Bumpy start to the good life!!

I’m listening to my boss talk about the Goldman Sachs account, wide-eyed, feeling blood trickle down my thighs. As a newbie in the corporate labor force, I didn’t know my rights or privileges from my left elbow, and my manages doesn’t hesitate to take advantage of that. I was subletting a room up in Harlem while waiting for my apartment move-in date and it was a shiny, silver day in the city on an otherwise unremarkable Monday morning. After a week doing orientation in Boston, I was out of stamina, clothes, and patience. I was coming straight from the train station, being made to come into the office with my suitcase, and no underwear on.

It’s my period, I realize, squashing the urge to scream. Or we have another Bloody Mary situation on our hands. I pull my dress tightly with my legs. It’s mortifyingly short, but the July sun outside is unbearable.

My manager is a recently divorced Turkish guy who takes his job way too seriously, as middle management generally tends to do. In addition to making me come into the office straight from the station at the ass crack of dawn, he had many lectures about timeliness, godliness, and all the agency awards we would win. Also some racist comments about India, peppered in like peas in the vanilla pudding.

On my lunch hour, I brave midtown to go buy myself some underwear, even though everyone else is eating their lunch at their desks. I don’t have Microsoft Teams on my phone yet, so I risk being offline through my entire errand.

Midtown is beautiful like a navy ship, with huge, proud, steel buildings, late summer sunshine glowing against the windows, refracting many worlds through the light, in between squares of brilliant blue sky. I duck into the closest boutique and pay eighty dollars for two white thongs (just the thing for the period), and grab a coffee as my cover up, sidle back to the office, panting from my eyebrows, under my eyelids, streaks growing between my legs.

After a few weeks of slow boil torture, as if I were the lobster in the pot, my manager leaves against will, the first of many to go missing overnight, their Teams buttons turning permanently red, and I settle into the job, into the perfect life. Our floor is in the IPG headquarters, our parent company, and it’s gloriously done.

Every morning that I go in, I say hi to the koi fish in the lobby, help myself to an iced caramel macchiato, fire up my work laptop and spend the day drawing, illustrating, sipping, and talking shop at the water cooler. On the days management comes in, there’s a great hullabaloo, sushi to go round, piles of strawberries, grapes, berries, kiwi, anything your heart desired, slices of prosciutto, salami, and ice cream in the freezer. The usually quiet office turns into a burst of life and color. I love it when management comes in. On the days there isn’t much to do, I stay home, laptop open on my desk, snoozing well into lunchtime. The hybrid work schedule is just right, and everyone knows it.

I’ve seen enough darkness in my life to know when the good days are here. This is what I’ve wanted my entire life. An adult job, a cute apartment in Manhattan, making more money than I know what to do with. I stop by every bookstore in the lower east side to finally begin building my library. I throw cash at sable hair paintbrushes, and go out to eat every time a friend suggests it. This must be what the regular person’s life is like. No screaming and slammed doors and hospital scrubs. Just a favorite train to take to work, knowing the name of the doorman, and weekends in the DJ booth at the club.

Yet, the pandemic demands itself to be felt. All around town places are shuttered down, and the city that never sleeps has begun to doze off, red tape scattering through the wind. The post-pandemic world is a strange one, parallel to an online world that has sprung out of nowhere, and promises to stay as long as it possibly can. As far as the eye can see, the recession creeps in slowly, jobs going down the drain, and stimulus checks bouncing. It’s like watching a collective ego death.

Nothing in this universe is perfect, but you sure as hell can make it as close as possible.

Our apartment is an exhausting five-floor walkup. On days I don’t have much work to do, I can smell an eeriness of bad weather coming, suspicious like a salt from water. I can’t ever open my eyes to peace, it never lasts, and then I’m back to circle one, licking my wounds.

My roommates and I get along well, just four girls tackling womanhood, but arguments happen, and later on we find out Maddie has been talking mad shit about Maeve, and hospital stays still threaten the road like bullet trains, but for now, the croissants taste wonderful, and the songs on the radio are always the ones I like. And I’ve left the ghosts of Cal long behind in a previous life (just as long as I avoid Brooklyn).