04.11.23
I slipped and fell in this shower this morning and it made me think about dying (off to a fun start today!).
I operated in a fugue state for the first half or so of the day (I cannot stop using this term lately, fugue state — I’ve been using it to describe the fog I was in after an unsettling work trip to Los Angeles a few weeks back), thinking about how if I had hit my head harder, or even just fallen slightly further to the right, as my head mostly hit the actual toilet paper roll as opposed to the much more painful holder, I could have been knocked unconscious and then how long would it take for people to find me. I have never fallen in the shower before, which is astonishing because I have fallen in most other places. I wonder if I could convince someone to marry me and move into my apartment, like, tomorrow. But by the afternoon I’m remembering I like having my own space and maybe marriage is not the answer. I should just be more careful when I am tired in the shower in the morning. I can feel the spot I hit on the top of my head when I brush my hair.
When I finally had to go somewhere at 8pm, my train ran slow and local and I was nearly late. I went to volleyball and Josh confirmed for me that I was still alive. “Everything is as it would be if you were alive and here right now,” he said, which was, in a way, the perfect thing to say, as I described to him what I was very dramatically calling a “near-death experience.” I need friends who are willing to tell me to chill, in however many words, without telling me I am being insane. Josh is very good at this. He is a good friend for this and many other reasons. I told him if I ever don’t show up to Tuesday volleyball with no explanation to order a wellness check to my apartment. No more than seven days will pass if I die alone at home, fourteen if it’s an off week. This seems like a lot, but I’m a pretty bad texter, and I am often known to take breaks from social media without announcements because I think social media break announcements are stupid and insane, so I don’t think people would think much of it if they didn’t hear from me for two weeks. Except maybe my mom.
After volleyball, I walk over to the A Train at West 4 from Mulberry Street to get some steps in. I don’t put my headphones in because they’re buried in my bag and I was chatting with Josh about the past weekend on our way out of the church’s youth center. Instead of listening to music or a podcast, I eavesdrop on snippets of the conversations of passersby, which is a favorite activity of mine. It was a nice day today but I didn’t go outside until 6:30pm, on account of the fugue. I just miss the train after entering the station — it pulls away as I walk onto the platform. I pull out my book and read, pacing.
When I get on the train, someone is playing The Smiths out loud. If not The Smiths, something similar. An unusual thing to bump on the subway. Can you imagine a showtime to Morrissey?… There’s a sketch in there somewhere. Maybe using a singer who is less of an awful person. This might exist already.
After a few songs, an ad plays. I smile to myself — how confident does one have to be to not only play their music out loud in public, but to not even have an ad-free music streaming subscription (I would just say Spotify, but I use Apple Music myself — SUE ME — so that would feel disingenuous). I think of being in college, when a man who would later become my boyfriend would play his ad-riddled music before and after comedy shows he hosted, loudly apologizing to the room when an ad would come up. I remember that, amid those apologies, my friend Mary Grace, who is so warm and funny that I’ve never introduced her to anyone who didn’t immediately fall in love with her, said, “It’s okay, you’re ballin’ on a budget!” He laughed really hard, and brought it up a lot when we were dating, any time we were given the opportunity to sing MG’s praises. I still use that phrase in fits of giggles — ballin’ on a budget — thinking not of the boyfriend, who, incidentally, turned out to not be such a good guy, but of MG, who I so love.
The presumably depressed person with the speaker gets out at 181st, just as I am finishing the final essay in the second part of Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I don’t start another because I’m not a very fast reader, and I only have two stops left.
