Restless from the shape of it

The worst part of trying to drift back off naturally was this liminal space of indecision. Trying to do something that’s difficult in proportion to your awareness of it, like when someone tells you to relax. Lying there in bed with a two-faced sunk cost fallacy, counting minutes of missed sleep but alert to the unfinished work in the next room. Both felt like gasoline for the next day’s drive leaking from the tank. Plenty of blame to the physicality, too, the refusal to stay still under these khaki sheets. Too hot only ever in regional bands of her body, she rotates creases of sweat across the twisted linen cone like a hula hop every ten minutes or so until they come back around to meet her on another side. She fights this movement, this notion that restarting the process, rearranging things and settling back to soak in the brief contrast, is the best way forward. Instead she remains still until she feels like screaming, then finds a new place on the bed. An echo of warmth next to her now: she could put her hand above the spot and feel her own body’s heat still escaping up into the air around her fingers. Easy to fixate on the imposing edifice when the issue at hand was the lights on upstairs, the work to be done. A mind “most active at night,” her own throwaway non sequitur. Sleep had this tinge of homesickness. Questioning memories of its composition while pining for it desperately. Her favorite counter, the one that worked the least often, was to imagine herself in a large, incomplete house, walking through rooms even while she filled them with detail. Sometimes they had more to say, about tricks, the little rituals, that they used. As if there was always a more efficient path through the day’s traffic that you were not taking. Sometimes you merely stayed late at the office because you did not want to come home.

Maybe one trick was to focus on the pattern of the final sheets of rain hitting the exposed window air conditioner unit. But she got up anyway, well past her loose ninety minute rule. The day’s work was not permitted to bleed into the night at all let alone the middle of it, though she still had a syllabus to finalize for the following day, or, rather, today. Limp through it caffeinated in the actual morning. After listening to the muted and guttural tocks of the coffee maker—the rituals of the day paled in comparison to that one, the first. Here was a series of considerations made one after another, like when she drove somewhere and imagined the six or seven turns necessary: caffeine or nicotine and she’d be a lost cause, the rest of the wine and she’d really be limping through that syllabus, she’d skipped dinner but wasn’t too hungry, drinking tea always felt so precious—should she get high? Always uncertainty re: the proper route through insomnia. That was the best part of this city and why she was stuck here—uncrowded but beautiful, easy to visualize and thus navigate, on the train, bus, car, bike, on foot. Ah. She would go on a walk.

She paused and then decided against bringing the beautiful red umbrella leaning against several packages she’d ordered and hadn’t bothered to open. Didn't want to carry it, mostly. It had been one of the best gifts, last year, a quiet surprise free of occasion just before he had moved across the country and evaporated out of her life like the warmth from a bedsheet. Maybe she should get high. Add a little color to the journey. She tucked everything necessary into her pocket and exited, savoring how little was required in the middle of the night.

How nice to breathe in this damp summer air. The best way to walk through a city like this is to meander as far as feels right in one direction. A proper walk has no lateral significance: its meaning is contingent upon the mess of moments that could only have been seen from above, not the latticed streets and sidewalks turned upon or ignored but the grander sense of what has been passed through. When you turn around to walk back on a different line of blocks, your trajectory forms a fat obelisk. If you are particularly careful with the method you can even do this against the grain and grid of the city, pushing away from its parallel tendency to lead you to the same few places, the same endpoints. Starting from one center you can eat chocolate slices of the landscape like this for as long as you choose to live in one place. And since she liked looking into the windows of the walk-ups as she went by the muscles in her hands packed the one-hitter themselves. Slid the small wooden box open with her left thumb, raked the glass through its ground contents while twisting it once with her right thumb and pointer finger to ensure a kind of seal at its open end, then held it to her lips twice while lighting it once with her right hand and pocketing the box. The best way to hide a mild drug habit is simply to never speak of it. Though he’d noticed and reacted to the way she always got caught in the rain. Now exhale.

Yes, best to dally between blocks like an insect down in the cracked pavement between brighter summer spaces. To consider the things you can never see inside of these structures is a ritual no different, really, from passing someone else in the street. She hadn’t seen anyone yet on the walk and likely wouldn’t. The harsh pipe was making her cough anyway, so she put it away. The current season around here saw ivy along the sides of the buildings and she was always reminded of arriving years ago to take the instructor position, how she’d assumed the verdant streaks bleeding down and across were here to stay. She supposed that people moved away from all cities, had their fill in their twenties (or thirties, or forties) and then settled somewhere else, as if there was for some people a gravity to urban life that pulled them in, to orbit skyscrapers briefly before whipping them back around and out just as harshly, like a rubber ball on a string. Inching closer to the center of the city, she passed apartment buildings now that seemed to be ripples of the prior block’s, modernist glass and steel filing cabinets that were nonetheless confined to the shape of the same old brick walk-ups. Similar rooms inside, more likely than not. She had not been too upset by his departure, as she had from the earliest flash of infatuation balanced her own commitment to the idea of them together with a counterweight of disappointment. When would these men each take on a quality greater, more definite in her mind, than being the reaction to another? She smiled, exhaling sharply through her nose. Or would the ball just rebound down the hallway forever? These buildings didn’t make any sense removed from their context—each one built in adherence to or rejection of an existing pattern, seeing them in sharp relief against the sky she considered the relationship between silhouettes, between things rendered flat—empty—by the problem of distance, the lack of light. In some places the rivers of ivy obscured the careful grid of bricks and windows. Come winter she’d be disappointed to see it wither.

Just as she came upon a familiar intersection, a man—he had on an apron—turned the opposite corner. Curious timing, given how he was also constructed so immediately: he was not dangerous—god, she was high now—because he was visibly sad, holding something and apparently already on his way to work. Wrapped in brown paper and twine tucked into the crook of his arm. Odd to see a package free of the black stripes and harsh labels that defined everything she received, the pieces of life that were packed and shipped from one building to another as she resumed or delayed the years-long funeral march away from the city’s center and out to the suburbs, from one brick building to another. She’d lived on this street once, actually, where departing rainclouds were now letting in degrees of sunless morning light like cheap window shades. Her legs adjusted the route for her, making a right angle into her old alley where the fire escape was—of course—still unlocked. She climbed up it more carefully than when she’d been younger and thought about where that man might have been walking so intently, what was in the soft thin package that had presumably been wrapped and sent by an actual person. Eight stories up she sat down and imagined what it would have been like for him to see her walking out here, what he would have known about her given she was not carrying a piece of herself (or someone else) to help with the impression. What was her own impression?

This was the sensation of movement back through her own life: to have ended up somewhere she does not remember at all. Was the black metal of the fire escape welded clumsily, or was this just the way things were built? Dangling her legs off it, she realized again how high she was, chewing on metaphors on top of the block. Repeating phrases in her mind to watch how the meaning ran off of them like rainwater. He had on an apron, to see it wither, on his way to work, to never speak of it, when someone tells me to relax. She was now holding fixed a perfect view of the skyline, and pretended to feel the skyscrapers and her dangling legs being pulled towards the rising sun together with the rest of the city. Leaning forward above the alley just enough to feel nervous. No matter where she went in these early mornings she had to walk around or through the places, the rooms, where she had spent time with him or else someone before him, had to feel how their company had pressed against her own movement. She could just make out the building where they’d met—the shape of it made her restless. How could anyone be homesick for something that wouldn’t stay still?