Somewhere Else

I shrug on my jacket as the first morning comes when I can feel the cold air left over on the woman sitting next to me on the metro. She wears boots and leggings and loses herself in a book, as I am doing, and we co-habit a bench for a few minutes, sharing the cold. The escalator moves me upward to what is usually the light of morning, but today is the gray of morning, and even the musicians place themselves in a new corner of the atrium. They are powerful artists, an electric base and a fiddle, playing melancholy and weepy covers of well known pop songs and bright jaunty versions of classical duets. The voice of the human violin attach themselves to the spaces between us as lawyers and assistants wait for the cars to slow so we may cross the street, the violin fading to make way for the deep metronome of the amplified bass, and as these sounds are lost the cohesion of the crossing professionals is as well. We part each to a different straight path on the sidewalk, into different offices with different door-men and different receptionists, all who have themselves lost the strings they crossed the street with.

The elevator carries me to the ninth floor, to a corner cubicle with a view of the offices. In my space I turn on mellow music of loveworn artists, drink coffee and then tea, eat a grapefruit and then a banana, make plans and copies and file folders and mail off envelopes and answer telephone calls with a “Let me check if he is available please hold” and a “can I take a message” and a “thank you goodbye”. The photocopier is warm today, the office mimicking the September air, and I laugh at how my sixteen-year-old self was utterly correct. My days are exactly what I thought they would be. Not so much working for a lawyer, but in my Mad Men-esque world there is the same elements of organizing and copying and detailed tasks, collared-shirt-and-heels uniform, simple and small but constant attentions to details that I believed I would be performing. I live where I expected, drive the car I saw in my mind, eat and move in the style I anticipated. This image will have faded to the seventeen year old me, when I saw myself a married mother to a young medical student as most likely, but here I am, proving my youth correct in its own presuppositions (Does this make my infancy wise? Am I old in my adolescence? I certainly was an old child, a serious one, but can hormonal self involvement really see clearly? Perhaps the point is moot).

I have dreams now of somewhere else, of being where the tree limbs are longer than the street light arms because there are no street light arms. I see deep turquoise ponds and alien birds and humble bowing people in impeccable robery, with dirty feet and simple food and beautiful buildings providing the background of beautiful thoughts. I am more and more hungry the more food I eat, relishing the application of texture and color to the taste and nutrition, all propitious, promising a better me, goading my urge for optimization. Such luxury in orange tea and flatbread with homemade baba ghanoush, such sheer joy in a carefully constructed salad and jasmine green tea. I am not here, but in Pakistan, or in India when I eat. I am not here, but at a wooden table in the muggy evening after a sweaty noon surrounded by oil lamps and tapestries. I am not here but somewhere else.