app on your smart TV. Singing feels better than thinking, and you document your “joy” in half-assed mirror selfies, messy videos belting words that barely string together. You haphazardly send them to half-interested Tinder matches. There is eyeliner smeared across your cheek, a half-finished bottle of wine on your bedside table, a late-night knock on the door by an all-too-willing man. you sink your teeth into his shoulder and moan a name you only learned a few hours ago. You don’t cum. You never cum. Go on, tell him how hard you came.

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“So...you want me to spend the night?” The too-high voice pounds against your turned back with an urgency you’re unwilling to stomach alongside the generous swirl of wine.

“Uh, no, why would you spend the night? I can pay for your Uber or whatever.” His coarse hand slides too comfortably across your waist, fingers skittering in a playful rhythm.

“Well, I just thought we could have a nice night, maybe do some more of that when I recharge.” Warm breath tickles your still-turned back as your eyes barely bother to roll. As if you’re raring to fake another orgasm. Your phone lights up with a karmic gift, buzzing under your folded arm.

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“It’s just that my friend Lily—oh, see, she’s calling me—is supposed to come over, I guess she’s on her way.” Your lips move before your mind can stop you, stuttering a weak “Hey, Lily!” in a rush to eject the unwelcome visitor. Her voice rings through tinny speakers, blending its malted rhythm into racing thoughts. Ohmygod hey! I didn’t think you’d pick up! I’ve been thinking about you lately and I wanted to see if you—

“Yeah, hey, I’ll let you up if you buzz. Ten minutes? Yeah, cool.” You shrug at the expectant man, dejection already kissing his overgrown eyebrows.

“I had a guy over but he’s on his way out so I’ll pour you a glass of wine. Okay, sounds good, see you soon.” His belt clinks into your periphery, his back finally turned in frantic priming for his exit.

You pause as Lily jabbers through the speaker, each sentence ending with a predictable lilt. Your faceless intruder bends down for a kiss goodbye, meeting your turning cheek with too-wet lips. As the front door shudders closed, Lily’s shrillness mounts.

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“Hey, sorry about that, I really needed to get rid of that guy. It’s lucky you called, I guess. Anyway, I actually don’t have time to talk right now, sorry.”

“Absolutely not. This is the first time I’ve gotten through to you in months. I just want to make sure you’re okay and Goddamnit, you’re gonna let me.” Your eyes narrow at the insistence of your most persistent friend. Her demands continue, culminating in the distance between your empty apartment and her ass on your torn couch: thirty minutes if she plays the traffic right. You pour the glass of wine you promised and gulp it down quickly, eyes drooping with self-inflicted dread. When she finally buzzes the intercom, you lurch up from a kind of half-sleep.

When you go to work in the morning, you sit at an unmarked table in a half-furnished basement. There’s 2010s pop music coming from a speaker somewhere behind you, but no one else seems to mind. There is a skylight in this basement, glass murky and untouched, speckled with water stains. The sky isn’t much to look at, a flat gray, the kind of gray that almost makes you forget about color. You’re less yourself for gazing up through its dirty glass, so you point your eyes back at the bright screen. You think about how many people are doing real work, the kind of work that tears their muscles and stains their skin under the sun and keeps their flesh sealed to bone. You think about how you almost stayed home today. How they don’t get the option. How pathetic you are, unmotivated and slovenly and buried under the seat of the empire. You place an online order to pick up lunch at the cafe upstairs. You join a Zoom call with your boss, from their office two floors up. You think about closing your laptop, smashing it against the floor, and launching your chair into the wall. You nod and discuss this month’s metrics instead.

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This evening, you’re obsessed with unsubscribing from email lists, clicking and confirming the glowing button until your inbox is less cluttered, less mocking, less likely to alert you to a meager 20% off sale and encourage yet another meaningless transaction. You unsubscribe to your credit company’s alerts, too. The Doomsday Clock occupies a permanent space in your mind, especially when it comes to finances. It’s easier this way, to think about the burning world in terms of a future you don’t have to work to plan. You forget your joint is lit until a clump of sizzling ash stings your thigh. You finish it in a hurry, half-assedly opening a window to dispel the smoke. There are perks to renting from a senile landlord.

Your mom calls, an unwelcome interruption of an otherwise picturesque evening. You decline it, lying that you’re out with coworkers. The same people you only met once, on your first day at the office. She sends a sad emoji, an odd kind of guilt trip in an otherwise shallow text exchange. She’ll get it all off her chest tomorrow. You promise to call her in the morning, after your first meeting. Getting to bed involves the usual shuffle. You fall asleep on the couch, bags of snacks still open around you,  stomach newly empty, mouth sour with bile. You jolt awake just two hours later, removing your makeup and clothes under dim lamplight.

 

The last sip of water you swallow has seven pills floating on its surface. Wellbutrin, Metformin, Naltrexone, Spironolactone, birth control, Zoloft, Sertraline. It’s a wonder telehealth is legal. Your foot bumps a box, ribbon tickling your toe. Your phone flashlight illuminates the holographic wrapping paper, a card taped to the package’s side. To make the night a little easier. Wrapping paper torn from cardboard reveals a weighted blanket, hospital grey, the kind you’d give to a widow. Lily. You sleep naked, window cracked, heating set to ‘medium’, fifteen pounds of quilted microfiber crushing your anxious chest into its sterile embrace.

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In the morning, you scoot down the block to a dilapidated Taco Bell, tears brimming through kohl eyeliner and searing wind. You receive a subpar breakfast burrito and pay an absurd $8.50 total. The clerk turns the screen toward you to input a tip. Live fucking mas. A woman holding a snarling mini poodle noxiously taps her foot behind you. She smells like a pottery barn, so strongly you could retch all over her well-groomed demon dog. You settle for a shoulder check on the way out, nine dollars poorer than when you walked in. The rest of your commute is undeniably bleak; sloppy, drunk men shake their fingers when you deny them a smile, performers climb all over the subway railings, a woman speaks too loudly on the phone, right by your ear. You’ve forgotten your headphones, forced to endureit all in screaming color. A teenager runs over your foot on the way out. Since when did fucking Heelys come back?

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Today, you decide to work at one of the long, “collaboratively designed” tables on the first floor, within view of the glass double doors. You get on another Zoom call with your supervisor, in which you discover major layoffs have been made. Your job is safe, and you aren’t displeased to hear it,but it sounds like there have been several

angry email exchanges in the last twenty-four hours. A bird flies into the yawning glass doors, feathers crumpling under its lifeless body.
 

After lunch, you watch as your coworkers filter in and out of the lobby, sitting and standing and refilling lily white coffee cups. A man walks in through the double doors, card scanning through the turnstile. He stumbles into a trash can on the way to ask someone a question. It’s Mandy, from billing. She’s always been perfectly present. You overhear: “Do you work here?”

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“Yeah, hi, what do you need?”

The gunshot echoes up to the rafters. As you flinch at the blast, his eyes meet yours too quickly. They’re brimming with tears, escaping from the corners and carving across sweat-slicked skin. Your head darts down, away from his too-close stare. Lily’s Post-it message peeks its corner out from under your black rubber sole, ‘easier’ its only legible marking. Easier. Another shot rings through frantic air, and your ribs crush down into a wad of terror. Mangled in a car accident, swallowed in a fire, murder-suicide, robbery gone wrong, tornado, drowning, overdose. You forgot about shootings. How un-American of you.