I start to think I’m getting a free pass at this job. I remember now how jumpy I was those first months. I take the work seriously as ever but I admit that I took it a little too seriously at first. I overthink. It’s just what I do. I’ll work this holiday weekend, imagining it my last. However different my attitude about things here have changed I know I would miss this place.

Aha, there it is. The air conditioning just turned on. I guess that goes on at 8am? I’m here early.

I switched breakfast establishments. The flirtations with the one woman had gone too far, too strange. I still do not know what she looks like. Anyone else around here goes maskless for at least a little while. Never her. What is she hiding? Hiding from?

Obviously we know what the reason is. Hiding from Covid, from BA.5, from some new mystery Covid-like disease in Argentina. Always something to hide from, a thing of some stature, fictional or not, from which to hide.

I think of my absence in her life. Its suddenness. How long does she cry at night? How many masks intended to stave off contagion are instead wasted as snot rags for her bawling face and snot-belching nostrils?

I am only being partly flippant with this obviously ludicrous scenario. The idea that she would even make note of my absence is, itself, a joke. But the visual of a woman bawling, screaming, snot and tears belching from her face… this is not a concocted scenario. I have been in the room with women like this and it is scary.

But for now I’ll keep the fantasy scenario, in which I deliberately and in its way self-deprecatingly imagine this casual acquaintance who I can’t even call an acquaintance because I don’t know her name or what she looks like — I can imagine the emotional havoc I hath wrought by switching breakfast destinations.

When she chases after me, skulks around lower Manhattan, seeking me out, asking others if they’d seen a white guy with a mask any time recently… Her determination will no doubt pay off. She will find me because the depths of desperation and loss could only be fulfilled by that accomplishment. She will find, embrace, attack, brandish some emotional weapon before wielding the physical hammer and sickle. She will slash my throat in a fury of passion, a nuclear winter of childhood’s apocalyptic defilements choked back to life.

Then the love will commence. My enslavement to her whims and wishes will achieve instant eternity, our souls and bodies swishing and swimming through these slippery, slim streets. I see our  rapturous rivers roaring into the sewers of Water Street, burbling up on Maiden Lane and wrapping our blood-thickened waters around new disciples. We accumulate an army of acolytes who gather to applaud and maraud on our behalves. The sex becomes eternal, a continuous sensation of all souls fornicating with the air, the heartbeats of our separations carved together while the universe throbs with the force of our fucking.

Our waters gel, then coagulate. We languish on the sidewalks of John Street, sleeping in pools of our vomit, slathering ourselves with the nourishment and re-digesting it through the grasslands forming across our ever-expanding tundræ. We reminisce about the tedium of having bodies, of scheduling time for food and vitamins. Our unstoppable fucking earns us waves of applause and envy, as nymphs and nodes of Gold Street convene, scheming about our obliteration but giving up quickly. THe forces of our insecurity are simply too great to provoke. Too harsh would be the anger, the outrage, the bodily assault. We are dead together and will not be disturbed.

…

Alright, then… Aside from this flirtation I might have something going with a woman somewhere up north. I wouldn’t call it upstate but it’s past Westchester. She sent a really sweet photo of her breasts and smiling mouth, but no eyes visible. Aside from her mostly-shaved hoo-hah that’s all I know of what she looks like. She’s a serial hookup woman, does not host, nor do I. She suggested scenarios but nothing specific in terms of place or when. I told her Sunday’s my fun day so let’s try for something Saturday. But it’s a holiday week and she had family things, or so she said. Hard to know what level of trust to have here. We’ve been talking for almost a year but very sporadically. No shortage of drama seemingly inspired by anxiety. If it took a full year for me to earn her trust I guess that would suit the arc of time in some splash-o-sphere.

I found myself outside Crown Motor Inn on Wednesday, feeling weirdly nostalgic for the encounter that happened there in November. The coast is clear that I can talk about it now. The coast has been clear for months now, I think, which is to say the coast of the coast is clear from coast to coast. No one would have any way to trace back and figure out who I’m talking about. That’s become essential for me, though in saying that it should be made clear that it’s essential for the other individuals as well. Most women I’ve been around the past few years want no trickle of their affairs blasted onto social media. They have their reasons, and I have mine.

…

Temperatures have cooled. I stood in the doorway of my new breakfast place, an Asian-owned market with miracle smoothies and acai miracles that will cleanse your body of its very soul. The breezes blew me over, rippling through my shirt and across my chest, trying to inch up my pants  but not getting far. It felt as sensuous as any woman’s touch, raising a modest bulge safely hidden by my untucked shirt.

I felt good. I feel good today. Yesterday not so much, after a sour couple of days spent contemplating the grim reality of this job, how I am losing money here and not getting anything in return. Not much, at least. I’m starting to think these hours spent typing these mental strambles are the highlight of this gig, that I at least have the freedom to do this. I mean why would they stop me? It’s not like a security problem. But I feel free here, outside the seeming shackles of the apartment I’ve been in for 24 years. I cannot create there anymore. I can barely even think within that space. Whenever I part 34-12 I will leave behind a legacy of blood stains too small to scour and compost bins filled with existential placenta from all the dead time left behind.