morning commute
The anxiety of the pressing uncertainties formed a stubborn shape at the back of Esme’s throat; as if she were trying to swallow a stubborn box of toothpicks. Her hand shook obnoxiously as she attempted to apply her royal blue eyeliner - subtle, but just a hint of difference from the everyday.
“This is so stupid,” she debated with herself.
But the decision had been made and one of the few parting traits she had inherited from her grandmother before she left this sweet earth was the notion of making a decision and sticking to it, regardless of what well thought out dialogues may proceed with arguments thereafter.
Esme straightened up, taking a look at herself in her small retro bathroom mirror.
“Last Day.”
As Esme moved into the small living room of her humble one-bedroom apartment, the weight of the mixed, painful absurdity stung underneath her fingernails. It felt impossible to move. Although her commute across the living room to her temporary in-home office would be significantly timelier than the forty-five minutes on the red line, this felt harder. The desire to fling open the front door and find herself metro-bound with the other overworked and appropriately rushed passengers curled knots into her esophagus.
Esme turned her gaze to catch a glance of a neighboring window. Someone she had lived across from for years and never met had written almost ironically with a cherry pop of lipstick on the window, “I’m getting let go today. If you are too, you’re not alone.”
The toothpick box in her throat began to dissipate. From inside of the neighboring apartment a man could be made out behind the glass. Esme’s eyes locked in with his as he carefully stepped to face her, his message casting sun shadows across his face.
The sincerity of her gratitude poured through the glass. A stranger she had shared air space with for hundreds of days now shared the intimacy in one of her most challenging and important moments.
Slowly, the man lifted his cup of coffee into the air in a small invitation. Esme smiled as she raised her to-go mug in a small “cheers.”
The man knocked back his cup of coffee before glancing animatedly at his watch and nodding towards his living room as a suggestion that he needed to get to it.
Pausing for one final moment, they swam in the mixed pool of their collected anxieties. Raising his cup he seemed to suggest, “together.” And as the sunlight licked their freckled skin, the two took the final inhale of their realities, before turning into their fragmented unknowns.
-b
April 29, 2020
Photo Credit: Camilla Carvalho