There’s a love story inside of me that I don’t know how to write. I think it might be because I have to fall in love, first, with the girl whose mind I’m slowly wrecking with every bit of self-loathing I put on paper.

I promise we’re going to get better.

The baristas had looked over at my erratic, almost angry typing with increasing concern every time they passed by me in their end-of-day routine, but they needn’t have worried. At exactly 10:59 I snapped the lid of my computer shut and pushed it into my bag, striding determinedly away from the corner of the coffee shop where I’d been sitting in self-imposed isolation for the past three hours.

I hadn’t realized how cold I’d been getting, bent over my screen at the bar of the coffee shop, until I stepped into the wintry night air that refused to coalesce into spring. It was worrying to realize that my body didn’t actually feel much warmer than the wind stinging my face. I’d always had bad circulation, but usually my extremities managed to stay somewhere around room temperature.

I tucked my hands ineffectually into my coat pocket, seeking a refuge that didn’t exist. My numb fingers curled around my music player and I kicked up the volume of a song that had been playing around in my head for days. Part of me wanted to sing along at the top of my lungs, but even though it was 11:03 on a Sunday evening and few people were on the streets, I couldn’t bring myself to vocalize more than the barest hum.

A car zoomed by with the daring recklessness of the college driver who knew that the rules of traffic were different on campus. I, too, crossing the street as it passed, willfully ignored the by-laws on jaywalking. I liked to think that this act of rebellion was a subtle reminder to myself to always question authority, but, really, I’m just impatient. 

I stepped onto the sidewalk on the opposite side and began the long trek home, longer always when the barometer dropped. My breath hitched and became shallower, faster, and for a moment I couldn’t decide if it was because I was ready to cry or because I’d left my scarf at home. The moment passed, and I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of that metacognition. What had four years here done to me?

For a few hours, tonight, it seemed like I had had a glimpse of the way I had envisioned my life here to be like, when I was first writing breathless application essays to be judged by old guards of the establishment with the privilege of determining whether or not I was worthy to walk these allegedly hallowed halls. I had envisioned days of symposia and nights of pouring my heart out onto paper, exhausted but satisfied. I’d envisioned restrained but passionate discussions around espressos and lattes, surrounded by many of my peers but truly connected to none of them as we abstractly debated the fate of the coming era. I’d envisioned a room of my own, a little enclave within the greater institution of learning where my body was a prisoner but where my mind would be free to wander. Somehow, none of my visions had contained the tainted smell of ethanol, or the chill of petty exclusion that permeated the atmosphere even though high school was long in the past.

I wasn’t ready to give up on that dream, but I won’t find it here, so I try not to think about it too much. Instead of a sense of contentedness that I’d managed to discover the precise sequence that imbued my words with the desperate ferocity they needed, I was rewarded with the leaden knowledge that I would regret this indulgence of creativity in the coming week when I was scrambling to teach myself advanced financial statistics out of a textbook that cost more than the complete Encyclopedia Britannica. I may not need it ever again in my life in three weeks’ time, but maybe some unsuspecting soul would be willing to take it off my hands for a pittance.

When the next sleepless night rolls around, I’ll curse myself…but for tonight, I’ll pretend that I’m an artist.

Her coworkers at the museum think her a little shallow sometimes, not because of anything she’s said or done, but because for some reason people insist on judging you by the media you consume. They know she goes to see a movie every Tuesday, either with a few girlfriends or with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, and sometimes they accompany her to the theater after work, but they never join her. They mostly go for the foreign features, or the period piece. Unlike her, they wouldn’t be caught dead in a showing of the latest iteration of the Boy Meets Girl And Falls In Love Against All Adversity And The Audience Pretends To Be Surprised When They End Up Together meme. Sometimes she switches it up for an action comedy with a smarmy good cop and an embittered bad cop caught in hilarious hijinks. If she’s really feeling adventurous, she might be found at some 3D butchering of a favourite childhood fairytale.

It’s really a pity that her taste in pop culture is so deplorable, her coworkers lament. She’s such a smart girl, but she’s rotting her brain on formulaic Hollywood B-films

She listens to these comments with the ghost of a smile dancing about her lips and shrugs the petty gossip off of her shoulders with the ease of the guiltless. She doesn’t have to justify to them why her download queue is filled with titles even she considers to be mindless drivel, and her friends are more than happy to indulge this particular quirk of hers.

She’d had a choice to make, long ago. She could have chosen clarity, to bear the weight of the darkness around her that she is helpless to alleviate and to thus become slave to it in a moebius strip of despair, or she could have chosen willful blindness, an intentional oblivion that obfuscated  the horrors of life and let her merely survive, day-in, day-out.

Like you, she had scoffed at the adage that ignorance would be bliss, and chosen to care. Chosen to expose herself. Inform herself of all that was wrong around her and do whatever she could to help, however futile it may have seemed. So she went on for years, heart ever heavier, mind ever more medicated.

When a scuffed up and faded photo of a family she’d never seen before lying on the sidewalk managed to knock the breath out of her lungs and send sobs reverberating through her chest, she knew she was on the verge of losing. So she chose again, this time to compromise. She could save the world by day, but she needed to hide away from it at night. If that meant that she had to carefully compartmentalize the way her mind processed information, she wasn’t about to apologize for it. 

You’d think the downtown of the busiest metropolitan area in the country would see a few more 24-hour places open, but in a city where homelessness ran rampant and college kids ran over whatever was left behind, it was easy to see why businesses were wary of staying open past a certain time.

She arrived in this connecting city at 3 AM in the morning, and her bus ticket into a week of forgetting about her current life said 6:15 AM. The bus terminal, cruelly, was closed as well – after all what more vulnerable place for unsavourables to loiter than a big open hall with minimal supervision? Her friend in the city had suggested this particular café, after hesitatingly making the obligatory offer for her to crash for the night that she was clearly meant to refuse.

The café was so close to the bus station that two separate cab drivers laughed at her when she asked if she could use her credit  card. Foresight to get some cash, that would’ve been nice.

The third cab driver had laughed, too, but at least he let her on. She made sure to tip him with the last remaining coins she had.

She didn’t know what she was expecting, but it wasn’t this. The little café was tucked off of one of the busiest streets in the city, ironically understated against the impotent neon signs of the copy businesses and the chain car rental places. The entrance was marked by a Narnia-esque street-lamp with a logomark emblazoned against the white sphere of light, and there was a black awning overhanging the door in a tribute to faux Victorianism.

It hadn’t been originally been intended for a business, that much was obvious, but the narrow stairs that separated the two stories of the café were kind of charming in their rickety splendour. The first story was evidently an apartment that had had its walls knocked down. It had been redecorated in a tasteful wood paneling with rich, dark curtains marking the windows and the door. A chandelier with electric candles and what she suspected to be plastic crystals hung from the ceiling, adding to the glow of yellow that emanated from the in-set ceiling lights.

It was an absolutely gorgeous effect, especially with the aged wooden tables and the tiny metal chairs, but it was also filled with people who had seen the backside of “drunk” about two cocktails ago.

She had packed light, but even her carry-on luggage seemed embarrassingly intrusive in this setting. She maneuvred it with some difficulty to a table in the corner by a large bay window that had been abandoned just moments before and settled into a chair with some sense of relief. Sitting in the corner like this, her back against the wall and her face to the entrance, she felt like she was ready for battle.

The waiter dropped off two glasses of water at the table next to her and looked at her doubtfully. “Just for one?” He asked, not unkindly.

“Yes.” She was resolute not to feel embarrassed. At least she was still sober enough to use words other than ‘like’ and ‘um’. Dimly she noted the song that was playing —a classic rock type of song that had been popular a few years ago—and decided that she could survive this for a few hours until the baristas at the Starbucks near the bus terminal reluctantly flipped the sign from “closed” to “open”.

Her waiter took his time getting her a menu with dismayingly expensive food, and then taking her order, which was just fine with her. Time was always on a different pace this late in the night. She asked for the cheapest item on the menu (a bowl of soup) and a terrifyingly big mug of coffee. That, at least, was sort of familiar.

The table next to her seemed to have been there for quite a while. They had the look of people who had fought bitterly over the social dynamic in their rather large group of eight or nine, and who had settled begrudgingly into their respective niches. There were only two men in the group, one of whom seemed like he couldn’t believe he was hanging out with seven beautiful girls, the other of whom was just a little too sure of himself.

“The pita-dip ratio is really odd.” She heard from one of the girls at the table. She was staring at their decimated appetizer in confusion. “There’s, like, not enough pita and way too much dip.”

The girls were probably early twenties, she judged. Or, more likely, in their late twenties, and hoping to disguise that fact with fake tans and bleached blonde hair. The first man was their age as well, but the second one had to have been in his late thirties or early forties at least. He was wearing a suit and a tie and had his arm around a blonde who seemed to be the de facto leader of the girls, and who was positively hanging off his every word. Still, she thought that perhaps he was a little too intellectual and a little too sober for this crowd. They listened politely, obsequiously, but failed to laugh and gasp and nod at all the right places.

She suppressed a smile as she took all of this in. As always, there was such a discrepancy between expectation and reality. Tell any of her art friends that she would be sitting in an overnight café with a sketchbook and a lethal amount of coffee and they would crow with envy at the amazing opportunity it was to study people, but drawing was the furthest thing from her mind in her safe, dimly lit corner. Dating a twenty-year-old was probably the dream of every forty-year-old man in the throes of midlife crisis, but—and granted, she was still young—she couldn’t think of anything more depressing than to be forty, well into your career, and to be wasting precious hours of an early Friday morning sitting with girls who were so drunk they couldn’t pronounce the word “Maserati”. Still, at least he would be getting laid tonight, even if it came at the cost of picking up the tab for the table.

She only relaxed when she was sleeping, or traveling.

Not sleeping while traveling, mind you – she was too paranoid about being overly exhausted and missing her destination – but those two states are pretty much the only times when she didn’t feel the looming shadow of anxiety hanging over her head like a particularly malevolent poltergeist.

The sleeping part, that was obvious. Her therapist said that she slept as a way to avoid being awake, and then prescribed her medication that woke her up 3-4 times in the night and took even that away. Something about confronting your demons.

She’d never been a big fan of confrontations.

The traveling part confounded most of her friends, who complained ad nauseum about the traffic in the city, who feared airports and train stations and coach terminals, and who devised elaborate schedules that allowed them to spend as little time in transit as possible.

But to she who normally spent her life in firm control of every tiny bit of minutiae, being at the complete mercy of the ebb and flow of traffic allowed her to relinquish responsibility in a way that would be unconscionable in any other circumstance. From the moment she stepped foot into the subway car, and from the moment she took off her shoes at the security clearing, and from the moment she leaned her head against the cold window, her fate would be out of her hands. No one could find fault with her, or delegate more responsibility, or ask her for advice for impossible situations. She could read, or write, or draw, or stare out the window, or just sit and think. Well, at least until the moment she walked up the escalators, or picked up her baggage from the carousel, or pulled on the cord for her particular stop. But until then, after all, she was caught in traffic. Don’t be unreasonable.

The most foreboding time of the night isn’t midnight, not by a far stretch of the imagination. That’s just a silly rumour propagated by Shakespearean witches with an agenda. The worst time of the night is somewhere between 3 and 4 AM, long after the night staff throws their well-stocked trolley of cleaning supplies into the utility closet in the basement, well before the janitor comes by in the morning to unlock the main doors for the next day of business. 

Every building has a slightly different way of making its presence known to unwelcome intruders. This time is its time to stretch and flex and assert itself over its territory. Hospitals, contrary to popular belief, actually aren’t that bad. Too many anxious pre-op patients pacing the halls, too many restless relatives in waiting rooms, too many exhausted on-call attendings. Libraries are unpleasant. You can definitely feel the books hissing their disapproval at your audacity to cross into their unsullied world the peace of the darkness. Office buildings are mostly dormant, exhausted by the tiresome routine they endure day-in, day-out, dreaming of a time when they’ll house more than pencil-pushers.

School buildings are the worst. Elementary school buildings are just lonely, but university buildings are downright depressing. A subtly mocking, almost malicious air emanates from these buildings, as though they had seen too many dreams shattered, too many young humans in the mids of discovering themselves broken as they are forced to fit into a slot in which they didn’t belong. They’re not bitter, or vindictive, just subtly amused that you’re still here studying for your exam the next morning, because it’s seen what the establishment does to all the hopefuls that pass through its halls. 

She told me I was incapable of love. I don’t think she meant it maliciously. She was very matter-of-fact about it, like she always is. Like, you know, I don’t think history is your strong suit, why don’t you give geography a try? Except it was you know, I don’t think you’re capable of human emotion, you should consider giving it up. 

I didn’t quite agree with her assessment, but I guess I wound up internalizing it anyway. In retrospect, the incident said more about her than it did about me. When she handed me a book about emotional intelligence a few years later, telling me it would do me a lot of good, I was so proud of myself for not laughing in her face. I guess the irony was lost on her. I didn’t try enlightening her…I figured I would get accused of being petty. 

Parents always fuck you up, huh?

Writers write the people they want to be, the world they wish they lived in. The urban fantasy writer approaching middle age with dwindling options and a mild case of clinical depression, the twenty-five year-old young adult novelist who has never been in a relationship, the high school teacher publishing the latest legal thriller bestsellers under a pseudonym, the divorced secretary spinning a grand tale from a more romantic time centuries past…there are reasons they write what they do. There’s a reason you write what you do. 

She hopped up onto the ledge beside him and looked pensively in the direction he was turned towards.

“I’ve never sat up here before. This is kind of weird.” She whispered after a moment, as though it were a confession of conspiracy.

“Clearly you just don’t enjoy the beauty of sitting on radiators in library lobbies.” He didn’t look at her when he said it, but he could sense her quirked eyebrows and skeptical smile.

“Hey.” She leaned closer into him. He turned around then, a little startled at how close she suddenly was. She affected the most serious expression she could muster. “What are we looking at?”

“Nothing.” He shrugged with a studied nonchalance. ” I was trying to see how long I could make you stare off into space for no reason.”

His face broke into a wide grin when she rolled her eyes and slapped his shoulder (he wished her hand had lingered against his forearm a little longer). “I have to go home and call my parents. I don’t have time for your childish antics.”

“How cute.” He said mockingly, affectionately. She laughed and hopped off the ledge, waving absentmindedly as she left. She had almost reached the door when he bit his lip decisively and called out her name. She turned, one hand against the door handle.

“Coffee Friday?”

“Absolutely.” He hadn’t even realized that he had been tense, but at this easy answer he relaxed and winked at her. She laughed again, delightedly, and pushed her way out into the cold.

I’m experimenting with using Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies as writing prompts. This is attempt #2.

It was snowing again. There was something foreboding about the way the soft flakes blotted out the sky. There was no wind—it wasn’t even that cold, most days—but the flutter of white dancing against gray seemed like a dire warning, announcing winter’s intent of conquering this already dying world.

It was easy to imagine the snowflakes as beautiful, cruel soldiers, marching to battle ruthlessly against the few brave souls willing to brave the outdoors in this weather. It was a war that had been raging for months. The sidewalks and driveways were already piled high with the casualties, and yet the sky kept on raging, resentfully sending its troops into the atmosphere to fight the life it can never live. Sometimes the sun remembers its duty and deigns to warm up the earth by just a little, but inevitably it disappears again, bored of the mortal struggle, leaving the freshly thawed ground iced over and more dangerous than ever.

On days when the city was dormant, resigned to the assault of winter and resting up for the next skirmish, each step could mean sinking several inches into a cold that threatened to pull down not just your body, but also your mind. It’s impossible to retrace your steps even a few hours after you first pass somewhere on these days. The flurries of snow hasten to cover up any footprints that have been made in an attempt to distort and disorient. Anything for an edge in this seemingly neverending war.

Stop struggling, the soldiers admonish, sensing weariness. You’re so tired.

Why don’t you dance with us instead? They whisper, deceptively cheerful. It’s okay. Let winter take over.