HLS: Olivia

Olivia’s wrists ached under the weight of a five-pound apple pie, a treat her mother had taught her to make when she was still small and could be taught things.  She wished her parents had pushed her harder during those malleable years – force-feeding her Spanish and French lessons, throwing her in front of a piano or a guitar or anything that she could use to channel her occasional malaise.  Instead she had turned twenty-five and was just another useless, ignorant American, speaking English and going to concerts, not performing in them, making pies for holiday parties she didn’t really want to go to anyway.

As an adult she had found herself more reluctant in the acquisition of new knowledge.  Knowing too much made her feel small and insignificant; the more she knew about one singular topic, more subtopics would spring up around them like relentless weeds begging to be pulled, though when those were pulled new ones just grew up in their place.  Knowledge was an infinite void.  Stella never felt satisfied because there could be no satisfaction in the infinite.

Olivia should have taken a car.  Her pack was heavy with two bottles of wine and a festive homemade trail mix of dried cherries and pistachios, less obvious shades of the holiday season.  Instead, she was left to awkwardly negotiate the pie in her hands with the subway turnstile, onto a platform filled with the only other idiots in New York City willing to endure a similar hassle.

The voice of the robotic subway announcer – a sexless woman always telling Olivia when her Manhattan bound train was arriving – echoed around the filthy tiled halls, absorbed into nothing and no one the same way her apartment did.

She had been in her place five months already and hadn’t bothered to invest in any furniture save for a mattress, two forks, and a knife.  She had nested before, inspired by a boy and the concept of home.  She knew what it was like to spend weekends at flea markets, finding trinkets that accurately expressed her personality in brass and porcelain.  “I’m like this,” the chandelier in her dining room proudly stated, shining down over the faces of her beautiful friends in a beautiful kaleidoscope of light.  That time was beautiful.  Their apartment was beautiful.  They were beautiful and then they were over.

Olivia found an apartment far enough away from that place so she never had to walk past it.  He didn’t live there anymore but she couldn’t be bothered reliving times that had already passed.  There was no point in looking back; life was about charging relentlessly forward.  Forward and away.  Inventing new parts of yourself so you could forget about the old.

Her new place was not as beautiful as the last, in part because she couldn’t afford what they had been able to afford as a couple, but also because she just didn’t care.  It was a newer building, without crown molding or high ceilings.  Her neighbors were twenty-somethings who dressed like people who didn’t understand aesthetics. It felt a bit like a prefabricated cave with that fake wooden flooring that gave underfoot.  An apartment was just an apartment.  It lacked all of the things that Olivia had always associated with home and that was precisely the point; if it was perfect, if she made it perfect, she would get attached, and when the day came that she had to leave it, it would be that much more difficult.

When she moved, she vowed not to repeat the mistakes of her past.  Everything was temporary and everyone was transient.  Everything about New York City was a constant reminder of that fact: the internationals who came and went, the weather that changed by the hour, the constant flood of new things that indicated a forcing out of the old.  She knew all of this and she spent her time and money accordingly: sparsely and with a hesitant hand.

jennyblovespublictransportation

I don’t what possesses the MTA to grant advertisers the right to plaster their visual fury on the walls of my subways, but I hope it’s a lucrative venture.  Someone better be profiting from the raping of my eyeballs, because it sure as hell isn’t me.  Between full-size posters of open-heart surgery and macro shots of black lung, by the time I get from Point A to Point B, I am ready to gouge my eyes out.

Strangely enough, the most terrifying posters are usually the ones annotated in Spanish.  I don’t know if it’s just that I am unable to give the grotesque photographs context, thereby nullifying their visual potency or what, but the few times I have really wanted to wretch, this has been the case.

The other day I had the pleasure of sitting across from a poster featuring the pulverized face of a man, sporting some gnarly gash on his forehead and a mélange of attractive bruises.  He looked like he’d either fallen off of a building or been subjected to a three-day gangbang.

I go to the first line, attempting to pull some of my rudimentary knowledge of Spanish out of the recesses of my high school brain.  “Dos tragos antes te hubieres marchado.”  Nope.  I got nothing.  There’s no mention of el bano or el gato; if you ever need to talk about restrooms or cats, I’m your girl.  Thankfully, I am able to work more easily with the second line: “Beber en exceso es peligroso.”  I sound the letters out in a moronic hooked-on-phonics pace in my head that would have put the tenth grade version of me to shame.  Drinking in excess is dangerous…I get that much, but what the hell was this guy supposed to be drinking?  Forty shots of Absinthe?  Fifteen flaming margaritas?

I think the real story here isn’t that Senior Boozehound knocked back two too many beers, but that he started his morning off with a fifth of tequila, chased that with a trip to Las Vegas, accidentally smoked a mysterious white powder, smacked a stripper’s ass in the champagne room and got thrown in jail for any one of the subsequent idiotic things he did over the course of that night.  Because that, mi amigo, would be truly peligroso.

Hipster Love Stories: Sarah and Andrew

Sarah woke up first.  She could feel it already, how the day would move painfully slow, time dripping through a sieve blocked with blackstrap molasses.  It would be one of those eighteen-hour epic hangovers from a night of too much yelling and too little sleep, fueled by a nasty combination of uppers and downers.

Andrew shifted in his sleep, his face contorted in a pinched grimace, as though he felt the same way Sarah did but didn’t know it yet.  She looked around a bedroom she hadn’t found herself in for nearly a month.  He still kept his pile of shoes in a corner: a large stack of battered Converse with shredded shoelaces and holes where his feet were too wide.  His closet doors were wide open, organized by color – something she had always found funny because he was a slob in all other capacities.  She rolled quietly to the right to look at the wall and not Andrew’s face, her left arm resting uncomfortably on top of the comforter she never liked: a sallow buttercup yellow blanket that looked like something her grandmother kept hidden in her basement back during the ugly part of the 70s.

Sarah hated knowing so much about this room and wished that she were naïve to this boy all over again.  Not in an I-wish-I-never-met-him type of way, but something else.  She wanted to feel and think the way she did when they first met – how everything Andrew did was cool and interesting, how she didn’t judge his messiness but found it charming, how she was nervous he wouldn’t call and surprised when he always did.  She carried this false history with her and it killed her a little bit.  She couldn’t wait for it to be gone.

To Sarah, knowing someone in such close proximity – with such extreme detail – made the chasm of being away from them seem endlessly large.  Her life had been so wrapped up in Andrew that it consumed her now even though they were apart.  She couldn’t even go shopping without finding something that he would like: a pair of slippers, a striped cardigan, air plants.  Sarah looked around a room that was familiar but no longer felt like home.  She felt strange and unwelcome and wondered if she should leave before he woke up.

They had run into each other last night in front of the Kitty Day Care on Bedford, an empty looking room with a few sad looking playpens for cats.  Sarah didn’t much care for cats and the whole enterprise irritated her.

Sarah sat on the cold concrete, inhaling the fruits of her American Spirit, when he walked by.  She hated how this place had turned into a college campus: everyone knew each other and everyone had slept with each other, broken up with each other and gone off to sleep with one another’s close friends, and afterwards they were then routinely forced to see each other.  Brooklyn was a cruel and unusual punishment for the dating community.  Sarah wondered if getting dumped was easier in Los Angeles, where people could just break hearts and get heart broken and then drive away in their cars, isolated and alone whenever they wanted to be.

From far away, she knew it was him.  Andrew had a noticeable gait, his thin legs bowed at the knees.  And the coat he wore, she recognized that, too: she had given it to him last winter.  It was expensive and right then she wished she had that money back.  Sarah kept her head down hoping that she could avoid what ended up happing anyway – the awkward hello, the excessive drinking, the ending up back at his place when there were eight million other places in the world she should have been instead.

Andrew shifted in the bed behind her and Sarah closed her eyes tightly in case he was awake.  She waited for some sort of touch or movement but it never came, and even if he had been awake he probably wouldn’t have reached for her.  She couldn’t bear the thought of him not drawing her in close to him, feeling his warm belly against her back like he used to do every morning.  Her stomach turned, not because she was hungry or sick but because she was overwhelmed with the nausea that usually accompanied her self-loathing.  She was angry with herself for ending up back here.  She was embarrassed and angry.

Quickly, Sarah crawled out of bed and began the search for her clothes from last night, digging around for whatever she could find immediately.  Her pants were near his shirt; her bra was buried under his sweater.  A sock had gone missing but she put her boot on anyway.

She crept to the door, coat in hand, walking on the balls of her feet to avoid excessive contact with the floor.  And she left him, lying asleep in an empty bed, the remaining warmth from her side rapidly disappearing.  As she took one last look at his bedroom filled with no evidence they ever existed, her stomach turned again with the knowledge this was the last time she would wake up next to him.

Hipster Love Stories: Devon

Devon swiped his card.  Insufficient Fare.  He had multiples, ones he kept in his wallet because he never trusted those words: Insufficient Fare.  The expiration date on his MetroCard always seemed to come too quickly and at inopportune moments that left him watching his train depart its station like a bullet on a string, without him onboard.   And so he kept the supposed discards in his wallet, trying them on a couple different occasions and at a few different turnstiles.  In the end, the meters were always right.

He put the first denied card in his back pocket and promised to throw it away on the other side of the gate.  Devon then procured a second.  He swiped.  Insufficient Fare.  Assholes.  He was mad at that proposed fare increases and wondered how people making minimum wage could afford anything, especially in New York.  He made good enough money bartending and he still struggled.

There was a third somewhere in his wallet, he knew that.  He dug around between crumpled five-dollar bills and one crisp twenty.  There, smashed next to the face of Abraham Lincoln, was the card that would work.  He swiped.  BEEP.  Insufficient Fare.

Devon walked away from the turnstile, concerned that he was perhaps holding up the line, but who was he kidding, it was 3 a.m. on a Wednesday morning in the depths of Bushwick; no one was behind him.

He was about to succumb to purchasing a new card when he found the fourth.  This one must be it, he thought to himself as he steadied his hand above the machine that was able to read the magnetic stripe on the back of this yellow card by some trick of science he never studied.

There was a definitely a card with money left on it.  His friend had given him her MetroCard before she left town.  “I think there’s a couple bucks left on this one,” she said before hauling her heavy suitcase down four flights of stairs.  He had offered to help but she declined, so when the door closed, he sat back down on his couch to watch Dexter, listening to the sound of her bag clunking against the hallway walls until her noise disappeared underneath the sounds of bad dialogue and a screaming victim.

Later, Devon thought that he probably should have insisted on helping, even if she insisted otherwise.  Girls did that shit all the time – the whole “No Means Yes” thing, but not in that rapey way they warned you about in high school.  This was becoming a proven truth in Devon ’s relationships with girls and women, and judging by how many times his mother warned him about this pattern of female behavior and how often it had happened in real life, he would be best served in adapting to their nonsensical Laws of the Universe.  “That’s what you’ll need to know, Devon, if you ever want to keep a woman,” his mother always told him.  But Devon didn’t want a woman, and he was on the fence about girls, too.

BEEP.  The words flashed again and Devon groaned.  Another Monthly Unlimited, here I come, he thought.  Devon ’s mother had taught him a lot about thrift and maximizing one’s dollar, but her relationship advice had always irritated him, probably because it was often unprovoked and uncalled upon.  What did his mother know about relationships anyway?  During his childhood, she had been divorced four times, routinely dated hideous douche bags in between, and then seemed to magically forget about all of it, willingly putting herself back out there into a worthless dating pool of a small town on the outskirts of Bakersfield.  He didn’t need to hear advice from her, Thank You Very Much.

The MetroCard machine ate his money and spat out its blue and yellow card of proverbial gold.  Another eighty-nine fucking dollars, he thought.  Devon walked to the turnstile, which now graciously offered him the word “Go.”  He just wanted to be home already; he was tired from the MetroCard ordeal and the four glasses of red wine he had just had, and went to rest against a grimy tile wall while waiting for the train.

Kelly.  That’s who he had just met for drinks…drinks and other things.  They had ended up back at her house – a terrifyingly unpalatable mish mash of magazines ordered alphabetically and shabby chic décor.  The girlish nature of her abode made Devon nervous.  These were the types of girls who wanted to get married before they turned twenty-six and have kids two years after.  They wanted big wedding rings and white ponies.  Girly girls.  His mother had warned him of those, too.

Devon had been dating a lot lately.  Ever since he got a bike he had been above ground for most of the summer, exposing himself to a world of beautiful girls in short shorts and see-through dresses, colored sandals and Ray Ban sunglasses.  He looked at them as trophies to be collected.  Dirty blondes, shorthaired brunettes, chicks with freckles on their backs and nicely painted toenails.  There was something addicting about women – not one particular woman, but women in general.

His bike had opened up an entirely new, entrepreneurial world to Devon.  He thought of all those years he had wasted on the subway, staring at homeless people with long fingernails and vomiting children.  The choice to ride through downtown had turned out to be quite a fortuitous one; he met a new girl who seemed keen on him at least three times a week.  Winter made him nervous, though secretly relieved.

It had been fun in the beginning, sleeping with as many girls as he possibly could because he could.  He didn’t even really have to try, which probably meant that he was good looking, though he never thought of himself in that way before.  And when he was over each of the many girls that happened between the months of May and September, he didn’t really have to try to end it either.  It ended simply because it didn’t continue, and he thought that would be enough for the girls, though they were most often left anxious and confused.  But that was their problem, not his.  Onto the next one, the next one, the next one.  There was some comfort in that, he supposed.

Devon couldn’t say he was looking for anything in particular, or anything at all.  He found it interesting that as the months went on and the number of dates increased in equal measure, the way he kissed – any signature style or tricks or, fuck, he didn’t know – was gone.  His kisses had become an indecipherable mess derived from the collective mouths of different girls.

By the end of summer, Devon was well versed in the art of casual, flirtatious interactions.  He knew what stories to tell from his youth – sweet stories about trips with his family to the Grand Canyon, how he got lost at Disneyland for six hours when he was five, about the time he got This scar, this scar right here.  The girls would watch him as he told them these stories, these anecdotes that were sure to illicit the same Fuck Me reaction.  And to be sure, they worked every time.  Devon knew when a girl had been hooked by how they would lean over a table or a drink, giggling and batting their eyes.  He knew by the way they would engage, which was, to him, an obvious combination of coy and vulnerable.

Devon said “They” because it was literally every girl; not one was able to resist him.  Suckers.  Girls routinely ignored patterns of the male species.  No matter how many times a girl was routinely destroyed by a man, she would dust herself off and start over again, telling herself, “This guy will be different.”  There was something about this that made Devon a bit squeamish, knowing that these girls were pretty much just younger versions of his own mother – hopeful, open, loving women who he would break down because he could and because he had to and because he was, well, easily and routinely bored.  Something inside of him wanted to sit down and tell these girls the truth, that each guy was exactly the same, but it didn’t seem like the best strategy for getting laid.

Through the depths of the dark tunnel, Devon could hear his train approaching, sucking the cold air of December past him like a vacuum, sending an unexpected shiver down his spine and awakening his dulled senses, however slight.

Hipster Love Stories: Tess

Tess watched the last leaves before winter float through the air like lost birds.  Aviary papiery, she thought to herself, and she smiled because in her head it made sense and she imagined a room filled with paper birds, the light from above filtering through their flapping wings as they moved under trapped glass.  Aviary papiery.

Papiery was a word she borrowed on her walks down this same street every day.  It was written on a dirty neighborhood trashcan, and neither the neighborhood nor the plastic container was fancy enough to warrant the labeling of such with such a beautiful word.  Each time she passed it she would laugh, wondering if the person who wrote the words also understood the joke.

She ducked under concrete and the earth’s surface onto a subway platform, where she dropped a penny on the ground.  She watched it fall and didn’t reach for it, the copper playing nicely against the steely gray it was rushing towards.  And Tess left it there so that someone could then have a lucky penny for themselves.  The transference of intention, she thought to herself.  Tess often made up big words in her head – words strung together to form phrases that sounded good in partnership with one another but probably didn’t make sense to anyone else.  That didn’t matter; she was the only one living in her own head, anyhow, and it would always be like that.

As she waited for the train she thought about love because she was listening to a song about love on her headphones.  Most songs were about love, that fact was unavoidable – except rap songs, which were about fucking and degrading women and coming up in a world Tess had no personal connection to.  Tess thought about love and why everyone wrote about it and cried about it and consumed days on end with it.  Despite her penchant for pretty words, Tess was always of a very analytical mind – mathematical, logical, scientific, and cold like the floor of an operating room.  She could never understand how people had such visceral reactions to such an intangible, fickle, unproven thing.

Tess was twenty-eight and had never been in love before and she wondered if that moment would ever come.  If it didn’t, she didn’t mind.  She had reached a comfortable homeostasis with her emotions that went unperturbed by trivial, fleeting interactions with boys.  She had seen what love had done to her friends – lying despondent in their bedrooms, sitting in front of untouched plates of food, sleeping with the wrong people to get over the wrong person.  Why would anyone want to subject themselves to such horrors?

As she got older, Love the Concept became increasingly difficult to understand, as things typically do when we attempt to learn as adults and not children, our heads filled with can’t dos and never have dones, the logistics of accomplishment becoming bothersome and overwhelming.  Riding a bike, learning to drive, falling in love.  These were all things better first attempted as a child, when the possibility for pain and injury is not of primary concern.  Wounds healed, hearts mended, we would live forever.

Tess waited for the train and someone sang in her ears about a broken heart.  It wasn’t the first time she had heard the song, but it was the first time it had made her think about her own heart – unmarred, uncut, left alone.  The train came near, its glowing yellow light like a swiftly moving lantern seen through a dark well, and she was struck with wave of crushing sadness.  A safe heart, like safe skin with no stories to tell, is one that had never been loved or been in love.  And in that moment, she felt her heart break by her own hand.