verdera

when the contractors tore up my kitchen floor i found mounds of mouse shit from who knows when and i wanted to tell him about it, someone who would commiserate, wouldn’t wrinkle their nose in disgust. i did and i didn’t. i could and i couldn’t. i should have worn a mask as i swept it up, straw bristling over the plywood subfloor where there was supposed to have been concrete. it’s no wonder that all the tiles cracked.

the thing that sucks about renovating an apartment as someone who has no idea how to renovate an apartment is not the self-doubt that piles up behind every decision like sand at the desert door, it’s that at the end of the day, i’m doing it alone. my friends and family and friends who are family are there to provide necessary friction to infinite hypotheticals like wallpaper versus paint but there is no one else who is eating from my living room fridge and tripping over boxes of brass fixtures piled too high in the office. in my mind everything is picture perfect, checkerboard floor and brand new bathtub, but the journey is endless emails to building management asking if they can respond to the last email i sent them please. it’s lonely to feel like the only one going through something and lonely to feel like the only one not going through something.

i’m doing a rotation on a team whose problem space and technology is vastly different from anything i’ve had to know before because it’s good for my “career” and now i can tell the girl who spent nights and weekends on code academy to become a software engineer about circuit breaking through the service mesh. the part of my brain i haven’t used since undergrad, the ping pong of traffic through the network layer. an asteroid belt. i’m at the end of the orbit she chose for me.

i descend the night elevators from the office into the midtown midnight intellectually enthralled, and a smoking shell of personhood i’m not burnt out i’m crispy i’m incinerated i disintegrate at the sound of your voice. i am still going because the going is steady and i love the stability almost as much as my insides ache for entropy. my naked ambition could fill gas giants i want to win but i don’t know which lottery to play. a friend’s mother asks me, aghast, how new york city can charge people to enter and exit the islands but i remind her it’s an archipelago. it’s expensive to stay and it’s expensive to leave.

grace and i go out to brunch and she suggests ordering our own entrees if i want eggs but i tell her that i’m happy to skip them so we can share, family style. it’s known as breaking bread because love craves a messy, flaky divide; what’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine. private property is a funny little construct that prioritizes the survival of the individual over the survival of the species. there is less joy in eating by oneself.

i know i am so so privileged to be able to make a home in the image of myself and i am eternally grateful but the longer i live alone the more i wonder if there’s even space for anyone else in my lot. i think he saw the foundation of my life as a fabergé egg that would not yield to him, but it’s hard to fill a hole with a hollow. i tried to build out crime scene cutouts, leave down painters tape. i’m putting down roots in the soil, but i don’t want the blueprint for how the branches will bend; i worry i typecast myself in bronze before the mold was finished; i’m eating all of my vegetables at the same time; dare me twice and bases loaded, no one out, i’ll walk away from the plate.

at least, the girl in the newly mounted mirror thinks she will.