The Flipside

On the morning of your first day back at work, after your days off, the ones that correspond to your other self and your other life, you wake up feeling expansive and energized, looking forward to your shift, almost.

Instead of the usual limping and hobbling, from one piece of furniture to the next, from one appliance to the next, you cross the apartment in two confident strides and give the cats their food, at the foot of the refrigerator, before they even have time to ask for it. They are as surprised as you are, and they look at you as if you are someone else, someone other than the one at the desk with the books and notebooks, an anchor that sinks deeper into the ocean floor with each page.  

You run the water colder than usual in the shower, as cold as you can take it. Without flinching, you turn your face upward, not wanting to squander a drop of it. It is almost as if, when you open your eyes again, a switch has been flipped, a line has been crossed, a door has been opened and fresh air has rushed into the room. Everything in the apartment, all the furniture, all the appliances, are the same, but something is different, much different, lighter, newer, the fabric of the towel as you dry your face, even.

The Flipside

It isn’t that your shift is easy or amusing, because it is none of those things and, indeed, much closer to their opposite, that is, demanding and tedious, but rather that, somehow, it is what is supposed to happen next. It makes sense again.

You haven’t left the house for the past three and a half days. In fact, you have barely gotten up from your desk, with its piles of stacked books, your notebook, ever more unruly, margins crowded with words, with its incoherences, its impossibility. Only occasionally do you get up to pace the floors, to accompany the cats in the front window in the off hours, or to sleep when absolutely necessary.

With each passing day, the air grows staler, danker, and the apartment grows older, dimmer, hostile even. With each passing day, your thoughts grow woollier, tangled, haggard; your eyes become ashtrays, red and itchy, with tiny cobwebs forming in the corners; your muscles and connective tissue stiffen, plank-like, and your bones, now brittle, creak when you move, like an old vessel, no longer seaworthy.

Little by little, the apartment has closed in on itself, threatening to crush you and the cats. The relief and comfort that you felt when you returned home after the end of your work week as a janitor has fizzled and faded, has transformed into this, the current restlessness and dismay.

The Portal

Quite simply, it’s time, time to open the curtains, close the notebooks, the earmarked books, stack them on the tabletop, run the comb through your hair, step into your coveralls, the beige ones, the janitor ones, and walk through the doorframe, out into harsh sunlight, the waves, the sunlight on the waves, anchor uplifted. Somewhere on the other side, the far shore, The Community Center is waiting for you, with its clogged toilets, sticky floors, interminable corridors, trash cans spilling over with paper towels, serene stairwells, and cool, dark gymnasium nooks.

You will crouch and lift, hem and hew. Sweat will gather on your brow. Beads of it will form at your forehead, some of which will break away and glide across the surface of your face, riding the transitions, carving the contours. Your chest will heave up and down. You’ll grunt and grimace. Your nostrils will flare. You’ll sigh and all that air, all those stale words, which you have been holding in for days, will be released, like the freight train whistle in the distance that cuts the heavy night into two burgundy slices. The following inhalation will be deep, unexpected, as if you had forgotten what it was like to live without the weight, the wait, the tension. Your thoughts, which had been collecting at the drain, forming eddies, will syphon off and the waters will run clear. Movement will be restored. And the next time you sit at the desk, with your books and cats, the path forward will be clear. The pages of your notebook will be calling.