Angel’s Intimate
Filters aren’t quite right—pulling in all kinds of externalities and she can’t limit it too much, create a puddle from an ocean—fuuuuuuck, she’s fucked up the extraction again—have to start all from scratch.
Being asked to solve grand problems, her in her third year of undergraduate studies, not anticipating much more past that—the comfortable sterility of her dining hall, a chicken sandwich she’s bought at half-price through twenty hours per week whisked away in a kitchen rapidly deteriorating her dexterity and nerve connectivity. Hard to complain when rent is less than half a grand. Can walk most places even if she has to bum rides to get to the grocery store—those beer cans are heavy, man, and for the time being she’s the supplier. 30 racks taking up a solid third of the total space there, the cans eventually dispersing for easy access—remember a roommate drunkenly taking a knife to the cardboard hoping for easier access, no no no she laughs but inside she’s dreading the worst, they eventually coax it out of her hand and get her in bed, make sure she’s on her side. Tastes her own stale breath, hours after waking up, past the lightly breaded patty—swishes around a too-diluted lemonade, stands up and smells her armpit, not too worried about onlookers—empty enough that others will definitely have seen it, but what’s the rush….
General, almost Jungian case of crash-and-burn. Took her a solid two months to convince herself that yes, school was the path that she should be on, that there’s a place for her in education—done pretty well up until that point but goddammit, hard to care sometimes about decompositions named after cities far away in Mexico she wishes that she could visit, if only for a few months, to pretend she’s something else entirely…
Has three classes a day and they’re all in the same room. Basement, no windows. Constantly on the brink of sleep, even if she had slept well the night before. Hard to avoid when the least-bad word association is cavernous. Professor’s on last legs, she was at Berkeley in what seems, per her retelling, another life entirely, something about agriculture and student protests.
The real boom/bust is the social life of an early twenty-something—goes days without as much as a casual “hello” and then night in, night out, she’s out at some shitty diner, hoping she doesn’t just pass the fuck out, there’s some predictably hilarious quip or turn of phrase that sets her off and in the morning she won’t remember what it is, most likely because well, it really just wasn’t that funny… the roommate who, despite her most lethargic, liturgical intentions, will not even exchange that heartless, faceless nod of acknowledgement in the hallway, for whatever-the-fuck reason—
She still says early twenties, and she convinces herself it’s mostly out of habit. 24, and at what most consider some sort of liminal notary, as if in the coming three, four days, giving herself the necessary, redemptive framework to sort out the shit, drain out the sodium of the past few days’ excess, get more than 5 hours of sleep, ideally not on a couch in the library, in the unlikely, unfortunate occurrence that someone she knows passes her and takes a photo, forever archived online of her slumped over, mouth open, agape agape and it’ll live on much longer in her memory than literally anyone else, figurative/literal—twinges late at night, it all compounds—psychoactive embarrassment, combusting every filament of her justifications for past actions, some predating puberty, how on earth do I remember this, all gone the next morning. Replaced with reticence, retreat into cushions—refine armament, the treacherous hug of the shower, gets wherever she needs to be just in time. No space here to recoup and feel as if she’s some complete adult, scrambling, and whenever she confesses this to someone else—yep, it’s universal. How do the wheels keep turning?
Has a date. Agreed to it out of civility, he’s a good friend and he’s admitted as much to needing her as a buffer—one of his best friends is going out with a guy she barely knows and based on his mannerisms, general congeniality, alone there’d be a lot of awkward silence. She wants to give him a chance the rhetoric and she’s suppressed the basic id of asking but why? and goes along, telling herself that any time spent outside the apartment is good time. Truth be told, she doesn’t hate it as much as she thought she would—they go to the college’s theater, they play a Shakespeare play (if she’s really gonna be honest here, she smoked a couple joints beforehand and on a purely intellectual level she knows that it’s As You Like It but as the days unfold she’ll have to ask, multiple times, which one it was…) aside from her everyone’s faux-religious and they’re not the types to overindulge, a single drink each, she has to ask herself if two, three are fine, says she’s had a long week and they all laugh, she thinks at the very least they’re not judging her, whether or not that’s true another story entirely.
Thinks she didn’t smoke that much—the Deadhead’s Curse, feels herself rise up faded on the cross, excuses herself to the bathroom… careful not to splash any water to where it shouldn’t belong, she’s been in that scenario before where a seemingly innocent flick of the wrist knocks something over, spilling forever, not that she was even drinking at the time, just clumsy as all hell. Something’s playing in the background and she knows she recognizes it, just cannot place it, something with a bit of a syncopated rhythm in the background, dammit, she leans into the wall hoping that the speaker is somewhere close and that the noise will become clearer. No dice. She and some other friends go out the next night, she almost cancels and they talk about the projects they’ve put on hold due to their current workload. Most are applying for grad school and she’ll hold off, wait until she has a clearer idea of what’s going on in her life. Difficult to tell.
“Oh no…”
Has friends coming over—more precisely, her roommate has friends coming over with whom she’s friendly, she’ll try and join in for as much as she can but inevitably will end up on an aimless walk, hoping to clear her head and inevitably doing some parallax of that—focuses too freely on passing cars, embellishments and chromes, no scratches, no aberrations, the endless rising buildings, they are just as tall as they were when she was a child. She walks down the hill to where she spent many an adolescent night, a park whose tree-branch perimeter is so thick it looks to warn of a private property, somewhere they cannot go but within is a children’s play-contraption, pits of bark, benches where vagrants sleep without spikes or interruptions. She does not enter this time—takes attention to the sloping canopy walls, the fences between her and the backyards. Vantage point, from topography and topography alone—pools, the kinds not even her rich friends had… sun’s still going down, in the one furthest down the hill, across the street from an old Methodist cathedral, kitty-corner to a market recently rejuvenated by Hong Kong investors, a couple women taking in the last rays—looks to be a daughter and her mother, most likely fresh into college, just a couple years younger than Rose. Tries not to stare but the pavilion by the pool is fully furbished, with tables and what looks like a charcuturie platter half-finished, can almost smell the capricotta… they have what looks like a doghouse in miniature of the house, the third story for god knows what, there hasn’t been a dog living there in years…
Stops by a dive bar she’s been to only twice and the bartender recognizes her. Fuck. She’s nice enough, it’s dead on a Tuesday and she pulls up her phone, shows Rose videos of her cats. One is supernaturally big, looks like it’s some sort of dog. Hopes it’s the perspective because surely that thing has some kind of eldritch curse over it.
With the bar being empty they play whatever they feel like and it turns out to be a greatest hits compilation of Rose’s deep cuts from all her favorite bands. Obscurities, no, but she can claim in her head to know things and even more than that, she enjoys them… this is something by Queens of the Stone Age, one of the oldest albums, not Songs for the Deaf, she knows at least that much, pretty raucous and after her second beer. She nods along with a certain fervency, enough that the barkeep notices and she puts a solemn embarrassed end to it.
Brings a notebook to places like this—it’s important to her to be occupied, whether or not something productive comes from it is a separate issue, she touches base with a thousand emotions and dreams and leaves them with a sloppy scribble that she swears is the curvature of the pages, her southpaw deficiencies smearing the page, working against the creases. There are certain sinusoids to her script, the up/down, according to some, indicative of a glass perspective, reading fill lines and judging accordingly, as if they cut through the dry desert creases of her palm at full disk, undulating according to the circumference of some jocular sycophantic mean, hoping she stands up and sits back down, adding things all wrong in her head… she takes note of her script, one thing in particular calling attention:
ideal broken life//actual broken life
She’ll read this a few days later and not know what to make of it and when she begins work on a new collection of poetry entitled Swim to the Moon three weeks later she titles the third in the collection after this loose fluctuation.
Depending on how much water I’ve had to drink
I can see the tendons move in my hands.
What is the stress of everyday life doing to them?
If I worked the fields, or washed garment after garment
Rather than blather on and on typing for papers about three people, generously, will read
What needles’ eye could I cross then
End of semester. One more to go. She’ll quit her job then, focus on the two classes she has left. Impossibly, has enough money to survive, and even eat out every couple of weeks. Has an errant aunt and uncle who, without any children of their own, take it upon themselves to provide her with a Sunday dinner and enough leftovers for at least through Wednesday. She’ll take them, renege what she can, not that it’s out of a tainted conscience, mind you, it’s simply more than she can carry…
Accumulated plenty of change and she spends it in coffee shops, no room for cream. Sits in corners, works her ways around the crowds. They come to recognize her, make conversation of the books she’s reading and the work she’s doing. Mostly light fare, quiet poems on notebooks, types them out sometimes, scratches out the odd words and hopes to god she’s spelling most of it correctly. She shows them to a few friends who tell her that they’re “really good” and offer little other feedback.
Classes go fine. She barely shows up to one and this doesn’t matter, it’s only based on exams and all the content is online. Hell, the first exam is entirely from the study resources they have, she does it three times over in preparation and knows the material by heart and still double-checks everything. A thousand cat-scratches across the various double-sided pages—final exam for her other course, the professor fresh out of his doctorate, hell is probably still in his 20s, and he’s accidentally printed off the answer key for the multiple-choice section of the exam.
In moments of boredom or desperation she searches out job postings. Feels, well, felt confident about her prospects. She never learned any sort of specific language for her data science, she’s pieced it together through her professors’ decades-old PDF with scribbled postscripts in additional notes, several wikis from universities including but not limited to Stanford and the University of Minnesota, and general expertise with search engine manipulation, and while this is good enough for her to scrape by with a B+, A- if she’s lucky, but she can’t say with confidence, feigned or otherwise, yes, I know Python, yes I know R. She knows what they are, has bookmarks to free tutorials. Isn’t that enough?
Her latest project is failing, spectacularly. She relies on surveys of the general populace, so that’s the Alpha and Omega of her issues. Wants to dive deep into some shit—consumption patterns after cataclysmic events. Everyone and their mother’s looked at the numbers post-9/11 and she tries not to constrain it to personal tragedy, death, OD, lost job. The last one would have been particularly interesting but the numbers just aren’t there. She eventually switches it to something much more benign, spending habits of SNAP recipients, specifically the kinds of foods they buy and how much they spend on food outside of EBT purchases. Government’s very interested in that and she has no fewer than three out-of-body experiences completing it in the late hours of the library, finals week has most people going looney, accidentally copies/pastes from another paper to start:
Minimum wage laws have long been an incendiary topic both in labor economics and the popular sphere. Originating from labor movements in the One main argument levied against enacting higher minimum wages is that it interrupts with the natural stasis of the economy,
base level of salary to survive. In writing this paper, I wish to see both the effects of minimum wage on both workers and firms and how the government can enact regulation to assure that both employment levels and the quality of life for minimum-wage workers.
Doesn’t bother to correct mistakes.
Does well, gets the degree. Moves back home, sleeps in less guilt-free, at least there’s no late penalty for not applying to jobs. Eats well, considers picking up a job at a restaurant, has experience, something to spend. Has a couple friends she still sees—effervescent and illusionary as she’s discussed, borders, codependent with distance, relegate bonds to occasional text messages and well-wishes.
Speaks many times over the phone with people with friendly enough dispositions, they invite her in sometimes, sometimes cold, sometimes inviting buildings.
Takes her nine months and she sometimes thinks of it as an incubatory period where she learns very little and accomplishes enough, plays piano sometimes, nowhere near as much as she’d like and feels some of that innate dexterity flood back, beyond just playing the notes. Makes time for it outside of work, makes time for a few things.
Eternal party problem: finding somewhere safe and comfortable to pee and in the narrow hallways she’s worried she’ll disrupt something. Had a hard enough time getting into the house, how is a basement a separate address? The upstairs neighbors were nice and understanding enough, it had began to rain and in the near-freezing weather she began to worry she’d slip on some nascent patch of ice, not perhaps the most rational thoughts at this hour but in order to loosen up, she’s joined a group in the kitchen with a pipe and plenty of thoughts on the human condition…
“I don’t know what else could be done in a situation like that,” referring to the hyperinflation and general media hysteria of Maduro’s Venezuela, “do you know what was going on there before?”
Better this than the paleo-primitivist, uh, enthusiasts who harangued her with no end in sight until she actually sprinted through the doorway trying to get to a more mellow locale. She’d mentioned that well, she likes not having a myriad range of disease, and that it may just be one woman’s take but that the gains of scientific and medical advances clearly outweigh the benefits of a more natural, simplistic life. Not, to her understanding, that this was the case of some overly enthusiastic environmentalists, this was damn near reboot of the human condition…
Someone’s trying to be her one and only and she buzzes around the now-empty portmanteau of rum and horchata…
“And so here’s this guy, telling me that what I’m doing is appropriation because I work at a taco truck owned by a güero, my dad’s from Jalisco…”
“Sativa or indica?”
“Oh, that’s so nice of you to ask!”
As if, there is no longer any indication that what you do is simply grift your whole way through life…
She sits by the fire for a bit. No smokes, just ready to rest her wings from the transition of wallflower to butterfly. The person next to her is tall, somewhere from South Asia with a beard that looks like it hosts its own microcosmic set of impeccably tuned gardeners. Passes her a bottle of bourbon and it’s some of the smoothest shit she’s ever had…
She gets caught third-wheeling with him and a nascent conversation he has with one of the residents of the home who will surely be reincarnated into a kind tree at some point, they very quickly come to the topic of the dead and whether or not they walk again. Speaks of his time in a Singaporean jail as if he is still a child, heavy emphasis, assuming they will not believe him. Rose is indifferent.
Impossibly thin, they talk to her in on what will be her bed, a sofa that’s much more comfortable than she could have ever dreamed for free. Find out she’s got a degree in economics, ask her a million questions, she thinks of all the ways she can reconnect with a thousand lost friends. She’s off the grid mostly, doesn’t give a shit about tracking or invasion of privacy, that happens anyway, just… doesn’t.
I just do//I just don’t. Explain it beyond that, Rose really can’t…
Through her one last remaining digital tie, Instagram, she reaches out to a good friend. Hasn’t seen her since high school but hopes that she still thinks fondly of her when she does think of her if at all. Convinces herself of a few things:
I’m interesting; I get distracted from what I want to do sometimes, but that doesn’t make my endeavors less worthwhile.
I don’t look worse than I did when I was 18, I should probably just eat less salt.
I’m much more relaxed, I legitimately don’t care about not caring.
Even starts to think of it as an inconvenience to routine: Every conversation she wishes she could’ve had should’ve happened ten years ago with ten separate people. Push them down this pipeline, hope some of them come out the right end and that the ones that don’t leave no lacerations on the sides. She’s been to a therapist, she’s found out how to be happy but she still likes to sleep in.
“How long has it been?!” Like I don’t know.
“There’s a place just down the street, you don’t mind walking, do you? It’s worth it, I promise.”
Relieved I can use chopsticks so well
“How do you like working only part-time?”
“The money side is stressful, but I have so much energy for other things, you know? Like I don’t have to stress about how I’m going to try and fit music or socializing in. Of course it was the exact opposite problem when I was working full-time, so I guess you can’t have everything.”
“Right! Like there’s only so much energy you have. It’s not like it was when we were younger.”
Takes her nearly four hours into the night to get into her writing. She’s wanted to bring it up the entire time, of course—just that there was so much else to say, small and big. Mentions it, gets the congratulatory airs she wants, dwell, topic, form etc, move on, they begin to speak of movements hear and afar.
“I don’t know anything about politics. Like really anything. Who’s the president of France?”
Gotta ease into this one
“Emmanuel Macron.”
“What?”
“Emmanuel Macron.”
“See, doesn’t even sound familiar! I really need to read more.”
Part ways and she doesn’t realize she’s walking to the incorrect subway stop—that’s the way her friend’s going, shit… turns around, what’s the worst thing that could happen, really, they ride the subway back together and talk more? Not like it’s a post mortem kind of thing…
Sleeps deeper than she has for a long time, wakes up feeling refreshed, new, what in the hell…
Decides to be daring—memory’s fickle and all that but when she reviews her past it comes as herself being very much in favor of the status quo mostly out of its safety and it’s like she’s come to the end of a very long rubber band that’s finally had enough. Leaves to go places on a whim, spends more than she should, particularly on food and drinks, takes trips to cities where she only knows one or two people, feels something has set her free.
Dust blows and she has no idea how to set up her tent in the weather, clasps her hands and someone luckily comes to help her out. She feels almost as if her skin’s being chipped off by the wind, joining the loose rock fragments.
Built to fade into the land—synchronicity, they have lectures about how to reduce footprints. She doesn’t understand quite how or why, only that it’s a pleasant place to be. The amphitheater, intended as some rock formation, slate formed and hard with some of those Gaudi charms, the sound is good and her back stays straight and the occasional switch in sitting position keeps most of the pain at bay. Stays in place, keeps her spot for the bands she most wants to see. Shuffles off to other stages, leaves a bit early and feels fine about it. Drive home is nice, can finally smell herself.
Lazy lonely Sunday, spends it in a hoodie she should really wash and some jeans that are finally starting to fray. Cleans up a bit, sweeps out the dust. Really should buy a rag for that.
Text comes through, wanting to hang out, why not? Go grab a coffee.
Grab that old flyer that’s been there forever?
Some old change too. Old change. Shirts with wrinkles embedded in.
As if it all stretched out, null, delimited. Can see it all and it is all named, concise and exhaling. Sorts with some sort of sublime filter, seeing exactly what she needs. She can’t see that far.
