I am filling up the gas tank of my boyfriend’s 2012 Range Rover when a familiar face appears in my periphery, a local farmer whose family has been here so long that she and the road her farm is on share a name. We pretend not to see one another. Or maybe it is just me hiding from her, because I’m also kind of crying. I flick away a tear and bundle my coat around my neck so I can continue to stare furiously at the point where the gas pump enters the vehicle, listening to gunk ooze into the vacuous tank. It feels like it will take all the gas this side of the Hormuz to fill this huge car up. Regarding the farmer: in general I’d like to be in this woman’s good graces and can’t tell if I’ve projected a coolness onto our repeated interactions or if that dynamic is legit; at best I feel she’s indifferent to me. She is a cattle farmer and so it goes without saying a very hard worker, and very dedicated to the town. I don’t want to trouble her, plus the crying, so I keep to myself. We are kind of neighbors, meaning we live within a 7 minute drive of one another on two very different farms. The main differences are that mine is relatively new and the land owner doesn’t work on it. The landowner is my boyfriend. The farm is a nonprofit that feeds the community, but that doesn’t on its own fold us into the community. I think it’s hard to trust people who show up from nowhere and give stuff away for free (though it’s been happening for over a decade now).
I consider what it would be like to have enjoyed where I grew up enough to have stayed there (notwithstanding my parents selling our childhood home the minute my twin sister and I left for college) and to never have to feel like an interloper, but to watch all the other people be interlopers. Would I prefer it? My hometown is now somewhere the New York Times writes about at least annually as a quite desirable place to live. Oh well. When I think about it a little more, this woman has really always been nice enough. What does she owe me anyway? Nothing. Plus, she throws parties at her farm with her wife and we never go, even though we’re just around the corner. And, twist, I used to work with her wife! We’ve never officially been invited to the parties, but I’m pretty sure they’re open to everyone…
It’s possible we don’t go because I am actually a little shy. I recall a sticker I once saw on an NYC subway platform that read: SHYNESS WILL STEAL YOUR LIFE. When this comes to me I’m still very curious about who took the time and money to make and distribute those stickers. Was it a shy person who resented their condition? Or an outgoing person who had seen the virus of shyness castrate the life of a loved one? Is someone trying to make money off of it? Is there a seminar?
I hustle back into the driver’s seat and sit there momentarily with my forehead on the steering wheel, then drive the three minutes back to my studio, a huge room that acted as a storage space for a local furniture company for the 10 years before I moved into it in November. It feels at once too big for me – what could I possibly do with all this space? And too small – could this really be everything? All my belongings from the railroad apartment I had before I met my boyfriend and we moved up here together by accident during the pandemic are in this room. Or everything that I’ve kept, at least. Aside from clothes and shoes - I put those in a series of closets in my boyfriend’s house. Okay: my house, our house (but really his house).
I am on my 6th day of Covid, which, along with statements from the American president like: “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” has manifested an acute episode of depression, hence the tears, and so I curl up in the corner on a daybed (a cushion on the floor) that the heat from the huge exposed ducts in the ceiling invariably fails to reach. The ducts just blast the same spot on the table below them all day, so I never put any papers or food on there or they will flutter to the ground or sort of cook or stale, respectively. I sit there on the daybed for hours doing my taxes and feeling every lingering ounce of hope drain from my body and mind. I am amazed by my bank account - I double check that the small paychecks I take out of my “business” (intended to give me a legitimate payroll), despite making less last year than a substitute teacher, despite having sold my book for a ‘real good first-timer deal,’ have been making it into my account. They have. I Google “how much money can I make selling pictures of my feet?” and skim a Reddit thread dissuading OP from even considering it. It turns out you really have to work at it, make it your full time job. A commenter writes: “I sold a part of my soul that I’ll never get back.”
I heat up a boyoz - it’s like an unleavened croissant made with sesame oil and shaped like a spiral - that’s been tetrised into the freezer from recipe testing last week. It is greasy and good. The freezer plus the oven are a remarkable duo, slowing and then quickening time together into some molten center. Later, a friend connects me with another friend who is having trouble getting an apartment in New York City. He’s a scholar employed at a well-regarded institution of higher ed but he keeps getting passed over. Usually the realtors or whoever won’t even write him back. Our mutual friend remembered that I once doctored another mutual friend’s bank statements to help with an apartment application years ago. The memory comes back to me in fuzzy fragments like an old dream, but I agree it sounds like something I can and would do. I suddenly feel more alive than I have all day. “I love an illicit task for the good of man,” I write back. “I’m excited.”
My texts to the new friend are green, like spring, like money. We decide that for starters he’ll use my credit score from now on (it is rated “Excellent” for some reason) and he agrees to check back in when he finds a new apartment to apply to. Then we will improvise and scheme. I end the day feeling like I am in good-standing life-wise, having last had to use a fake document to procure housing (an entire phony tax return, which came with the directive “shred that when you’re done”) almost a decade ago. This is thanks solely to now living in someone else’s home, not having the money to afford my own, as this new friend assures me he does. All the same. I also feel like I have some kind of expertise, but cannot quite pinpoint either this or the sensation of a mature lifestyle in meaningful reality. In any case, I am reminded that I like to help people in small, concrete ways.
Unbelievably, there is snow in the forecast tomorrow.
ps. despite the above, all paid subs are on pause until i feel you’ll reliably get your money’s worth.
Now we’ll make some pitas, why not?
The full recipe is below these videos of kneading, dividing/balling, and rolling, which were filmed as part of a thing I did with Avgvst and J.Kim, who are incredibly nice to work with, by the way. Credits are all at the end.
Okay let’s go.
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