Breadcrumb #663
GENEVIEVE SACHS
Everything that has touched Mary’s tongue for the last month has been bland. Every food, every person, every word. She’s been awake since 6:00am—the first time perhaps in history that she’s been up bothering her dog before the dog can do the same to her. There’s a half-bitten Excedrin on her desk but she opts for two full. Something in her bed is broken and she believes Hank is responsible for both the broken bed and the broken Excedrin. Through the grates of her ground-floor window, she’s forced to look at a cumbersome half-finished tag on the sidewall of the opposing building. Apparently the culprit happens to be Hank’s studio mate. Directly next door under the graffiti is a giant, weed-filled—the foliage but to be honest probably the drug too—lot, or as she and the other tenants of Apartment #1 refer to it, The Pit. Vagrants come and go but the only seemingly permanent residents are the Pit Kitties. The Pit Kitties tend to scream into the wind, at the wind, and at each other every morning but today they’ve been unnervingly silent. Inside, Mary’s stomach recoils every few minutes at the scent of last night’s nearly drained wine glass (bottle) wafting through her bedroom. Yesterday’s abandoned deli coffee sits next to it, and the day before’s sits next to that. She has a rotation of three coasters always in use surrounding her bedside.
She is writing she is recounting she is re-counting because it is Sam’s birthday today and they split four weeks ago. They last spoke 22 days ago on the day his exhibition opened and he thanked her for the flowers she had sent him cross-country. I’m still thinking about you, too he sent back. This is why she decided that her preference is to fill her head with thoughts of coasters and cats in heat and the way her dog taps her shoulder, so that she doesn’t think of how she and Sam couldn’t even make it to the next birthday. Their life as we only occupied the space between birthdays—shortly after his 40th until the month before his 41st. She is 23 but before he gets to you, it wasn’t an Age Thing. The days following their grand finale at the East River, she was on a manic high, delaying the heartbreak and in denial of any other shoe ever dropping. She fared surprisingly well until on the cusp of the Third Week, she broke. She broke and she broke and she broke and she broke her promise to herself not to break.
Mary and Sam’s love fell apart right as the Quarantine hit. The churning collapse of it got her to feel like both Abigail Williams and her yellow bird simultaneously. She used a napkin to write down ways to continue loving him but ate pepperoni pizza and the grease started to drip and her cuticle started to bleed and so did the ink on the napkin. Her flowers died, a different ex got married at City Hall, and a cat on a leash showed up at the dog park. 2020 planners were marked 50% off before March even started so she should have known the universe was about to enter the New Dimension and she should have known it wasn’t going to look very good. She slowly began scaling down her 11:11 wishes as she started to feel more hopeless—smaller and smaller desires until she was simply asking for her eyes to stay dry, to stay open. Meanwhile she was having difficulty opening her own notebook in fear that he’d manipulated her words as well as her thoughts. She was having difficulty opening her underwear drawer in fear that he’d monopolized even her own thongs. The only thing that meant anything to her was Words and she sank into the increasing repulsion budding from him having told her how to write. One night, she dreamt that she wore a red dress to say goodbye to him, and she donated her red dress the next day.
“The days following their grand finale at the East River, she was on a manic high, delaying the heartbreak and in denial of any other shoe ever dropping.”
Another quarantined day she must now get through but she can’t even manage the thought of embarking on her deli coffee trip. She keeps filling her head filling her head filling her head with the man from the dog park in the orange pants and dredging up the courage to cook meat and grand plans of doing laundry so that the Coca-Cola t-shirt Christopher sent her doesn’t reek of him. But her thoughts just keep drifting back to needing to make her ex-lover proud.
Christopher. Christopher came at the exact right time; from the moment her lips first closed around his finger—the first time they met—to the morning he laid down sleeping bags to cushion their bodies on the floor of his closed art gallery, he carried her out of a potentially very deep Pit. And for that, she was grateful.
She knew he was in a non-monogamous marriage and had two kids—a 16-year-old and an accidental 4-year-old—but she didn’t expect to be warming her boots by the fire with all of them, let alone texting pictures of puppies to each parent separately. Bottom of her boots facing the fire, next to her new lover and his wife, careful not to get too close. Christopher said two weeks is when people normally get sick of him. She assured him that she was not “people,” but did wonder why he insisted on sharing every dirty thought in his head, both having to do with her and not. He masturbates in front of a camera for money. A 50-year-old Cam Boy. He described it as his “side business of selling his dick to gay guys and, remarkably, dudes who want me to fuck their girlfriends,” followed by, “the guys who say it’s for their girlfriends are just gay and don’t know it.” He apologized in case his morals had disappointed her but she just blanched inwardly at the humble-brag disguising his glorification of sex work of this sort. Sorry, sir, you have yet to shock me, she kept to herself.
She brushes it off, they brush it off. They do drugs by the fire, he bends her over his workbench, she feels her way to his pullout couch in the dark and takes the train home barely conscious the next morning. That was one week ago. That week followed the Worst Week, which means that presently she is almost two weeks removed from it. In the interim between the Worst Week and This Week, the Quarantine escalated.
As the New Dimension seemed to get even more hopeless, she scaled her 11:11 wishes back up, way up. She wished for it to end, she wished to feel the sun on her bruised legs, she wished to wrap those legs around a body, she wished that the best thoughts weren’t the ones she has right before falling asleep so that she may remember more of them. She wished that crucifying her flowers upside down didn’t make them look more beautiful than the day they were placed in her Valentine’s Day arms, that crucifying them upside down didn’t ultimately keep them alive.
Slowly, the girl realized that in order to continue getting by, everything must come down to a matter of seconds—Fight or Flight. Slowly, she realized that everything comes down to how she treats that passing of time; otherwise, if she checks out, even for what feels like a second, and doesn’t give the passage of time its due sentience, her sun spot will be gone and suddenly she’ll find herself sitting in a room slightly too dark for her to be able to function normally.