The traveler in the city in a love story.
I moved here about a year ago, and it isn’t much of a city compared to the last one I was in. This city isn’t extremely loud, it has great hangout spots, but not enough people to stop them from looking desolate. It could pass as a ghost town during the night hours. I don’t exactly care about these intricacies, these minutia, I only care for the rush of walking into a new apartment door and judging the similarity of its scent to the last one you inhabited. The city is quite expansive nonetheless, the residential suburb being somewhat more lively than it.
I have a few friends and we go out every once in a while, placing straws on the city’s spot on the map and pulling up to decide whether we like its taste or not. I don’t exactly like the taste of this city. It is a drink that tastes good while in your mouth, but has the most repugnant of aftertastes. Normally I can eschew the feelings of disgust and learn to love what I like about it, but this time I don’t have it in me. I’m thinking of leaving soon. I’ve been looking at more reserved, rural areas: upstate New York, Maine, maybe NorCal.
“What time is it?” The warmth on my leg shifts. His morning questions and grunts are adorable to me. We’ve been sharing this bed for about four months of the year I’ve been staying here.
“Ten forty,” I respond. He’s my best friend called Jaquan and has the most regal mane of locs framing his face. I’m not much of a contrast: I have rather dark skin and wear my hair in a large afro, which I twist on occasion, that could only be described as luxurious. He sleeps at my place despite having a place of his own, because he enjoys my body warmth. I like the way he clings to my presence in this way like a suckling babe.
He shuffles into the bathroom, making use of the amenities I purchased to accommodate his stays here. I hear the soundtrack of a bathroom routine: the toilet flush, the toilet paper being rolled out of its prison, a striptease, and the water begins to run. I wander into the kitchen, motivated both by giving him privacy while he gets dressed and the demands made by my growling stomach. I grab a banana and sit at the table in my less-than-small kitchen, feeling embarrassed because it is a little dirty. I want to clean it, to satisfy this desire because it makes me feel slightly like an insufficient person, as if I’m missing some part of me. A void. A void that refuses to be quelled no matter how many apartments I smell or how less and less busy the cities I love to find become.
I begin peeling the banana when I hear Jaquan in the kitchen before I see him. I slide the banana between my lips and look up. “You’re so crazy,” he says, laughing. He’s paused in the middle of retrieving an item from the fridge to fill his belly. I laugh, chewing my banana between each ha. “What do you mean?” I say, taking another bite. “People always say things like that to me.”
He considers his words before they reach the air, sprayed out like the contents of an aerosol can. “It’s just that I was asking you where the jelly was, but you were just staring off into space and couldn’t hear me. It’s like you can travel without even having to move from where you are.” I chuckle softly and stare at my banana. My teeth marks across it look like a mountain range on one of those oddly satisfying textured and contoured globes. I look up again and he’s sitting across from me with two slices of bread, freeing the deep purple mass from its plastic prison, only to be held prisoner, yet again, in his digestive tract.
We laugh and chat over breakfast; mouths going dry then moist again with spittle occupying the corners of our lips. We cover our empty plates in spit as we converse, and then the table, evidence of us there forever even if we move away or destroy the table. That permanence is important to me, not exactly tangible, corporeal permanence though. Permanence in people’s minds. To know that I exist in many places at once reaching even beyond the great equalizer, death. Jaquan eventually passed through the portal to the outside world, the front door. He moves from my place to another planet; the planet where people are laughing and talking, shaking hands, or walking, having a good time and being.
I do not have to work today so I get to sit at home and relax. I get to watch the sun revolve around the earth. The clouds pass in front of it, then away from it until it is dark enough for the moon to be truly visible. After he leaves, I retire to my room which contains the whole world. Maps cover the walls: one of the whole world with political boundaries noted and then continent-specific maps. There are many more maps to buy—of my favorite states in the United States and my favorite countries from each continent. It is an idea tossed around in my head of whether or not I should still buy those especially because I am considering departing from this place.
I’ve gotten into my usual “day off” get up and set up. The gray sweatpants somewhat match the cream color of my bedsheets and the two mingle and melt, cementing me in place for today. My laptop, a dull gray combination of metals and plastic, sits before me, of course internet connected (for how could I not join the masses and worship the god of modern life?), with my smartphone sitting next to it. During the day I will toggle between the two; checking my phone to assist in boosting my self-esteem, ego, and to get an idea of my general marketability as a person, not a product. The dull gray contraption will be used as my portal to the outside world. Not quite as appealing as the movies, it being dull gray, but I guess it will suffice.
The various white screens on the gray slab feed my hungry, fleeter brain. Initially the screens have foreboding messages in all capital letters about the future of our nation with regards to our future leader, the state of our economy, police brutality, and the sensitive topics of marginalized communities. I study my dark brown skin for a minute, frown, and decide not to care about it. After all, I could just leave. These screens morph and shift and change and shake like clay for which I am the potter. I think it is that quality about the internet that allows its tendrils to remain deeply entrenched in our bodies, connected to our hearts. And while my heart knew that it wasn’t best for me, I needed access and information. This control and command means a lot to people. The screen shifted to reflect what was on my mind at the time: apartments in the cities of the areas I’d been probing with my mind’s tongue. Prices in black print jumped out at me against the stark white of the screens like warning signs. They were far too expensive for my current budget, though that was entirely irrelevant to me when looking. When I look at content like this my body undergoes the most pleasant of sensations like your mind sneezing, a release of a tension that you didn’t know existed.
I’ve never been afraid of being penniless or not having sufficient money to move again. I’ll be homeless if I need to—I must support my habit by any means necessary. My phone vibrates. I flinch at the sudden noise and my legs shift, separating from the soupy mixture of gray and cream from my sweatpants and bedsheets. I press the home button on the screen and unlock the phone. Jaquan texted me a map, a location to be exact, with the following message: “hey there’s a party tonight wanna come? the addy’s above.” I immediately fill with excitement. “sure what time?” is my response. He texts back in seconds; he probably left work not too long ago. “It’s a house party by a friend from work at nine.” I thank him in return and smile to myself. I’m going to a party tonight. The prospects of social gatherings that excite me are the food (not in the way you’d think), meeting different people, and meeting a different people.
My phone vibrates again at the behest of Jaquan with a text message reading “i’m here.” I am giddy at the thought of being able to travel to a new place within the same place that I’ve been staying in for a year.
“Hey Quan,” I said with a smile in my vocal pattern. I entered the car and filled the air quickly with my copious happy hormones and neurotransmitters spilling everywhere.
“Someone’s in a good mood!” he says in response. He shifts the car into drive and off we go. We drive past places familiar to me, the grass near the sidewalk a blur. Driving in your city at night is quite like following a color inverted tapestry. It’s a tapestry of the place you’ve known for a while but with new colors and new people with the backdrop of a blue- or indigo-black sky. We pull into a gas station and Quan exits the car.
The door of the convenience store spits him out and he comes bearing gifts wrapped in brown paper bags. He hands them to me through the window and facilitates his car’s own version of cellular respiration. I observe my surroundings while he does this and found a spider weaving a web on the trail which my eye was walking. It wove in a spiral like how life throws you for a loop the whole time, then you meet your eventual end in the middle. Not too far from it another spider was weaving a web. They grew closer and closer together and knew it. They kept weaving so close to each other despite squabbles this might cause about whose food belongs to whom. It was like fate wove them together. Chance. Opportunity. Kismet in action.
We’re on the road again, drinking my green smoothie and his flavored water.
“We’re not too far from the place now,” Quan reassured me. I don’t care though. I enjoy watching the people live, watching the landscape metamorphosize before my eyes.
We pull into a dark parking lot of another apartment complex. I almost jump out of the car and am slightly dizzy with my excitement. We reach the door and can hear the bass in the music shaking the ground we stand on. It feels like we’re teenagers again. We ring the bell and are greeted by a man who looks like he would be coddled by his parents and peers.
“Thanks for having us!” I say while Quan hands him the bag of chips we bought. I turn around and roll my eyes at Quan he laughs softly and tells me to “chill out.”
The greeting at the door seemed elementary in comparison to what the entrails of this apartment looked like. I was attacked by many bright colors, bright people, and bright sounds. Celestial discord. Quan takes me around and introduces me to his horde of work friends that I don’t know; Liz, Jack, Shauna, Kat, Kelly, Ahmed, just seas of names and people that I have to save in my head for a later date. We laugh. We talk. We drink, and soon enough we dance.
I inhale the music and let it go straight into my bloodstream and then my brain. My body is the interpreter of every peak and fall of the music. I’m dancing with Jaquan, dancing with Ahmed and Shauna and then I begin to dance with someone I don’t know and the crowd sucks me into its orbit. I bump into a woman and hear her gasp so I quickly turn to apologize and then something happens. As I look for her face to make eye contact for the apology I see a light starting to emanate from her. She has beautiful brown skin and light brown eyes. In the strobing lights I see that her hair is in a twist out. I realize that I’ve located her head so I begin to speak. But as I speak, her head starts to split at the seams. Everyone is still dancing so I’m confused and begin to try to remember what I drank. Her brain is exposed but instead of a pink mass with several sulci, I see what looks like a globe with maps floating above it. I go to touch it, and then her head is sealed again and I am still on the dance floor, stumbling through an apology. I stop myself short.
“Um, what’s your name?” I ask instead. I smile to myself while she says it. I think I’ve found my reason to stay.
—By Prince Q., 17, Florida