“Why don’t you fall in love today, Ma?” I say and accidentally slam the carton so hard it splats milk across the counter.
“Rag under the sink,” she says and turns back to her book.
*
I must not forget to fill my mother’s hummingbird feeder with nectar. Nectar, it turns out, is just boiled sugar and water.
*
I am lonely, of course. I’m so lonely I could make a map of my loneliness. In my mind it looks like South America, colossal, then petering out to a jagged little tip. Sometimes I’m so lonely I’m not even on that map. Sometimes I’m so lonely I’m the fucking Falklands.
*
“I’d throw myself off a bridge but I’m afraid of heights!” says one old woman to another as they carry their shopping bags home ahead of me.
*
I spend the morning working on subway ad taglines for a Swedish yogurt company.
I’m a dairy good idea.
I have culture!
Spoon me …
Then kill me.
*
Levi calls to tell me he’s taken up whittling after reading an article declaring it the perfect antidote to the stresses and strains of modern life. I tell him I could use some whittling too.
“Hmm, how’s work?” he asks, crunching on something loud down the phone.
“I’m a human pun machine,” I say.
“Oxymoronic,” he says, chomping away. “You can’t be both human and a machine.”
“I hope you’re putting this streak of pedantry to use at the hot food counter,” I say.
“You know what the best antidote for existential ennui is?” he asks.
“Tell me,” I say.
“Physical pain.”
*
Levi was born with the IQ of a genius, but I worry he’s smoked so much weed he might be down to smart lab rat by now.
*
Myke insists on talking to me, despite having no verifiable interest in me as a person at all. I am playing a game with myself where I see how many questions I can ask him until he asks me one in return. So far, I’m at nine. It is like putting coins in a slot machine with no hope of ever getting a prize.
*
I’m in the office late when Frank walks by my desk.
“Still here?”
I tell him I’m waiting for my mother to finish her class at the Botanical Gardens so I can drive her back to Jersey.
“Ah, so you’re a suburb kid,” says Frank. “When I was in high school, they were always the craziest. Did you used to sneak into the city on the weekends too?”
Somehow it doesn’t seem appropriate to tell him I spent my weekends with my forty-year-old boyfriend doing things like his laundry and helping edit his “memoir” about his nascent career as a race car driver. In fact, there’s nothing about that situation that feels appropriate to tell anyone.
“Not really,” I say.
“Ah, so you were a good egg,” says Frank.
“More like a soft-boiled egg,” I say.
“Soft-boiled, that’s funny,” he says. “What would that make me?”
He starts to laugh. “A deviled egg,” he says.
*
I’m still in the office when I see an email from Frank pop up on my screen.
I forgot to ask how it’s going over there with Myke.
Oh, just fyne, I reply.
I can hear Frank laughing from my desk.
*
Everything about this tasteful Botanical Gardens gift shop makes me want to spend money. Would I ever use a pair of pruning shears in the shape of a pelican? Who’s to say?
I find a tea towel that reads “You don’t stop gardening because you get old, you get old because you stop gardening.” This seems apt for my green-fingered and aphoristically inclined mother, so I buy it for her.
I’m making my way to the exit when I notice a Frisbee that says “You don’t stop playing because you get old, you get old because you stop playing.” Then I pass a mannequin wearing an apron embroidered with “You don’t stop baking because you get old, you get old because you stop baking.” Then I notice the sign by the bookshelf. “You don’t stop reading because …”
When I tell my mother this on the drive home, she laughs so hard she upends the potted daffodils on her knee.
“You don’t stop bullshitting because you get old,” she says.
“You get old because life’s bullshit,” I say.
*
I’ve started seeing dead animals out of the corner of my eye. Some incidents of this are understandable, I think. A flattened leaf on the sidewalk does look like a dead mouse. An abandoned black sneaker trailing its laces is pretty much the same size as a rat. But it’s the cow heads in trash cans and raccoon’s bodies hanging stiff from trees that I’m having a harder time explaining. I google early signs of schizophrenia, mania, and psychosis.