I Want You to Tell Me

On her walk home, Sasha stopped for an iced coffee at a shop in the basement of an old brownstone. She sipped it as she thought about the class, about what the professor had said, about the truth. The sun was slanting down in long bright staves of light over the edges of buildings as cars rushing from light to light passed her. She let the class filter through her thoughts and let it run out over her life, which suddenly seemed small and predictable. She was just a college student with a boyfriend and a major going back to a small apartment just as any professor might predict. She was no one to take seriously, just a sophomore handing in her little papers for marks and as so often happened on these walks home, her life started to dissolve around her, as if it were paint oozing down the walls revealing a nothingness behind them. 

She was a black silhouette proceeding through a world of white outlines.

She tried to bring the world back: she was walking outside in the city and she loved to walk outside in the city. She was drinking her coffee, cold and sharp and sweet. The ice sloshed around in the clear plastic cup, the condensation was cold on her fingers. The world rose. She had a solid boyfriend, she was taking classes. It fell again, dissolved.

She was surrounded by a buzzing kind of white static. 

She tried to gather it in, form it into some kind of manageable mass in her hands, peel it off the buildings around her, the brownstones and the large gray office buildings behind them. When a bike messenger whizzed by she scooped a snowball from the static and threw it at him. She expected his bike to veer off and crash. She expected that the static would zap him, infiltrate his immune system like a virus. But he just kept going like there was nothing wrong. How did he keep pedaling, keep delivering his pointless envelopes? How did anyone? She thought she saw him wobble, saw her doubt spread to him. It would start peeling everything back and his world would dissolve to pointless static emptiness.

Her legs got weak and heavy and numb. She stopped, leaned up against a wall, breathed for a moment, squeezed her eyes shut, and then kept going. 

She was back in the world. 

The static had fallen away and was small enough for her to grab it like a piece of paper, crumple it up into a ball, and bat it away. There. That was better.

Once she got upstairs to her studio apartment she put her school bag down, squashed the flat light brown squiggly bugs that had started showing up on her white kitchen tiles, and settled at her small table by the window before she threw herself down onto the bed and looked up at the ceiling. She was supposed to be packing. Paul would pick her up the next morning to go to stupid upstate New York. As a siren howled far away and someone emptied cans into a dumpster in the back alley, the ball of static floated back into view through a water stain in the ceiling. She looked at it for a long moment, floating up there, and decided that she would observe it, would study the emptiness that irradiated the space around it. She would analyze it to get at the truth, something clear and strong and sharp enough to pop it with. Something all her own. As it floated down toward her she batted it back up, like a beach ball at a party.