There is a little girl in a red sailor suit dress walking down the street with her dad. They are behind a mother and a father and a freshly seven year old boy and the reason I know he is recently seven is because they are wheeling a stroller filled with a cooler and plastic plates and adorned with a gold balloon of the number seven and a rectangular balloon saying happy birthday. It is Saturday and I am on the way to the gym and I have on my new noise cancelling Air Pods that my roommate sold me, water bottle in hand.
I am on the train and it is late and I am on the way back from watching Succession in the empty apartment of my friend from college. He just moved; all his furniture is elsewhere. I stopped by the Whole Foods in Fort Greene and got a cobb salad and macaroni salad and I ate the cobb salad sitting criss cross on the parquet floors of his cavernous brownstone. I saved the macaroni salad for lunch at work. I leaned back against a cushion while watching the show and drank a glass of wine and a beer I brought. I got on the train to go home at Atlantic Barclays and wondered if anyone would care about the parquet floor salad and the hero’s journey at Whole Foods and decided no. No one would care. There is an attractive man watching Seinfeld on his phone and drinking a beer out of a paper bag on the train and then things take a turn and now there are two men sitting across from me who aren’t doing well, per se. One of them pulled out a Paw Patrol watch and a thing of gin and is drinking and tinkering, and the other is rocking back and forth. On account of my new noise cancelling head phones, I can’t hear what they were saying, could only tell it wasn’t good. I switch cars when the Seinfeld man got off the train, race back into my bed.
I am on the way back from a Seder dinner with my roommate. I am carrying a mostly empty botttle of Manischewitz. I was talking at the dinner about everything and nothing. I was bad at cracking open the hard boiled egg. Shell fragments went everywhere. There is a man in the tracks at Union Square. He is facing away from us, pulling down his pants. I am worried he will be hit by a train. It occurs to me that I am less concerned about his getting hit by the train than I am about me having to witness it. That feels so selfish to me, and I feel ashamed. He gets out of the tracks. He launches himself up to the platform and is promptly handcuffed. My roommate and I don’t care for the handcuffing (doesn’t he seem unwell, she asks, and the unspoken part is shouldn’t he be treated with compassion?), but it isn’t our place to say anything. On the last train home, we witness a show time dance involving a hat and then a man panhandling by doing stand up comedy about being homeless. All of my clothes are designer, he says. Washington Square Park, Tompkins, Central Park, Prospect Park. Got all my clothes from the park. He makes a joke about his wife being fat. I don’t find it funny. She has nine stomachs, he says. She weighs more than a subway car. No one laughs.
I am at a house warming party at the previously empty apartment of my friend. It is now full of people and furniture. I meet some of his friends. One of them asks me to describe myself using three places in New York. The first thing I think of is Penn Station, and I say that, and they all laugh. I realize I am playing the game wrong. I am supposed to think of restaurants or bars or something cool. I try backtracking, but give up. I say, I am in and out of there every day. It’s a big part of my personality at this point. It’s not, not really, but they don’t need to know that. One of them leans into me and asks, in all seriousness, if I am a musical theatre person. I feel offended. I say, no. I am not. On the subway ride home, my roommates and I witness a man get on the subway with a speaker much louder than any noise my noise cancelling headphones can cancel. He is playing Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey and walking up and down the train car. If he is speaking, I cannot hear him. We switch cars, laugh about it. I see him bobbing and weaving one car over, and I wonder what it is he needs from the other people there with him.
I am in North Carolina, and it is painfully green. I am at a concert with my best friend and I am reading an email that contains bad news, and then I am putting my phone away and listening to a beautiful long haired man from San Luis Obispo sing about how time is a circle. He says that he first started the song in 2015, back when he first started therapy. Had to burn down my house, he says. My metaphorical house. I had to heal, had to know that time is a circle. One of our friends says, is he saying that time is a clock? I lean into my best friend and say, this man is a menace on Hinge in San Luis Obispo.
I am in my blue room in North Carolina and it is still painfully green outside. There is a dogwood tree blooming outside my window. It is sunny and warm. I am thinking of how when I was in grief counseling the first time, my counselor encouraged me to paint. She didn’t know yet that all that matters to me are words. I painted a box green and blue. She asked why I did that. I said that green and blue were the colors of grief, to me. Today I am thinking that time is indeed a circle.
I am TSA at LaGuardia. It’s moving slowly and the TSA agent telling us to take our shoes off is making jokes. Laughter adds years to your life he says. Jokes are a health decision. He’s saying this to a man behind me. Okay, Chuckles the Clown, I think. I am on my way back to North Carolina. I’ve been thinking of this month as some kind of pilgrimage. I’m going to Chapel Hill and then driving down to Atlanta with my sister. I think maybe it’ll heal something in me.
I am accosted by memory when I get off the plane in Raleigh. I am 20 years old, in love, holding hands in the airport, on my way to Ireland for the first time. I am 18, crying on a bench because being at UNC without my dad knowing felt like a sick joke. I am 19, vaguely suicidal on Raleigh Road. I am drunk in an Uber on my way to a frat party, I am clinging to something that never was in the arboretum, I am in a humid house party with a liter of red wine and a last minute Halloween costume. I am sitting in Linda’s and it’s here and now, and I am saying, where is my food, do you remember, do you remember how it was, how I was? I am thinking about the Easter service where the preacher said you can’t go home again, and I am thinking, that is true. I drink a beer and see some old friends and this feeling fades. I think, isn’t it luxurious to sit somewhere and remember? Isn’t that the hard won prize of aging?