Self Inflicted | Chapter 5

"His mind raced and took him so far away from reality that he didn’t notice even that he ... was thinking the same few sentences over and over again. That his breathing had slowed, steadied even. That he was causing his own suffering with the story he weaved in his head... "

January is a frigid month in New York. The sun sets before 5pm. The tall buildings create funnels guiding blue winds towards ill-prepared pedestrians. Snow and rain turn to a brown muck on the asphalt. Alexi usually biked across the Williamsburg bridge to get to work. This route, over taking public transit, saved him around ten minutes, but in January it was too cold and icy to consider. If you forgot to wear big tightly knit gloves, the cold wind could frost your fingers off. If you went as fast as Alexi did, your hoodie would get blown off and you’d constantly need to ride single-handedly to pull the hoodie back over your head, and you’d pull it so far forward, in attempt to make it not fall back down, that you’d block your own peripheral vision. Yes, in January, Alexi had a worse time of it than usual. He hated having to take the train to the office. It took just 10 minutes longer, but to have to constantly take those 10 minutes into consideration: to have 10 minutes less sleep everyday, to carry the weight of the jackets and coats on his shoulders, to be stuffed into a train car amidst occasional strange characters, and to have even less time for social interaction, ate away at Alexi’s already low spirits.

His sour mood found no relief with the stresses at work nor when he had to board the train to go back home. Transit wasn’t the problem, it was what it represented. It was the loss of his youth, of living. He hated watching the clock tick onward. He could not join in its progress. 

He wanted to delay the night’s end as long as possible. Returning home from work, he might sit on the bed in his room and let out a sigh, scroll on his phone for a bit and then realize he had wasted thirty minutes somehow. The time just flew away. It was thirty minutes closer to bedtime, which was thirty minutes closer to waking up, and thirty minutes closer to having to rush out into that frozen wasteland to make some meaningless changes to a document for a client. He’d stand up-right and throw his phone to the other side of the bed and think of what to do next, pacing around sighing and muttering to himself. If a concrete action item didn’t float into his head, like to go to the gym or the desire to play some video games with his friends from back in Illinois, he’d invariably crawl onto his bed and pick his phone back up. There were always work emails to check, or more social media.

Sleep can be an escape, if one can convince their psyche that everything will be ok. If the argument breaks down though, then instead of being restful, the night exhausts you mentally. The brain dredges up fears from the past and invents new battles for you to imagine how to get out from. You drift into and out of sleep unaware whether you were still thinking or if half an hour has passed. You toss, readjust your pillows, toss the other direction. Then you start noticing your shoulders are uncomfortable. You try to bring them down, to sleep on your side, your back. But where has their normal position gone? It can’t be this, it's all tight and bunched up. Maybe this? Yes, there it is… wait no it only felt good for a moment. Then you fall asleep and wake up again after dreaming some awful frustrating dream about having to run as fast as possible to catch a plane. You run and you strain and run and turn the corner and strive to get there. You must get there. And then you wake panting. What was the point of sleeping? I felt fine before bed but today my body is sore and the weight of my head is unbearable. Alexi ended his journal entry with, “God, maybe I should start smoking weed or something,” and shut the leather bound notebook with frustration.
“Tanoooooooj,” he called, opening his door, “let's eat something.”

It was 8pm by that point. He spent thirty minutes scrolling an uncurated Reddit, a site for which he had no account, and then spent the next thirty minutes spiraling in his head and eventually on paper about the awful no good time he was having. Tanooj was in the kitchen already, sauteing onions and garlic.
“Way ahead of you. Tonight's menu: Frozen Vegetables Stir-fried over rice”
“My favorite,” Alexi said dryly, “Tell me at least it's the one with the baby corn.”
“You know I wouldn’t forget my baby's baby corn,” he joked.
Alexi scoffed and went over to the sink to wash some of the dishes that had accumulated there already. This was their pattern, Alexi never cooked but always cleaned. Most days Tanooj didn’t cook either. They’d order something on DoorDash and slam it while watching some action packed drama on TV. Their routine included one full episode, a sip of beer for Tanooj, and then a silent few minutes as the two of them sat back and zoned out or in Alexi’s case searched for the will to get back to work leaving behind this warm comfortable spot on the couch with the throw pillow pulled tightly to his torso supporting the mini pot belly he was working toward. Two hours and forty minutes left until midnight.

“What are you up to today,” Alexi asked, hoping to find a way out of updating excel spreadsheets tonight.
“Tuesdays, band practice.”
Something he couldn’t join, not that he’d ever joined much on weekdays. Tanooj would fill his days with people and activities as though there were many hours between dinner and bedtime. Then Hector would come home around midnight, or go join Tanooj directly wherever he was in the city, and continue their living it up until god knows when.
“How’s that going?”
“Dude it’s fantastic. We convinced Nishant to take singing lessons and he’s actually in tune for some songs!”
“Haha isn’t he the lead singer?”
“Let’s just say the voice box is his best instrument hahaha, but he’s passionate which is more than enough.”
“Y’all just need to get a gig now.”
“Yeah, me and Hector were thinking of joining the open mic nights at that cafe Jason runs. It’s usually pretty sparse though.”
“I don’t think I know Jason,” Alexi’s heart started to beat for some reason.
“He’s just the guy who runs it. Anyway I gotta go, it’s already 9:43!”
Alexi sat a while longer watching while Tanooj walked back and forth from his room upstairs and grabbed his ukulele and put on his coat and then went back upstairs to get the keys he forgot before finally heading out the door.
“See you later!”

The house was quiet. The TV had darkened due to inactivity. He leaned his head back, found the wall to be too far away, grabbed a pillow to fill the space and then closed his eyes. His mind wandered to the fact that he was running out of laundry, then to a memory of a girl he had liked in his old apartment building who always remembered his name when they crossed paths in the lobby, and then he regained lucidity noticing that the toe he was itching through his sock was not getting any relief.

He walked over to the sink to finish the dishes, avoiding looking at the clock on the microwave, but he knew the time would begin with a two digit number. He stared at the sink. At the two plates, the frying pan half filled with oily water, the two forks, one laying amongst the small scraps of onion and bell pepper left on the topmost plate, the other’s pronged head barely poking out from under the pile. He stood there motionless with the tap on, watching but not seeing the water overflowing from the mug directly beneath it. His phone vibrated in sets of three in his pocket. BZZZ - BZZZ - BZZZ. He saw it was his mother calling and declined. Then he turned the running tap off. “Idiot,” he thought, turning the tap back on and putting the ScrubDaddy to work. He washed with some urgency. He had happened to see the numbers 22:32 on his lock screen. It's insane, Alexi wondered to himself, that there are dishes to do every damn day. 

He was in a mad rush, but he didn’t know towards what. He had no plans afterwards, no obligations except the ever present work in the morning. After the dishes, he might have time to read? He wanted to be someone well read. He had a greying copy of Nabokov’s Pale Fire on his bedside table. He skimmed through the introduction eight weeks ago, and never found another moment to open it up. Or perhaps he could call his college buddy Krishna who had left him a friendly voice mail a few days ago. “Yes”, he thought, “I’ll hit Krishna up,” and dried his hands with the sides of his pants and reached into his pocket for his phone. Alexi walked over to the couch and put his palm over the top half of the screen so that he didn’t have to see the time. “Siri, Call Krishna.” The phone rang once, and then a second time. Alexi quickly canceled the call. No, I don’t have time to bullshit with Krishna. Besides I don’t know what I would even talk about. All he ever asks about is dating. Alexi, now that the phone was in his hand, instinctually unlocked the device and scrolled over to safari and typed in www.instagram.com. It was pure habit. He typed the letters in blazingly fast. He was so well practiced at typing this particular URL that the visual indicator that appeared above each letter still showed the letter ‘n’ after he had finished. The indicator took a moment and then all at once the letters stagram.com flashed into the URL. He tapped through the stories of his friends not even bothering to pay attention to who posted what, just skipping forward in search of something. It wasn’t in search of a particular person or a particularly interesting thing, it was just a blind, endless, desperate seeking.

He couldn’t help himself, he looked, having avoided the clock’s gaze until now, at the the numbers 23:01. He tapped faster, skipping to the end of his friends stories list. His breathing was ragged. Fuck its 11. I don’t have any time. He stood and grabbed the jacket hanging on the hook on the front door and walked out into the frozen night, leaving the front door ajar. He half walked and half ran to the end of the block. Without looking at whether the cross walk was on, he stepped out onto the street. He was momentarily woken from his delirium when he heard the honking of a slowing car to his right. He squinted as he looked towards the unbearably bright headlights of the car, a black Escalade, and stopped in his tracks. The driver honked again and leaned out of his window to shout in a thick accent, “Get out of the street!” Alexi unfurled his tight fists and felt a resistance in the muscles of his blood starved middle finger but fought through the soreness to curse the driver. He shouted “FUCK YOU!” and continued jogging towards the train station a few blocks away.

The streets were empty and quiet. Alexi heard only the crunch of his boots against the slushy pavement and his occasional shivering exhale. He forgot to bring gloves, and noticing how white his cold hands had gotten as he walked with middle finger outstretched out of the direct illumination of the SUV’s LED headlights, he crossed his arms and put each hand into the opposing armpit to keep them warm. He straightened his hunched posture, thinking about the upright form he would take when squatting when he finally got to the gym. It was worth the extra distance he had to travel given the gym was 24-7. That was nonnegotiable when Alexi shopped around for gyms earlier that month. His new year resolution, though he had only gone every day for the first week and then not again, could not yet be considered a failure because he was going to go there now. He hurried onward and at last saw the staircase that descended into the train station. He lept down the stairs, skipping the bottom three, and ran to the turnstyle. He unlocked his phone to pay, 23:29 he noted–just enough time, and rushed onto the platform only to see a long yellow tape blocking the platform from the tracks. What? Is the L down again? Alexi turned and looked for a sign. He saw one taped up near the turnstyle, “Manhattan bound L train service will not stop at this station 10:30pm-5:00am from 1/21-1/27.” 

AFAFHWAGH Its already 11:30!! I don’t have time for this! I lost so much of my day cause Tanooj took so long making dinner. Its not fair!! AaAAAAAA, the sign made an elegant whipping noise as Alexi tore it from the wall and threw it. It stalled in the air and fell unsatisfyingly close to Alexi’s feet. He kicked at it, but again it didn’t react much, its laminate being too friction-less to feel the man’s force. Alexi stomped out of the station shooting lasers at the MTA employee in his box who did not stop him from wasting $2.95 when the station was closed. I could bike there, or take the other direction a few stops and swap back downtown assuming the Bedford stop isn’t closed too… his mind started with solutions then turned to despair… the fucking world doesn’t want me to succeed its not fair… I can’t even hang out with anyone… FUCKING PATRICK is gunning for my promotion… what do I do? What do I do?? Alexi aimlessly walked north–not the direction of his house. He took a step and shivered and took another step and shivered. He felt like he had to tighten up. Every muscle needed to be as close together as possible to keep warm. His shoulders rounded, his back bent over, even with his legs he walked not straight forward but sort of crossing his other leg so that they didn’t let a gap of air between them. Alexi walked passed a church and dreaded hearing its bell ring, like the tower in his university used to, marking that the next hour had come, that midnight had come. He walked cautiously, looking up at it and holding his breath. He walked all the way past it, with his neck craned towards it, and still it did not ring. He let out a sigh of relief but his brain wasn’t afraid to knock him over, maybe its passed midnight already. Alexi’s heart sank. He was not willing to check his phone. Its not worth it. Whatever time it is its too fucking late. There's nothing I can do. Alexi squatted to try to keep warm. He exhaled big huffs into his hands and pressed them against his face, trying especially to warm his eyes which were stinging from the wind. What do I do? What do I do… Alexi kept searching as he huddled there. His mind raced and took him so far away from reality that he didn’t notice even that he had fallen over into the snow. That he was thinking the same few sentences over and over again. That his breathing had slowed, steadied even. That he was causing his own suffering with the story he weaved in his head. That he had fallen asleep.

Alexi came to. The ambient sun light shocked his squinting eyes. He was wet from the melting snow. He was confused. He rolled onto his palms and wearily stood up. His phone was playing a soft melody. He checked it and saw that it was his 5:00am alarm. Guess its time for work, he thought and trudged back to the station he had visited that night. He payed the toll and waited for the train. He got on the train and sat with mind blank. He exited the train, climbed the stairs and walked a couple blocks. He stood for a moment in front of his building, sighed, and finally went in.