She realized her advancement in career had nothing to do with her skill sets she thought she’d possessed. She learned this from her colleague Kumar who told her it had to with the way she listened to people.
“You have the ability to listen in a way that makes people feel included and special. I wish I could listen like you.”
Mattie disagreed. She was a terrible listener. She wasn’t even listening now. She thought she’d heard Kumar say she’d been advanced in her career. But that was not the case at all. Kumar was in fact breaking up with her and told her still wanted to remain friends.

Inception: February 17, 1967: Shoulders thin, head large and wobbly. Eyesight poor. Wailing.

Deception: February 17, 2019: Shoulders thin, head large and wobbly. Eyesight better but still lacking. No longer wailing. But weeping.

Reception: January 21, 2026: Everyone’s posture has gone south. Heads are hung low. People can see but they are lacking in other ways. Everyone is weeping and wailing.

Coffee is the big lie. Makes me think it will change something. Caffeine whirrs through through my head, like a drone with legs and a smile.

But by the time I get to my desk, I realize I’ve got to pee. This is bad. Peeing provides enough time to think about everything. I mean every thing.

Flushing is useless–it doesn’t snap me out of my now-funk. By the time I get to my office I am in tears, crying caffeine.

Bester Stuster is one of those guys you’d find as a newborn blaring his honker from a dumpster in an ally because he’s covered by red ants after being left abandoned by drug-addicted teenage mother. He survived of course, thanks to the drunken bumbling of a college frat guy who’d accidentally began pissing on him during pledge week at Columbia. But ever since then his life turned out pretty great.

At some point it has to be okay to be an old man.

But before that it has to be okay to be an old woman.

His coordinates along Central Park proved as unpredictable and fast as anything I’d come across. I could never catch up to him, even with a head start. On those rare times I did, he was almost unrecognizable.  Fleetingly presented with a stoic man, a hard, heaving, driving man; sweaty, focused, angling for opportunity, zeroing in on his own state of affairs, deliberating over a burgeoning business, wondering what sort of shower he would step into or would it be a bath he’d take, what body part would he lather first, and how much. And what crevices and opportunities would I discover and grab onto, and if I did, would I be surprised and if so how long would it last before I was pushed away?

“Toast or grits?” the waitress said, having already taken the rest of my breakfast order down.

I put down my glassine-covered menu. I said to her, “One assumes that if one obsesses over someone that hilarity will ensue. Do you agree?”

“Toast or grits,” she repeated impatiently.

“Toast,” I told her. Because that was how I felt.

A good-looking, stocky, hairy man is jogging along the sidewalk toward me. I will melt onto the pavement as he runs past. The other option is that I will gesture excitedly saying, “Heyyyyyyyyy.”
Nowadays, there seems to be no in-between.

I carried a list to the supermarket, one I’d written in the fourth grade, after I’d gotten really really pissed at one of my teachers for humiliating me in front of the class.

He’d slammed his fist on the podium and said I wasn’t listening to him. I remember he was asking us to write down a math problem. For some reason I couldn’t hear him. I guess I was too busy thinking about my list: Rice O’Roni, Pop Tarts, Aunt Jemima’s syrup. Pepsi. Doritoes.

I shouldn’t go into the list. I should go into the anger. The disappointment.

But then there is the other list. Pond’s cold cream. Ex-lax. Luden’s cough drops (cherry)–the one I used for the fifth grade, for another mean teacher.

My sixth grade teacher: Levi’s 501 jeans, Pepsi-free, and Kit-Kats

College professor: AZT, Depends, Preparation H, Zima

Oh dear Lord, I have no idea what she’s going to say when I tell her but just let me take it like a man. Let me just stand there and take it.
In case I can’t: let me cry very stoically and sensitively, maybe a few tears, just small ones that drop off my face quickly and dry quickly.
Please don’t let my nose run. Please don’t let me run.

One cigarette for old time’s sake.

Two cigarettes because the flavor of the second one is different from the first one.

Three cigarettes to reflect on your life.

Four cigarettes to remember how stupid you were to have started.

Five cigarettes because that is all you’ve been given.