Dreamed I was tasked with sorting out a bag of apples left behind by a girlfriend 8 years ago. The apples were mostly rotten but the grannysmiths held their skin together. One apple was crawling with some kind of worm or maggot. I tried to sort through each apple individually before deciding to drop the whole sorry mess into the trash.
Someone was always yelling at me. From someplace inside my head, outside my room. Anger and insecurity, whichever comes first, fueled the tirades. Voices yelling circled my head and followed in my entrails.
Processing the bags of apples was a warm-up for me moving in to a small apartment in a rural area where the only activity and excitement around was found at a small pizza shop which shared their real estate with a gas station. There was a ghostly promise of a full-service convenience store, which would turn this promising but stubbornly dead-end location into a real oasis, a destination in an area lacking any culture or life. But that promise reared itself through optical illusions and holograms tricks that made it look like the store was already there, but when you approached it it disappeared.
My apartment barely had room for a bed. I basked in the air conditioning until the cold air ran warm. There was a TV but it only tuned in to radio stations. I was visited by the ex-girlfriend of a friend who died earlier this year, and also by a homeless woman I know from online, She says she listens to Payphone Radio once in a while just to hear the sound of my voice. I’ve seen her naked a number of times, but there will be no in-person consummation.
Also present was someone else who I cannot identify. I mean, I don’t know who it was, I’m not keeping their identity secret. But my tiny apartment was the scene of a crowded but comfortable housewarming as we discussed what I intended to do by moving to this rural location with no job or connections.
…
Today’s commute was back to magical. I understand now the anxiety people speak of when transferring to a different subway station or train. Removing that connection makes me feel closer to a child, safer in my infantilism. Today the train barely filled to even a tenth of its capacity. This is rush hour in Manhattan, mind you, although Friday’s remain quieter as the dubious work from home thing favors having Friday as your WFH day. I do kind of resent the way people are chosen for this privilige. I would not want to do it under pretty much any circumstance but the choice of allowing more senior people to do it makes commnuication with said royalty a lot more cumbersome, if not impossible.
…
Pretty girl said good morning to me. It was nice. We’ve been timidly flirty for a couple of weeks now. This job would really open up for me if I found just one person I could connect with. So many people here are extremely loud and domineering, some to the point of being hyper. Honestly, though, all I really know about this woman is that she’s cute, and seems friendly.
