circling the drain
She was more of a sketch around the edges of things than she was a fully flesh-and-blood person. She existed only in transient spaces: on the subway, headphones in, glaring at whoever might attempt to sit beside her; in the kitchen, flirting with the line cook who had gems in his canines, eating the last bites off of the guests’ plates she had cleared; outside of apartment buildings she didn’t live in, chainsmoking a pack of constantly-changing cigarettes, whichever was cheapest when she decided to buy another pack. It was hard to get a grasp on her; she was slippery and constantly mutating, ricocheting between godlessness and piety. It was an existence often romanticized but difficult in practice, cold and lonely and sharp as knives.
Coming from the Deep South to the Big City was a mistake. Out in the middle of nowhere, you could be nothing and have no expectations placed upon yourself, content with huffing gasoline and stealing from the Dollar Tree. Here, in the Great Somewhere, everyone asked for your ambitions, your goals, your dreams. She told the Sommelier that she had no ambition and he laughed at her. She wasn’t kidding. Who else would be content clearing the scraps of other people’s food, resetting their tables with care, never able to occupy the seats they’d be sitting in? Of course, the other boys who did her job had ambition: they had foreign countries they wanted to build houses in, wanted to make enough money that they could go home and never work again. She admired their grit, but did not share it. She floated through the workplace like a ghost, silently sweeping up debris and orbiting greater planets.
Sometimes, she would ride the entire subway line on her days off, taking it to the lowest possible point and then heading back uptown again. She would put on her headphones and listen to drone, zoning out in the in-between space of the tunnels. She was happiest then.
Days blurred into each other with no meaning. She followed a simple routine: wake up without an alarm. Lay in bed for an hour, attempting to read but more often scrolling. Order a coffee. Write in her diary instead of doing something productive. Go to work. If there was no work, she haunted the movie theatre, or the living room couch, or the benches by the river a few blocks from her apartment. She was deeply antisocial and rarely saw other people. She had a mandated date for partying, because the internet told her it was meant to be a spiritual experience. She did not find God in 6 AM Uber rides back uptown, but she thought that maybe He lingered in stalls of the after party venue where girls scraped cocaine out with acrylic nails and shut the door on you if you looked too closely. Or maybe He was in the Oxycontin she stole from her roommate and crushed up in the bathroom to waste her time more euphorically. Or maybe He was in the steaming hot showers she took in the dark, trying to create the feeling of being in the womb, liquefied and blind. He was definitely in the darkened auditorium of the movie theatre as the credits rolled, the seats empty save for her own because she preferred to go to 9:45 AM matinees.
“I just think you’re figuring things out.” Her mother says on the phone, unable to understand her daughter’s lack of determination after so many years of imbuing her with radical feminist thinking and being the breadwinner of their household.
The weather had turned ugly, painting the City grey and emptying out the streets. She walked from the Hundreds to the Seventies, pretending to have somewhere to go. People didn’t speak to you if you looked like you had a destination in mind. She spent hours picking out her favorite bench and sat there for a maximum of fifteen minutes. She crawled home, to the apartment, and let reality TV run on autopilot while she took an edible and “incubated ideas.” Her ideas were mostly vague fragments of nonsense: how the line cook’s sharp canines made her sweat in the kitchen, cross-country murder sprees by runaway lovers, the emptiness of cornfields in the middle of the night. Nothing ever manifested itself into reality. She took to watching old footage in her camera roll of better times, times where she had dreams that she pretended to hold onto to please the people around her. Life was plotless and lacked narrative.
“When I moved here, I wanted to write TV shows.” Her manager tells her while they’re waiting for an order. She imagines her manager in a writer’s room, fighting for dominance, her perfect red lipstick smudging coffee cups, her ideas solidifying into network television superstars. It’s easy to envision. The line cook used to work for the CIA and talks to her about how he can’t return to Mexico for ten years. When she asks why, he says he’s still an asset and that “they’d” chop his head off. When she asks who “they” are, he laughs at her and turns back to the fryer. He does fifty pull-ups every morning and quotes stand-up comedy sets every fifteen minutes. The hostesses are in graduate school, but both say they won’t have a career. She can see them in newsrooms and in casting calls. They’re beautiful and have boyfriends and seem very alive. Everyone around her is living and pretending she isn’t half-dead already. They try to pull ambition out of her, suggesting a career in hospitality, in modeling, in English teaching, in whatever performance she puts on for whichever audience is watching her. She smiles and nods and ignores their advice.
As she’s taking the trash out one night, a man approaches her from across the street. He tells her he’s watched her do this every night for a month. He asks her why she does it. She starts crying without meaning to.
“You seem like the type to fail upwards.” The line cook says over a shared cigarette. She squints at him from behind a pair of sunglasses.
“What does that even mean?” He smirks, knowing he rattled her. He has a good read on her; he says it all the time. When she asks him what he’s going to do with all that reading, he just grins.
“People like you, but you’re not good at anything. That can take you places.” She frowns, stealing the cigarette from between his fingers and taking a deep inhale.
“You don’t know whether I’m good at anything. You don’t know anything about me.” He laughs, and the conversation dies.
There are weeks where she doesn’t leave the house at all except to go to work. Her roommate tells her it’ll make her depressed, but she thinks it would be more depressing to leave the house without any plans. There’s a comfort to staying home and doing nothing, even if it drives her insane. She snorts ketamine in her room and lets herself sink into the bed, a vinyl scratching at the end of its lifespan, the cold sinking into her bones because she keeps forgetting to pay the electricity bill.
One morning, she wakes up and decides to be a different person. She books a Pilates class and actually goes, pretending she isn’t dying the whole time. She gets a smoothie afterwards and does the grocery shopping. She washes the dishes and does her laundry. She takes out the trash. But she never folds the laundry, and the dishes pile up again the next day, and most of the groceries go uneaten, and the smoothie makes her vomit. None of it sticks. It happens like this once every two months.
When she’s telling a friend the idea, they ask, “What’s the point?” She smiles and answers, “Does it matter?”
