Do you experience alien boredom
Lena is coming home from school next week. We haven't talked in a long while. We used to hang out, but I graduated last year. Covid shut school down and Lena thought it wasn't a good idea that we hang. She stayed up at school over the summer. I saw her at a party in December of 2020 and we didn't talk and I got covid anyway. In the year since we've hung out, I have not been up to much. I spent most of my unemployment money on books and skateboard parts. I started walking everywhere. I would walk out to Rockaway from my mom's house in the Bronx. I had a few jobs, in restaurants. Maybe I'll do a graduate program or something. I studied sociology. I wanted to study music but I didn't know how to sell that to my parents.
Now that I am vaccinated, I have thought a lot about seeing old friends again. It's been a lonely year. I've seen people here and there. Karl from college and I will get coffee and go on walks when we're free. We skate, but I have trouble keeping up with his crew. Sometimes I go to a bar with Jimmy from high school and his roommates. They're rather square.
Lena sent me an Instagram message a week ago. I posted a picture of Karl beside a few beers on the Brooklyn Borough Hall steps. Karl, smiling, gave a shaka with his fingers. He'd pulled his beanie down over his eyebrows, a single dreadlock poking out of the cuff. He wore a t-shirt with our college's mascot emblazoned on it and size 42 pants and Chuck Taylors. Karl's skateboard sat on its side, grip tape facing my phone camera. The beers were Genesee.
Lena made a joke about our school. Then she said, "I bet you wish that was Milwaukee's Best, though." I said that I did.
"I just graduated it's so weird."
"I bet," I say. "Covid year."
"So fucked. Let's hang when I get back."
"Sure."
I felt odd about her reaching out. I posted about it on Slap, a forum where I have access to private sections of the board because I have several thousand posts. A poster I consider an acquaintance says to not worry about it, and that the worst-case scenario is she is searching for closure. I then scroll through the gear section and leave a 300-word review of the new Vans Half Cabs.
Karl says that I shouldn't get hung up on it. I'm not hung up on it. Lena's the last person I had a connection with and it wasn't much of one. It's a big city and I don't want to glom onto her and try to restart something because I feel alone. I am a whole person in and out of relationships. I have not had many chances to be open lately, but I feel readier to face the discomfort vulnerability gives me head-on after this last year. I am not fixated on whether or not she wants to try again. I want to know if I want her. I want to know if that's a thing I can do anymore.
I am walking between bars with Jimmy and his roommates. There is a new girl hanging out with us, Ginny. She went to Tufts with them but she's different. She's wearing fishnets. When I showed up at the first bar, I spotted her from behind, smoking a cigarette a few steps from the door. I thought, "Babe," to myself, and chuckled. When I had settled in at Jimmy's table and she slid into the booth beside me, I chuckled again. "What," Jimmy asked.
Now we're walking in the Village. I don't mind these bars where crisp button-up people go. Where bridge-and-tunnel people go. I'm bridge-and-tunnel. These people at Vig or Kind Regards or Loverboy or La Caverna are interesting to watch. They're a marvel; no one makes movies about these people. No one ever did. Ginny talks to me about her zines.
Walking along the south end of Tompkins Square Park I spot Lena, among a few kids from her year. They're across the street, hanging around a tree planter. One kid sips a forty-ounce. They seem to have found their footing. Or perhaps they're regressing. I tap Ginny and tell her I'll meet them at Augur.
"Lena!" I say, loud enough that my shoulders shrug as I feel conscious of my volume. She looks up, wearing a loose-fitting satin smock and big jean shorts and brown suede Air Forces. Her eyes light up and she hugs me with one arm, a cigarette in the other. I greet the others.
"You look great," I say, slowly, hoping I don't sound insincere.
"You hate Forces."
"Not anym… Not on you."
She closes her eyes and tilts her head, almost wincing. "I meant to text you."
"I figured we'd run into each other."
"What are you up to? Bar crawl or something?"
"Something like that, with my yuppie friends. Gotta love 'em."
"Wanna beer?" She beckons to a case of Pabst sitting in the planter.
I don't give it a second. "Of course. Let me tell my buddy I'll be a little."
Lena's just moved in upstairs, she tells me, into a sprawling three-bed covid-deal. Jimmy's texting me that Ginny liked me and I'm ignoring him. I drink and hang out in front of that apartment building for a bit. We take breaks to get drinks; I remind the recent grads that they have been legal to drink for a bit now, despite what quarantine did to bars.
"This is kinda crazy, right?" Lena and I are the last in the group heading upstairs. "I mean, we're here in fucking New York."
"It's pretty gnarly, yeah."
She turns around at the top of a flight. She wobbles a bit and leans on the wall, looking down at me. "Like us, the two of us are here. It's great to see you."
"What, are you sending me home?"
"No, come on up."
There's something monkeyish about Lena's friends, in the way they move about the apartment. Drinks are held in laps, arms flick up to gesture and settle back. I walk from the bathroom, at the end of an incredibly long apartment, back into the living room. Beer cans, older than tonight, line the floor between marker-labeled boxes. The coffee table is unsettlingly modern next to a torn-up couch, a stained Victorian armchair, a plastic stackable deck chair and a milkcrate.
"So you were just walking around Tompkins by yourself," says Benjamin, a crabby art major with a demonstrated interest in pushing buttons. He squats atop the milkcrate, sipping one of those almost-tall boys of Busch, a six-ring hanging from it. He and Lena were housemates when I knew her. They would sit around in the evenings, Lena editing poetry and Benjamin sketching, and juniors would stop by periodically with a story or a cigarette. Usually splayed across their drab front room floor, Benjamin would listen intently, his eyes jumping up from his page sometimes. His laugh was deep, unfitting for his slender frame. Lena told me once it annoyed her.
"I just had a drink with some high school friends."
"God, you're old," he says.
"No, I just grew up here."
"Here?" Benjamin sweeps an arm in front of him quizzically.
"No, uh, in Queens."
Lena comes back from her room, a thick paperback in hand. "Here. I got a thing in Springer's Annual, do you want to read it?"
I'd already read it. They sent it to my mom's house last month. "I'd love to." I’d liked it. It's about education, so it's clear why the English department picked it up. It's easy to read a poet's writing if they're not looking for a critique. For a single fleeting moment, reach through your cloudy layers of subterfuge and relay a real emotion to somebody else. Same with an artist's work, though that may take longer. And you thank Christ you don't know any novelists.
She looks away from me as I read but she's pursing her lips.
"I really like this, Lena. There's something real dark in it."
"Oh, yeah, I got it past the censors, I guess."
"Yeah."
I text Karl that I saw Lena last night.
Oh word?
Ran into her by TF
Oh shit small world. Did you smash
Hahaha
You did? Wtf