“Do you want it in a bag or wrapped up in a box?” I ask, my hands clutching the side of the counter to keep my balance. The world is shivering slightly, as if in a mirage. All I can think about is the fight Cal and I had this morning. There were no winners in that fight, just knuckles and bared teeth.
“In a box, please,” replies the lady as she peers into the credt card machine, her round glasses glinting in the warm, white fluorescent lights that Macy’s always had on, day and night.
And before I can do anything, the world suddenly sours and blurs and tears leak out of the corners of my eyes. I’m half-astonished as I sob, my hands still on the keyboard of the register, my head bent over. As if out of a fairytale, my manager, Niel, walks by, does a double-take and comes up to me at the register.
“Hey, what’s going on?”
“I’m-I’m-I’m,” I gasp, unable to form words. I’d never cried like that before in my entire life; not when I was being beat, not in the psych ward, not when Aadit tripped me in middle school and had to get four purple stitches on my chin, not even when my chemistry teacher found me and my bestfriend kissing (she and I were doing characters from some show (“kiss me and I’ll be yours forever”)(my first kiss ever)) and threatened to tell our parents.
“Hey, listen to me, none of this matters if you’re not okay,” my manager says, pulling me to the side. “I mean it. You have to put yourself first. Do anything you need to do. Don’t worry about this at all, do you understand?”
I’m crying so hard I can barely breathe. It’s amazing how long a bit of kindess can go. I drop the scanner and run like hell for the breakroom. I’m lucky that we’re up on the sixth floor (Home Goods) because the breakroom is up here. It’s mostly empty, but I take a chair at the counter along the wall so I could turn my back to the group of my coworkers swaddled around a table, laughing and complaining.
I put my face in my hands, my shoulders shaking. I’m a veteran of crying quietly, but something had broken in me, something that could never be put back together again. Everything was just crashing down around me. I can’t stop myself, I’m choking and rasping, making guttural noises I’ve never heard before.
It isn’t just the fight, that much I know for sure. It’s the unbearable July heat, it’s working for pennies at Macy’s instead of some hip internship on Madison Avenue, it’s the nagging voices that are low, but not low enough for me to be around knives and tall buildings, it’s selling clothes that cost more than my bank account balance, it’s the tranquilzers I take that kill my creative spirit, it’s my parents’ constant, nagging calls, guilt tripping me for fleeing Bloomington. They would have me chained up in that house if they could.
I wipe my tears with my sleeve, still coughing from crying. My nose was running and my throat was sore. I’ve never cried in public before. But this was out of my control. Why now? Why here? Well, why does the solar system obey Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion? It could be six feet of water or a hundred feet of water, you still drown.
I can hear my coworkers talking about me, speculating, not even bothering to lower their voices. I’m too frightened to turn around and look at them. They say the word ‘boyfriend’ over and over again, and each time it digs a piece of glass into my chest. It has to be some kind of horrible irony, given that they’re part of the problem. My manager, Niel, is the only person who treats me with kindness, a gentle hand to stop a flight risk. I sign all my shifts over to his department.
Despite the incoming transplants and gentrification of neighborhoods, New York still has ethnic pockets here and there; some official, like Little Italy, and some not so much, like the black neighborhood this Macy’s is located in. I’m one of the very few non-black sales associates, and definitely the only Indian person. I’ve always been jealous of the community that black people have in this country. Indians are different. We’re in constant competition with each other. To us, the American Dream is a zero-sum game.
But I tried. I really did.
The sales associates were mostly girls. They got their nails done and had complicated hair and liked hip hop music and didn’t do drugs and never even heard of antipsychotics and went out to bars and clubs I was still too young to get into and had deadbeat boyfriends. It was a clique I had no access to, nothing in common with these girls, hardened by years of living in New York on minimum wage. It was like sipping chlorine with them.
The reason I was in New York in the first goddamn place was because I wanted to be with Cal. School was done, the summer was sizzling and free so I fled from Bloomington to go be with Cal, to become the couple we were meant to be. The couple who went to the opera in gloves and diamonds and silks, who made breakfast for each other, who knew what kind of shampoo to buy, who had sex several times a day, who went to dinner with other couples, who got invited to gallery openings, who sped through town in his dark green Volkswagen Beetle, and frequented restaurants that knew our names.
But of course things never add up the way they’re supposed to. The ice-cream melts and it only rains on the weekends and tax season comes before you’re ready.
By summer ’19, we had successfully passed the seven month itch (albeit with a tarnished record of at least four breakups). But we’d never lived together for such a long stretch of time and we fought like panthers in a cage and fucked like rabbits in the springtime. I could come home from an 8 hour shift wanting to watch tv and eat dinner but he wanted to deep clean the kitchen on a cocaine high, screaming at me about miniscule sugar particles on the counters from my tea.
Cal’s apartment was gorgeous, but unfortunately I was a second-class citizen there (the lesson in being financially abused takes me way too long to learn). The ground floor had the living area, and opened up to the standard Brooklyn garden in the back. The furniture was all walnut and chrome, with dark, inky blues and crimson fabrics that gave the space a touch of the midcentury modern sleekness. There were big, potted plants that nodded their green leaves in the way-too-cold-for-me air. The bed, with its white sheets was always a rumpled mess, from Cal’s tendency to thrash in his sleep and slightly damp from constant sex. Below that, half sunk in the ground, was the floor that housed all his expensive music equipment (yes I was dating a Wall Street guy who plays jazz music and wears sandals), all of which I was under strict orders not to touch. There was also an office set up, and a couch, which most importantly, had a door that locked. That was where I went if I wanted to get away from him, to lick my wounds, to sleep if he was watching Bloomberg at six am.
Our sleep schedules never matched up. Which was much worse than it sounds. We’d rotate around the studio sofa and his bed like two spiders going down the drain in perfect circles, not touching, moving the same way, going through the same places. Not having Cal in bed with me drove me crazy, it made me insecure and ill-tempered and frightened that this delicate, monstrous thing we had together was going to go out like a red star collapsing. Because when the good is this high, the bad is catastrophic.
Schizoposting 
