Fire Escape
I am sitting on my fire escape trying to avoid obsessively checking various social media sites. I am doing this because my situation feels dire. I woke up this morning and decided that I am living through electronic words and empty validation and I am missing out on something. The problem lies in the fact that I am painfully unsure of what this something is. The wind is touching my face in little bursts and it is knocking the air out of me. I am being forced to exhale dark plumes of dust. The dust is swirling in the air. It is moving with such purpose away from me towards a new destination, I just wish I knew where that destination was.
I live between two metro stations that both cause me severe anxiety. The train passes by my fire escape in predictable increments. Predictability could be what I am missing. Everyone looks like tiny ants that I could squash between my painted toes. I wonder if they can see me watching them. I wonder if they know their lives are hanging in the balance between my boredom and curiosity. I try to distinguish specific faces in the short time the train passes beneath me. I want to know each person on the train. I want to know what they had for breakfast and if they are happy. I want to know when they had their first kiss and where they are going. I want to know if I can come with them.
There are birds chirping from a tree hidden behind other buildings with fire escapes. I am trying to forget everything I have ever learned as a human. I feel this intense pull in my gut that I must decode each sound because birds know the meaning of life. They sound so sure of themselves, but I guess everyone is when hidden behind buildings or computer screens. I can’t tell if these birds are fucking or fighting. Maybe that is the hidden message, the key to life, although that seems pretty anticlimactic.
I fell off of this fire escape once. I don’t remember much of what lead up to that moment of me dangling from the ladder, but I remember what happened after. I came to curled around cellar stairs with a bruise that took up my entire left arm. It looked like an explosion of the cosmos. It felt too big for such an insignificant canvas. I still touch my arm sometimes and mourn the loss of its impressiveness. What if hurting myself is the only impressive thing I am capable of? I like to think that I can still feel its dull ache when I wrap my fingers around where it once called home. Do phantom bruises exist?
I am still exhaling as I try to take all of this reality in.
I forget how to inhale.
I am passing out.
I am asleep.
Kristie Shoemaker is a twenty-two-year-old writer who lives in Brooklyn and doesn’t understand the subway system. You can find more of her writing at 1ittlepeach.tumblr.com and twitter.com/1ittlepeach.
