I can’t decide if his timing is incredible or piss-poor.
Marcus: So I was on the train just now and this one guy was selling prints of his photos car to car. They were pretty good, too. Reminded me of you.
I know Ely’s probably staring at her screen waiting for my response, but I tap one out to Marcus instead.
Me: The good photos, or the selling them on the F line for drug money?
Marcus: I think you’re being a little unfair with the last bit, man. On yourself and on subway guy. He’s just trying to catch his break.
In case I needed reminding that I’m an asshole. Here I am, supposed to be clean but still seeing addicts everywhere I go. Even when I’m not physically there.
Marcus: I bought one of his pieces. I’ll show you next time we hang out. Maybe you’ll like them. Or maybe you’ll tell me they’re derivative pieces of trash, who knows. It’ll be a party!
He’s trying to make me feel better in that weird Marcus way of his, but it doesn’t really help. Today already feels like it’s gotten fucked up in so many ways that I’ll never disentangle myself from all of them. The only way out would be to cut the lights and start over from 12:01.
The one part of this I don’t regret is her. Ely.
No matter how idiotic I might act around her, I never regret a single moment I spend with Ely.
20
ELY
The humiliation of almost being caught kissing Wyatt by Ava Zhu is at war with the elation of realizing that I almost got caught kissing Wyatt by Ava Zhu. Which would mean that I was almost kissing Wyatt again.
Which would meeeeaaaaaan he has decided not to be weird about the whole student thing after all.
His texts certainly seem to suggest as much.
I literally have the song “Walking on Sunshine” stuck in my head for the rest of the day as I keep editing the photos. Wyatt’s words echo there too. I think this could be a very powerful body of work.
Like this moment exists in a space between worlds.
I’m light-headed by the time I finish and log out of my account at the end of the day, the kind of dazed feeling you get after staring at a screen for too long. I float out of the computer lab and down the hall, intentionally drifting past Wyatt’s office—but his door is shut, the light dim in the crack against the floor. He already left, I guess. Without saying goodbye.
The dreamlike feeling ends by the time I’m on the subway headed back to Astoria, crammed into an orange plastic seat between a cluster of gossiping high school students and a thirty-something-year-old man who still feels the need to play music without headphones. But all that’s an excuse to tip my head back and close my eyes and try not to think of anything at all…at least until the train barrels out of the tunnel beneath the East River and rises to the elevated platform at Queensboro Plaza.
Back home, I’m alone. Diego and Ophelia are still out, although one of them has left a bottle of tequila open on the kitchen counter. I wipe sticky residue off the fake marble and am about to screw the cap on the tequila when instead, on impulse, I tip forward and inhale.
The aroma is just as I remembered—sweet but with a steel wire cutting through the sugar. Like poisoned honey.
That smell is laced through so many of my best memories. And my worst. Drunken nights with Chaya Mushka, the both of us a tangle of limbs on a bed somewhere, giggling over some stupid boy (or girl). Sitting on a stranger’s dirty floor next to a smashed bottle of the stuff, my hands trembling as I slide the needle into my wrist. The acrid way tequila smells when you’ve thrown it up, my sister Dvora scrubbing it off our bedroom floor as I moan and roll uselessly around in my own misery.
I lift the bottle and take a tiny sip. I hold it in my mouth for one second, two. I could spit it out. I should, probably. But two seconds turn into three, then four.
Nothing happens. The world doesn’t implode. G-d himself doesn’t descend from the mountain to smite me. I just screw the cap back onto the bottle and put it away in the booze cabinet and clean up the rest of the mess.
I spend the rest of the evening sitting on my bed tucked right beneath the window, the curtains drawn so the streetlights don’t wash out the colors on my screen as I edit the remaining photos from Friday night. The bodies of the people in the pictures shift, and there’s my mother, her head bent over the candlesticks. A man’s face blurs, and then he’s my father, smiling in the flickering light next to Michal and her wife. There’s Dvora, still fourteen, distracted by the dog pawing at her shin.
I clench my eyes shut and shake my head to clear my mind. Focus. I have to stay present. It would be too easy to let myself put my laptop away and bury myself under the cover of the duvet, hide in the dark until I forget how to feel again.
That’s the problem with making yourself vulnerable: It might be necessary, but it also makes you want to hide from your own art. To just…never finish.
It’s nearly dark by the time I’m done and all the photos are neatly labeled and organized in their own folder in my Dropbox. I close my laptop and let it slip off my thighs as I tilt back, letting my head rest against the window frame.
The world is draped in violet dusk, the buildings and people outside gone blurry as the light falls. It’s a new day by Jewish reckoning. Shabbos is over. All over the East Coast people are lighting braided havdalah candles and sipping wine, smelling sweet spices in reverence to the departing bride.
I wonder if there’s something interesting there, some contrast I could draw between beginnings and endings, openings and closings.
Eight years. It’s been eight years.
The world can change a lot in eight years.
I shove the sheets back and tumble out of bed, grabbing my bag and phone off the desk. I’m out the door and halfway to the subway stop before I can let myself think too deeply about any of this.
It just feels like the next step, somehow. Like I’m on a downhill slope picking up speed, careening toward this inevitable conclusion.
Wyatt’s right, after all. I have to face it. I can’t hide.
Even near dusk the air is still hot and humid, summer beating down on the nape of my neck and sweat prickling at the small of my back. I dodge the clusters of friends on Thirtieth headed out for a late dinner, their heads tilted together and their mouths laughing. I try not to let my gaze linger on the people with their dogs’ leashes looped around their chairs as they pick at their appetizers, oblivious to the way their pets’ eyes grow big and hopeful every time a stranger passes close by. I wonder what it’d be like to snip myself out of my own life and insert myself into one of their lives instead. Somehow it’s impossible to imagine any of these people having regrets. Guilt doesn’t live in their stomachs like it does in mine, festering like an open wound. They spin glittering nets of friendships that come easily; they aren’t constantly wondering how they’ll poison them.