Fifth Avenue Pizza

It was cold and we were wild.

I'd like to say this happened in 2014. Obama was definitely still President. The time around those years is a blur, much like time now has bent and snapped so often that it might as well not matter.

I was taking an analog color photography class in the city (New York City), I was a junior in college, and I was almost as irresponsible with myself as someone can get. Many of my darker shenanigans surrounded this class, mostly because I did not live on campus at the time. There was a suicide attempt on my part and then it was best to live with family. I did stay on campus with a friend on nights I had to go to the photo lab.

The mix of apathy, drugs, constant passive suicidal thoughts, frequent active suicidal thoughts and friends who were in the same spot did not paint a picture of health and wellness. The times were dark, but as a good little millennial nihilist, nothing mattered, so I did what I wanted with very little care for the consequences.

I look back on those days both in fondness and in horror, the challenges taught me endless important lessons, however I wouldn't wish that level of instability on anyone. Sometimes I do look back on those days with amusement, because damn if I spent one day now the way I was spending weeks at a time then I would be sleeping for a month. The manic energy that surrounded my friends and I was, intense, too intense for most people I met at the time. Not many people stuck around from those years in my life and not a bit of me blames them. Okay, a bit of me blames a few of them I'm definitely not a perfect person.

I was wild, and it was cold.

The ones that got it are still around and doing well, it's honestly a miracle we all made it out alive. I was lucky. We were lucky. Somehow we twisted around each other and it kept us standing and maybe we cared enough about each other that it pushed the needle in the right direction for our survival.

There was one Thursday, and it was in fact a Thursday which is the only time related thing I can remember about the class, one of my best friends joined us for the trip so she could go to a museum while we printed. We were both pretty in our respective illnesses those days so when the two of us, plus another photo friend, got together things could and frequently did get weird. Weird and unhealthy. The three of us fed pretty deeply into each others dysfunctions back then.

We were broke, and also sick so typically a day of meals looked like picking at dining hall food on campus, but of course today we were away and I was in the middle of a print so once my friend got back from the museum she went down to get some dollar pizza. I think we payed in coins, not even quarters, it was maybe a single dollar and some coins.

Someone knocked into her on her way back to the lab and the pizza landed on Fifth Avenue. We met in the little corporate park by the lab, she was already eating her piece, she looked me in the eyes and said "it's Fifth Ave pizza"

I said "okay yeah"

She responded "No, it was on Fifth Ave. someone bumped into me and they both landed on Fifth Ave."

I don't remember the rest of the conversation, but if I definitely smoked a cigarette and then finished my slice of pizza, because I was starving and nothing mattered. Fully aware of how gross it was, we did not have any more money, so we ate the damn pizza. I don't think it was particularly bad, and we joked that we would have immune systems of steel if it didn't kill us.

It's strange to look back on this time and think about how little I cared about my own life. This is a small weird anecdote about eating Fifth Avenue pizza, it could be just a silly story about being a broke college student; for me and my friend it was a symptom of something much larger.

I felt things so deeply yet I had properly numbed myself from actually feeling things. Everything was just under the surface, and I would go digging for it often. I was in a cycle of hurting myself and doing drugs and drinking and smoking. The suffering, I accepted was just fuel for the art, and the people around me at this time might not have been in the same exact spot as I was but they were not well. It was no one's responsibility but mine when I ended up barefoot in a McDonalds parking lot either before or after the pizza incident. I'm lucky those same friends were there, accepting I was not, but coming along for the ride anyway.

This section of my life is full of weird joys that came out of a sick mind. I remember my college years fondly as a whole but there was a dark undertone very few people saw completely to my life then.

I was not a wrecking ball, though I hung out with a few, I was more of a cracked foundation that was quickly becoming more unstable. I accepted it because well, art had almost always come from suffering for me and that was one of the only things that mattered. It was the few people I loved and art. The only thing I could use to make any sense of my mind was art. On top of that at that point I didn't know how to make things without pain or anger, and the pain and anger that was I was channeling was making things that were very successful in school. I was often praised for my honesty, my brutal honesty, but I was not protecting myself with the work. My relationship with my work was as unhealthy as my relationship with myself.

I hadn't learned yet that even if your art comes from pain, no one is obligated to that pain until you are ready. I hadn't learned yet that art made from joy could be just as poignant. I hadn't learned yet that anger was a blanket emotion and I could make things with so much more depth once I understood all the things that were feeding into that big one.

Mostly I hadn't learned that taking care of yourself was not selfish.

Would I still eat the pizza you ask?

Literally, yes, I was extremely hungry.

Metaphorically, absolutely not.