Slouching

By Natalli Amato

It starts and then it ends: The piss-stinking elevator ride from the two and the three up to the bodega. The Brooklyn Bridge promenade. The six-staircase walk up to apartment 6D. The relationship you wanted so badly to put inside apartment 6D. The relationship that already started and now has arrived here to end, here on the curved, navy blue love seat taken from your aunt’s attic that has only lived here in 6D for a week. You cry for the pain you inflict on him. You cry for the pain he had inflicted upon you. You hope you’ve done more damage, and then you cry for wishing that. Mostly, though, you cry because this curved navy blue love seat traveled 332 miles and six staircases only for it to support your bones when the love leaves.

The girls you went to school with are in Programs. Programs where Senior Leadership hosts Brown Bag Lunches, where Supervisors develop them and let them rotate through Departments so that they may decide, once developed, which Department is the best fit. 

You leave work to go buy tequila to impress an industry figure who knows a thing or two about tequila. The last time you drank tequila, it was from a dixie cup at a playboy themed Phi Delt party. You do not know what bottle to by. 

You leave work to buy shots of ginger juice because it is a Wednesday morning and the to-do list you made is long and the newsroom is quiet and today it is a bit chilly outside and everyone agrees now would be the worst time to come down with something. 

You leave work to go buy unfiltered Black American Spirits for a reggae old timer whose lungs recognize their smoke as oxygen. Black American Spirits are not for sale on newsstands. They are bad for you and when you dip into the smoke shop on Times Square, the man behind the counter with fatherly eyes tells you no, these aren't the ones you want.

You leave work at 8:43 pm to go pick up the catering. You set it up, remembering when you were a caterer. You leave four hours later for apartment 6D. You might call your mom and let your voice catch in the phone. You might pause in front of Bryant Park and try to picture it empty. 

There are bars to go to on the Lower East Side. There is shopping to do on Smith street and more to drink on Henry street and an anarchist bookshop to visit over in Williamsburg that also hosts a Tarot card reader whom you hope will tell you it’s time to pack up and go home. 

The anarchist bookstore Tarot card reader says you have to stay. She points to the Queen of Swords in the spread and says that is you. You wanted to be cups. Something to be poured into. Something capable of pouring into others. 

No, she says. Swords. 

You like the diner on Clark street. The bar across from your best friend’s apartment that serves free paper-thin pizza with each drink on Monday nights. The Housing Works in Chelsea with the rack of costume dresses priced at $200 even though this is thrifting. You want a dress for your cousin’s wedding, but instead you buy a blue vase and put it on the black coffee table that you took from the side of the road on Atlantic Avenue. 

You like Ubering from your best friend’s apartment back to yours at three a.m. You like craning your neck to see Manhattan’s lights right there behind you, until a glinting one reminds you of a star which reminds you of a boy who knew you when you were young. You are still young, but you say things out loud like, “He knew me as I was when I was young.”

When you go out with friends you talk about the dates you have gone on, will go on, and should be going on right now. Your friends talk about the dates they have gone on, will go on, and should be going on right now, and maybe actually can squeeze in a little later tonight right after the next glass of wine is finished so long as we skip the pasta and order the cheese plate?

When you go on dates you like to talk, but not necessarily to the man who is taking you out. He could be a cheese plate. You talk about how late you have to stay at work; how this issue almost didn’t come together but then it did; about the book you wrote and the books you want to write but don’t have time to; about your homesickness for a place you once thought yourself better than; about the poems that you want him to know were published, but under no circumstances ever want him to read. You miss the places and people and loves that they are about. Everything you say is just a diversion keeping you form blurting that out. 

You don’t go on second dates. You hear your friends talk about second dates and decide you are not missing out on them.

In the wintertime, you seek out a boy living on the Lower East Side because you want to see somebody who has driven by your elementary school and has told your mother he would bring you back safe. 

You sign up for a credit card that lets you earn Amtrak rewards points so that you can go home and see more people that have driven by your elementary school. Not paying for your tickets with real money makes you feel less bad. You still feel bad when you leave apartment 6D because it is expensive and you should spend every waking minute inside those four walls just to get your money’s worth.

You feel bad that the dream you had didn't translate into a life that you can both have and want. 

Around Thanksgiving, your co-worker takes a Taylor Swift snow globe from off the free table and gives it to you for your desk.

Around Christmastime, your boss gives you a keepsake copy of Slouching Toward Bethlehem. You remember the girl from college who said her mother once brought Didion some soup. You wonder if her life is more interesting than yours. 

When the new year comes, you start doing yoga so you can spend less time listening to yourself talk. 

Somewhere in between the reading and the breathing, you go see Bob Dylan and His Band at the Beacon Theatre. You wear purple lipstick and watch the man who wrote the songs you wanted to devote your entire life to understating sing those same songs. You are not the only one who has ever thought yourself profound just for listening to Dylan. There are so many of you, but you don’t congratulate the others that fill the theatre around you. Just yourself.

Later, when you walk down Montague Street and pass the plaque that tells the unknowing that this street is worthy of keeping free of litter because it appears in ‘Tangled Up In Blue,’ you look around at the Starbucks, the Verizon, the Key Foods, and the Ann Taylor Loft, and you know you did not arrive to Dylan’s Montague. If you were a person who littered, you would litter out front of the Loft.

You do not litter.

You leave work again to buy unfiltered  Black American Spirits. You leave work to dip into Dunkin Donuts and shove a Boston cream donut in your mouth. You leave work to pick up Sushi for people who know Sushi even though you do not know Sushi. 

You leave work to stand in line at the Whole Foods only to find they are out of rice. You find a Japanese market and buy thirty pounds of it. The first case of coronavirus popped up in a nearby law firm and all of Manhattan decides that rice has something to do with deliverance. 

You leave work for the final time in March without knowing it. You take the subway from Bryant Park to High Street for the final time without knowing it. 

The friends who are still developing in Programs say they’ve heard transportation will be cut off overnight. You don’t bother buying any rice. You use the Amtrak credit card to buy a ticket home. The soft texture of leaving is on the tongue. You pack a bag with a few tee shirts and the leggings you think are dressy. You throw your vegetables down the garbage chute. The taste of leaving is soft on the tongue. And yet. 

And yet you pack your bag as if you are going to Williamsburg. 

You set your alarm for the morning and check the distance from Hight Street to Penn Station on Google Maps even though this is something you have learned here.

You make the loneliness scootch over from its place on the curved navy blue loveseat. The cushions are here to hold you, too. You are just as tangible.