Sam Heaps
9am The heat in my apartment has been off for three days now, the chill might be an omen, everything I depend on is falling apart. But, I am trying to remain in the present. The bed is full of the warmth of my dog, my cat, Y. My cat likes to sleep on the pillow next to my face, my dog likes to sleep against my lower legs, Y and I like to sleep entangled. We fuck while waking.
10am The floors are cold to the touch, I’m feeling unwell. Yesterday the rental company sent a mass text saying the issue would be resolved immediately, but now I’m worried I will have to wait until Monday, or even longer. I am worried about the neighbors next door with the infant and the toddler. Y and I stand in the shower together, hot water works fine, making dick jokes and having a conversation about Anora, which we saw the night before. I say the ending made me feel something, but I don’t think it justifies the middle, or the beginning. I do not like that this is the story some man wanted to tell, in this way.
11am - ish We walk the dog to the Farmer’s Market near Clark Park. The cat stays home. I am wearing the same long underwear I wore yesterday because I haven’t wanted to walk to the laundromat the past two weeks. I am filthy and look like a puffy winter child in my coats and my red cheeks and my hat hair. Y and I have a conversation we’ve scheduled for the end of the month, and I am sad I don’t look better on what may be one of our final trips to the farmer’s market. When we met about six months ago I was visiting a fertility treatment facility for tests and monitoring, hoping to get pregnant with donor sperm through IUI. I still want to have a child, and heard enough medical results bookended by “beautiful,” and, “for your age,” to be very aware a pregnancy now will be considered geriatric. But, two months into our relationship, I stopped actively trying to conceive. Y knows all of this. We are trying to decide what we want from each other, and how much of what each of us wants individually is worth sacrificing to that. We will be reforming or separating by the new year.
I have gone to the farmer’s market most Saturdays since moving to West Philly. It is one of my favorite parts of the week. Recently I haven’t had enough money to buy produce or flowers, but Temple’s Union (TAUP) won raises for faculty there, especially for the lowest paid adjunct faculty, and last week I received a fat $5,000 check which helped me get in control of some personal loans whose payments I’ve fallen behind on. I teach and work as a labor organizer, and recently both jobs have felt futile. So, it is nice to remember at least one of the vocations I sell the hours of my life to, can occasionally do good.
I buy kale, two tomatoes, an onion, yogurt, and a small loaf of zucchini bread. I feel a little gross after, buying more food than I know I can eat in a day always has this impact.
The person behind me in line is someone I know who I once abandoned at a social engagement with no warning because I had severe stomach pain I did not want to explain, and then never followed up with because I had severe depression, which no one ever wants explained to them. I also know they are friends with my ex’s new wife on Instagram, which frankly I should neither know about nor care about. But, it’s true, and it makes me wary. Their dog looks a little like mine, and I pet her appreciatively and avoid too much eye contact with her owner. My dog and this person’s dog are around the same age, but their dog is going visibly gray. A reminder, again, of a clock. I am trying not to see decay everywhere.
A car drives through the market with speakers attached to the roof. The driver wants us to know “Only Jesus Can Save You.” Y was not raised fearing God and says he is annoyed by the implication that the person listening believes in sin. I say it had not occurred to me that someone wouldn’t believe in sin. And we talk a little more like this and then are quiet for a few blocks. Y walks me to my apartment and holds me in his coat while we watch a very large bird soar in the sky above us. We are a little overly affectionate in public. Maybe it should embarrass me. But, I just like it, feeling and expressing so much pleasure. When the bird is gone I go in alone.
11:50ish I write the first part of this with the cat sitting on my lap in my winter coat in front of a space heater. The animals had cold ears this morning but seem to be okay right now. The dog is wrapped in a blanket on the sofa. I call the rental company again. Again, they do not pick up. I take my Prenatal Vitamins and notice there are only two left and feel dread at the idea of replacing the bottle, or not replacing the bottle, and the decision implied there and the time that is passing. My period is going to start soon. First remembering this is a sadness, remembering what I hoped for in this month. But it is also a relief. Today is the darkest day of the month. There are only twelve of them in the year. Also I only have a few more years of them. Both feelings.
12:38pm I am running late to meet my friend Sean. I walk to my trolley stop and just kind of linger on the side of the road for a while, waiting. I haven’t been able to upload more money onto my Septa card, I usually like to bike or walk the city, even in the winter, but today am not feeling well enough — so when the trolley arrives I pay for my ride with quarters I hold in my hand. I try to dump them all into the metal mouth but instead am forced to insert them one coin at a time while the car begins moving. It is crowded with people in staticky coats. I feel guilty I have a single window seat. A woman next to me is telling another woman that they need to get off, “I have a three year old who really has to go potty,” and it makes me feel something like longing for my family, who I very rarely see, but longing isn’t right. I don’t want the feeling. More, it makes me feel sorry for my mother. It also makes me think about my conversation about sin with Y earlier, and whether or not I deserve a child. Then I am thinking about the ending of Anora and how really I do think less is more, but how there is infinite depth to a day, which makes me think of Ulysses, which Y and I saw a reading of for my birthday, and which is the name of Y’s hometownship. And the wealth of associations could take another page. What important things might I be leaving out that would help a reader make a connection? But I admire brevity. While I am typing these notes on my phone a child around the age my ex’s son must be now stands next to me and my stomach starts to hurt.
I get off at 19th street and walk across the parkway. At the center fountain there is a small American flag next to a head of wilted lettuce. The fountain’s statue’s toes are settled on top of one another and evoke the kind of rubbing one does before falling asleep. I am so cold, I could fall asleep. I see someone sleeping on a bench in front of the big Mormon Temple my family’s tithing helped pay to build. I am thinking about where the tithes could go. Where the money goes.
1:10pm I am only ten minutes late to meet Sean at the Kite and Key. The Kite and Key is not a place I would recommend generally, but it is somewhere familiar from my twenties, and the nearest bar to the Free Library, where Sean and I are going to see our friend Lauren present her novel. Sean asks what exactly this means. I explain to Sean what Blue Stoop is, and say I think this is a big deal thing. Sean, Lauren, and I all took creative writing classes at Temple in undergrad where Lauren was always the golden child. We’ve both heard readings from her book before, but have never read it in full. At the bar there is more staff than patrons. Sean has a Guiness and a burger and I have an orange juice. I bring up Anora, which Sean has not seen but which was pitched to him as a slapstick comedy. We have not seen each other since the election and talk about politics for a while. He asks about my students, and I say they’re not doing well. I ask about his wife. Sean and his wife are two of the best people I know. They’re both doing okay.
2:00pm Sean and I have a hard time finding the room where the event is and so are a little late. There is a Book Art fair in the vaulted foyer and we walk through back and forth several times. A woman smiles at me. When we arrive at the room I serve myself coffee and a burnt chocolate chip cookie. There are two presenters. Lauren reads first from her novel, Thorns and Roses. It is about so many things. Her energy is earnest and frenetic and very beautiful. When she reads her hair kind of flies around her face, and she uses voices, hand gestures, she leans forward and back. I have seen her cry reading before. Her book makes me feel less bleak.
My friend Nikki reads from her novel Stopping next. I read an early version and I am impressed by the warm grace Nikki presents with. The book is concerned with heroin use in Kensington, and recovery, among other things. After she is done a man in the audience says he just completed a memoir about his own experiences in North Philadelphia. The two talk for a while and there is an almost-crying feeling in the room. Many audience members want to share the importance of this project to them. One of them shares the same preoccupation in the story with me, that of futility as virtue.
I am a little jealous of both of my friends and the books they have written and the success they will deservedly have. But I am glad to notice it is only a little. I am mostly just happy for them, and to have these stories written here in Philadelphia, by people who need to tell them. To see them noticed feels important.
4:15pm-ish The event is over and I stand awkwardly in the corner even though I should try to be social. I try to help the event coordinators move the chairs and clean up but they would prefer it if I did not. Lauren’s husband and I talk about the 7+ cats and kittens that were trapped in their backyard. They’ve found most of them homes, including a bonded pair of kittens now named, Yesterday and Tomorrow, and a young mother named Poet. I was able to help a sick kitten drink milk by bottle the other week. Hopefully he has a home now too. Sean offers to drive me home. We say goodbye and Lauren puts down her big white board - which she’s brought to illustrate her process - to give us both a hug. I tell her I’ll see her at her reading series in the evening.
In the car Sean and I talk about Lauren and Nikki’s projects. Sean tells me the drill he leant me earlier in the year is mine now, he bought another one. We talk about the UArts closure, I was teaching and organizing at UArts just last year, and how there’s a book there. I say amongst my colleagues it was decided I was too stupid to write it. We discuss the decline of higher education. I then start complaining about hypocrisy and get a little long-winded, but I am distracted by a bumper sticker in front of us which is either of one of the three stooges or of John C Reilly. We consider who the driver ahead of us might be driving across the Schuylkill and I watch the sunset which is a violent display of color. Pink scaly clouds over Boat Row to the right. To the left the light reflected in the skyline. I think about fiction.
5:17pm I make myself instant noodles with kimchi and the kale I bought this morning after realizing I’d mostly forgotten to eat today. The dog is walked and fed, the cat is fed. I sit down to work on this again in my winter coat in front of my space heater with a glass of orange wine and a pint of Cherry Garcia. Some of the ice cream melts on my hand. The kitten is licking my fingers while I type. Now he is watching the words as they appear on the screen like they have meaning to him.
7pm A little bit of the future seems to want to sneak in here. I’ve already allowed the past to cloud the present, hopefully an unintended alteration as a consequence of hindsight will now be forgiven.
I walk to the reading at Upstairs Abyssinia. When I arrive Lauren gives me cash to buy myself and her a beer and I stand awkwardly too long in line. I sit in the back of the room. A popular poet sits next to me and I immediately begin to flush from my hairline to my toes for a full 45 minutes. I do not know if it is because I am nervous around the poet or if its the heat from wearing too many layers, I am not sure if the layers smell, or if maybe I am flushing because I am starting to develop a fever — but interrogating the possibilities and considering that I may be being perceived to be flushing by any of the many other popular poets in the room, makes my condition worse.
All of the poets are talking about America, its rottenness. I like this about poets. Their anger. I have always been an admirer of the poets, like they are something completely other than me. I am worried the interest is perverse. All of the readers make jokes about the assassination of the CEO. Everyone laughs at the jokes. In the back of the reading is a stack of The New York War Crimes, which everyone also applauds. It is strange to feel so much grief, and also to be sitting in a chair in a room. I sometimes worry the poets actually believe they are not complicit in the same system as the rest of us because they have been given powers to observe and diagnose our sicknesses. That holding up that horrible lens so we can observe ourselves clearly, makes them believe they are on the outside, looking in. I think probably that is mostly not true and only a product of my obsessive reverent study of them, this grouping I feel outside of.
During the open mic a playwright reads a poem about losers, a friend reads a poem about his dog and a branch and ritualized suicide. A poet says maybe I am a woman — or something like that. The context makes it funny, which is another thing I like about poets, that they’re often very funny. There is a woman in stockings and a short skirt I am hyper-conscious of. A man I know on the internet said ugly people should stop writing about having sex — and although I disagree — I am inclined to agree with West Philly Gen Z that everyone is actually hot — I also was worried this man was talking specifically about me. Tonight I am very conscious of looking nothing like the woman I thought I was when I was in my 20s.
After the reading Y surprises me at the bar with his band. It is not a surprise for me, there just aren’t very many places to drink in West Philadelphia, but it is still a sweet thing. I drink Makku. I make a gesture to the table, show the way Y’s father wept when he heard their new album. Head thrown back. I try to convince a songwriter that sometimes we have to share imperfect things. I think I am successful. We talk about making art for a while and the relentless shitting of his four kittens. The feeling of being alive. Last year the songwriter left me on read for 72 hours and I almost did not survive. I notice again how a day can expand infinitely, and think I understand why bars are such useful tools for exposing that in narrative. I think about my first date with my ex at the table to my left, his first date with his first wife in one of these chairs. I think about the band that used to play in the corner where now there is a table where I have a photo taken. I think about my book launch here. I think about New Years Eve of 2024, a year that is almost done.
The songwriter leaves and I talk with Lauren and another poet about love.
Lauren and the poet leave and Y and I drink a little more Makku and tequila. We are talking about Anora again, we are gossiping a little, we are talking about his family and my day. I don’t know it yet but tomorrow morning a poet will read a line about form, and how for it to be forever it must constantly be remaking itself, or something like that. I wrote it somewhere but now it is lost. And I think both of those things are what Y and I are talking about tonight too.
Y and I almost never fight, but today on this day of close observation, we do. I tell Y I am feeling dread, the looming fear that is chasing me in the environment, in myself. We are full of booze and intimacy and the conversation we have been saving for the end of the month is broached. Y scalds me with a quick prescription. I am afraid there is not room for me. I ask him, Why. My favorite Fiona Apple song is Drumset, and this is the tone of the, Why. I don’t think it is a question for Y though really. That’s what you learn in therapy.
In the apartment I sit on the floor in my two coats in front of my space heater, arms crossed, next to my copy of What to Expect Before You’re Expecting, which is a terrible title.
I walk to the edge and I see Y has walked there too. I am trying to jump.Y takes my hand and we continue talking. Y and I talk until we can’t talk anymore. I crawl into my bed still in my coat and long underwear and double socks and Y climbs in with me. At some point Y makes a joke about me writing an essay about him being the Russian oligarch from Anora, which is mean to both of us, because I could, because I would. I laugh. The cat is on the second pillow and the dog has found her way under the covers as well, this night she curls up to Y’s legs while he holds me. At 3am I fall asleep and my day is over.
Sam Heaps is getting through the winter, and after over 100 hours, their heat is finally back on. You can buy their toxic sex memoir, Proximity, wherever books are sold.
