Alexa
Morning: I’m still clogged when I wake up so I decide to call out sick one more day. The first half hour on my feet is spent waking up slowly and hacking out the last remnants of a cold. After a while I drift over to my work inbox to see if anyone’s mad at me. Not really, but I figure I should send a Teams message about the meeting today in case the Team is wondering where I am. No need, already canceled. I scan my emails and see a “!” from HR to re-enroll my healthcare by EOD, elect my benefits in Paylocity and close Outlook. On my phone I open a dating app and close it immediately, exposure therapy, another inbox. I get up and walk to the bakery to get raisin bagels, my favorite. It’s grey and misty outside and I wear my blue rain jacket just in case.
1:30-2:00: Breakfast smears by and soon it’s time to log on with Bob for our weekly writing hour, a new ritual we started this month. I switch from my dayjob Zoom to my adjunct Temple Zoom account because my dayjob checks my Zoom hours to track my meeting volume with customers. While I wait, I check my UArts email and see a message from a student there. It’s a sweet end-of-semester note, that sort of live-giving scrap when you want to teach full-time but aren’t, and I start to mist up but don’t have time to process before Bob hops on. We talk about being in bad moods due to work stress (or in his case unemployment stress which is fundamentally more stressful), then go off-camera and mute to write.
2:00-2:40: I go to the bathroom to wash my face and pop a zit on the bridge of my nose whose existence has been bothering me and watch it bleed onto my washcloth. As I go to rinse the cleanser off my face, I see that the dregs of brown and yellow mucus I coughed up that morning are still snailed along the basin because the sink drained too slowly, allowing them to congeal there. The basin fills up quickly once again because the holes of the cheap drain catcher are too small and filmed over with residue, and I’m not quick enough to reach in and remove it so I’ll have to wait until the water level goes down to take it out and clean everything. I have a more pronounced streak of germaphobia after the pandemic which I’m thinking at this point is just a part of me for the rest of my life, nothing debilitating but a noticeable new layer of compulsive anxiety: a second or third handwashing when I’m not sure the first times were long enough, wiping down my phone with antibacterial wipes as soon as I get home, always thinking about what my hands touched before I touch my face. I cup them over the faucet to collect water for my face and take care to avoid splashback from the murky sudsy water below. Whenever my sink gets clogged like this, I think of an ex who used to wash his face in the mornings using the water collected in his basin, a distinct image of him reaching into the sink and splashing his face as part of his shaving routine. On a design level it feels only natural to do that, like the basin is fulfilling its purpose, but on a hygiene level I can’t help thinking back about all the roommates and the buildup of bacteria. One night he caught me brushing my teeth with the water running and told me about a song his mother used to sing when he was a kid to teach good water conservation in the house – “aaare you a waste-er-roo?” he asked me in a sing-song voice, and booped my nose on the “-roo” for punctuation. I still think about that sometimes when I brush my teeth now, ten years later. It’s funny what parts of people we take with us into our daily routines, meaningful or not, honoring them or not. Reader, I was a wasteroo and remain so to this day.
2:40-3:00: By the time I’m done writing about the ex and the basin there are still twenty minutes left on the timer, so I get some leftover pasta salad and think about where My Day could go next, then say bye to Bob and log off. There’s a version of this Day where we stay in my living room or bedroom and watch TV, probably hyperfocus on my phone, maybe emerge around sunset to do a quiet lap around Clark Park for a last sliver of outside time, but I don’t want that for either of us. It’s too similar to the other Days in Philadelphia I’ve had lately. (By the time I pull myself off the couch another hour’s blurred by, which is how this keeps happening.) So we’ll go:
4:00-6:00: It starts raining the moment I leave the house, but lightly. I zag past the squirrels and rain barrels and wind chimes, rows of bay windows and lawn flamingos and purple azaleas and little free libraries, the RENT signs for New Age Realty and flyers for the May Fair in the park this Saturday, a good dog and a church and my friend’s apartment on Spruce (hi Dev). It’s that late, ripe Spring in West: shrub of pink roses climbing up the corner building, fragrant orange honeysuckles, a layer of tiny white flower husks littering the brick sidewalk like my cat Momo when she sheds a tip of a claw. In a couple days I’ll walk around the same corner in the rain again and report all the same flowers to my granny on the phone, and she’ll say that she wishes she could still do that (walk outside), and thank me for describing them. We’ll stay on the line for two hours and I’ll talk to her about being queer for the first time, and money, work, love, divorce, art, family, loneliness. She wants me to have more fun.
At University City the flowers cut off, replaced by campus apartments and a garnish of trees. Down Locust Walk, a move-out cart squeaks a wheel and pierces the air. I need to pee and head to Houston Hall where I used to work in my early 20s, but there’s guards posted at every entrance for an event. I can’t tell if I’m allowed or not, so I default to sneakiness and follow a couple people in to avoid getting asked for ID, walk like I still belong and turn by muscle memory down the halls to find a restroom waiting. Like exes, it’s funny how blueprints of certain places stay in your mind/body. At the sink I briefly flash back to eight years ago, changing out of my old burgundy button-down Perelman Quad uniform and slapping on makeup to go out after my shift ended, taking my long ropes of hair out of a bun to become a different person. I realize I just took it down again without thinking, shake it out at the mirror and walk on.
Cross the Walnut Street Bridge down to Schuylkill Trail where I pause to rest on an Adopt-a-Bench (in memory of Anne Bryan, sister, daughter, student, artist) by the river. I watch a couple of mallard ducks drift towards the FMC tower and google a name on a memorial statue I passed a few minutes earlier, Jasper Baxter. Back on the trail, a dogwood with full blossoms that are starting to develop fine lines on their petals and a graffiti tag that says “POET” in big yellow letters like those gold alphabet balloons you see at birthday parties. I step off the path and walk along the grass shoulder because all the bikes and runners behind me start to stress me out. Through a podcast I hear someone call my name: my friend Sara jogs past me smiling in the opposite direction, opposite of stress. Her face is joyful. I smile back and feel lighter.
By the Art Museum, I climb up past the gazebos and find a cliff overlooking the Water Works, watch the river rush over the dam and people criss-crossing through the courtyard dressed for something formal below. elliɵtt texts and asks if I feel like an electron today. I don’t get the joke until they explain it to me later (that electrons behave differently when they’re being observed). In a couple days we’ll be on a walk at John Heinz and they’ll tell me about a dream they had where they were like a baby clinging to someone they could feel but couldn’t see. They spent the dream trying to figure out who or what was holding them, until they finally gave in.
When I get to Fairmount Park, it goes differently than I imagined. I pictured myself finding a large stretch of grass, somewhere open but dotted with trees and just a few people, then taking out the shower curtain/picnic blanket in my bag and lying down. I’d look up at the sky and remember what it was like to be observed from this position once before, then tell you all about the Ring of Fire. “This one time, at theater camp” when I was nineteen, the teacher had all of us stand in a circle (Ring) and take turns going into the center alone (Fire). It was an improv challenge: you weren’t allowed to leave the center until you’d made every single person in the circle laugh at the same time. There were no other rules, except maybe no touching. After several attempts, one boy finally got out by hopping up and down on one leg and crying “carrot!” over and over. One girl stayed in for a painfully long stretch and started to turn on the circle over time when we couldn’t bring ourselves to laugh for her, making snide jokes about different classmates as a form of defensive crowd work, getting on her knees, lashing out and then sort of crumpling. You don’t know what it’ll bring out in you until you’re in it.
When it was my turn, I laid down on the floor and gave up. I started talking into the air to everyone, I don’t know what about anymore. What I remember more is the feeling of calm, and being able to exist in front of people in a way that felt whole and serene because I’d stopped trying to do anything else. In years ahead I’d clock a similar feeling when I’d model for figure drawing sessions, a kind of zen: yes you’re naked, yes they’re watching, and there’s nothing left to worry about now. You are who you are and they see what they see.
6:00 - 8:00: Instead of lying down, I rove around Fairmount looking for a good place to stop, getting restless as I realize the sheer scope of the park and how long it takes to navigate without a car. It’s getting late and I haven’t thought of dinner or how I’ll get home yet. elliɵtt texts again and asks if I want to go to a show at Solar Myth. I’m covid-negative and feeling much better by now, unclogged, so I say yes and veer off into Brewerytown. I stop in a sandwich shop where all the sandwiches are named for different cities, wolf down a Kansas City and a beer in ten minutes then jump on the 15 riding East down Girard. Pass a Celebrate Poetry mural, a plaque for the Pyramid Club, the bright striped rays of the Calcutta House gutted. A dinky condo complex with chandeliers in the windows and a gated, grassless strip of tarmac patio blinks its lights menacingly at the street.
I get off the 15 at 13th and walk North towards Temple, passing blocks of houses. Silver and black balloons for a graduation party, a family outside and the calm notes of wrap-up talk as the last guests get in their car to leave. Deep fuschia roses growing past brick and chain link. On 12th and Master, two guys hammer planks in a fence as the street lamps come on. elliɵtt picks me up on the corner and we drive South.
Night: The concert is lovely, Jim White + Marisa Anderson. I move up a little closer so I can see their hands and faces playing, note White’s chest hair and Anderson’s sturdy soft blue button-down. I’m aware of my feet after all the time walking but it’s not too bad, just feeling. My mind runs through practicing a future conversation while I listen to the show, troubleshooting and caching phrases like a background program running. It’s one long continuous set that must be over an hour but doesn’t feel like it at all, instead more like cresting in water. Like you’re watching a movie where the character is floating in the ocean and the camera bobs in and out of the surface, the hush / the light — if that had a sound, and it was two people making it happen over time, undulating. I like the rapport they seem to have, glancing over at each other occasionally, a small smile of acknowledgement. A quiet word and a nod to confirm that it was time to end. They climb off the stage and into the crowd.
Alexa is a writer and teacher from D.C. now living in West Philadelphia. She works in publishing and teaches creative writing at UArts, Temple, and sometimes Blue Stoop. Poems and podcasts can be found on Interim, Entropy, Peach Mag, Spotify and elsewhere.
