I'll do today without my heart

Something a little different

Illustrated by Stephanie Davidson, written by Rae Katz

I’m sitting in an air-conditioned office with my fingers white at the tips and numb on the keyboard. My belly is hollow from drinking a diet Dr. Pepper on an empty stomach, and my whole spine, from tailbone to nape of neck, is one long, stiff curve. Will the cartilage between my vertebrae harden like this? I bow my head a centimeter lower. One of these days my chin will reach my chest and stay there. The keyboard comes back in focus. Tap. Tap. If I listen very closely, I can hear my knuckles creak.

Time is going by, I’m not sure how much time—a minute, a year—and I notice my fingers are starting to turn to ice from the tips down. I try to shrug about it, but can’t because­—and I just noticed this—a thirty pound barbell has been laid across my shoulders and neck. The ice fingertips are making me clumsy, and I’m wondering: can anyone hear the extra-loud tapping of ice on keys? I wish I could look around to see if anyone is watching, but the barbell. Tap. Tippity Tap.

Ho hum. Just another day.

I focus on the white light coming from the screen in front of me. My whole world is the screen, and the keyboard, and my ice hands. I shiver in the air conditioning and look up at the wood paneled wall. On the other side is the world, hot and beating like a heart.

*

This is how I remember those years, now. I sat and sat. I sat while my limbs froze, while vines grew up around my thighs and wound tightly down the legs of my chair, while my fingernails grew into the little spaces between the keys and got lodged there. I sat until my back froze in a C-shape and my pectoral muscles became so tight that the front of my body forgot how to stretch tall, until the white light from the screen was absorbed into to the colorful parts of my eyes and my eyeballs turned white, too.

*

I’d prefer to lose the tip of my finger on a mountainside from a red Swiss army knife sliced the wrong way through a stick of beefy pepperoni. Let my shoulder come out of its socket while I’m lifting a child by the hand so that she can swing with a squeal over the white foam top of a wave hitting the beach. May my back give out while chasing a flock of plovers off the sand. I’d like my neck to stiffen over a windy night in a tent on a cliff overlooking an alpine lake, my eyes to go dim from staring straight at too many sunsets. I’d like my gut to get weak from homemade pasta slathered in basil pesto grown, fresh from the yard, and good beer. I’d like my hips to give out from my daily bike ride through the streets of my majestic city, to snap my ankle because I was looking up, lost in the rows of rainbow flags flying crisp and joyful against the blue sky.

*

Once I asked an odd, thoughtful colleague in my office:

“What do you think we’re like?”

“I think we’re like pickles in a jar,” he said.

Preserved, but aged before our time.

I’d rather be a leaf, already brown by fall

Eaten through by a ladybug.

Coming up…

Once, fifteen years ago, I asked a stupid question. I was on board a ferry boat, a rising college senior, red-cheeked from a day at the beach. A group of friends lounged on the deck, high on the sweet, auspicious air of early summer, bare arms slung over shoulders. The late afternoon sun glanced off the waves and projected sparkles. Everything was wide and inviting ahead.

I wanted to know the plans for the night, so I turned to my friend Alex and said,

“So are you guys, like, partying later?”

The syntax and word choice were odd. I was a serious student, the type of person who would use the word “syntax.” Alex, with an inborn instinct for comedy, mined some hilarity from my dumb question. He turned to the group and yelled,

“Hey, everyone, are we, like, partying later? Anyone, like, partying?”

The small group giggled and repeated my badly composed question—Anyone, like, partying later? I blushed a happy pink, the butt of the joke but also the queen of the joke. I’m a fiend for this kind of fond teasing. This kind of love.

So? That would usually be the end of it. A silly, frivolous joke. Barely a joke, really.

But that year this phrase became a habit—Are you, like, partying later? If Alex and I encountered any discussion of nighttime plans, any mention of events on campus, indeed any use of the word “later,” he turned to me and said, Are we, like, partying? Later? The phrasing evolved—later, are we gonna, like, party?—and became truncated—later, wanna like…? Eventually the entire joke was contained in just a glance my way and a single word: party?

This excerpt is from Ode to an Inside Joke, an upcoming essay about my friendship with

Alex Dobrenko`

of

Both Are True

. It will be made available this Thursday. To read the full essay and get more like it, please consider a paid subscription!

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A quick note to say that I’ll be taking next week off to spend time working on our community building project at the land. Instead of a new essay, you’ll get a favorite from the archives. Paid subscribers will also get their April roundup next week, including an essay from 1877 and some photos from our construction in the woods!

Meet me in the comments…

What did you think of this short lyric essay? It’s different than what I normally write, and I’d love to hear your thoughts!