Awareness

Creaking noises above my head. I can’t focus, can’t concentrate, I have to get out. A dog howls in the yard outside my window. My hand shakes as I grab for the kettle, and I almost spill boiling water all over my feet. It has been one and a half days since I’ve talked to anyone, but I’ve been reminded of other people’s existence every waking second. The air ducts hum quietly, perched on the edge of my consciousness. My next door neighbor is watching TV — sports, probably. I can hear the professional tones of a commentator’s voice even muffled by the wall. Somewhere some part of the building settles with a small creak. The dog again.

I pour the tea — double strength green, to drive away the tremors. I’ve sworn off coffee, but I’m doing a poor job of it. Can’t think straight. Leave the house. I pour the tea into a thermos instead. My coat is tossed over a chair. The whine of my laptop’s fan fills the upper register, the rumbling air ducts fill the lower. A door is slammed shut in the hall. I pause, frozen, coat halfway over my arms, and I count backward from 15 to allow the hallway to empty before I move again. I slip on my shoes and rush out the door to the back stairs, which other people rarely use.

It takes longer than the elevator, but I don’t care. It’s quiet, and I don’t mind the walk. On the flight between the third and second floors my calm is disturbed when I notice a teenager sitting on the steps. He’s wearing a bulky jacket and a beanie, and he’s looking at his phone. I know he can hear me coming down the stairs behind him, but he doesn’t move. My pulse races. I stare at him carefully as I approach, watching for any movement, praying he doesn’t turn to look at me, wishing he would. As I pass him I look away, just in case he glances up. Neither of us speak. I hurry down the stairs past him, even though I know he won’t be watching and doesn’t care.

Outside the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and I feel better. The background noise has gotten louder — street traffic, people yelling, a jackhammer cycling at the work site two blocks over — but somehow it seems less oppressive, easier to sort through. There’s no one treading on floorboards above my head, which is the main thing. Everything else I can forgive.

Walking in the city takes too much concentration. It’s impossible to lose yourself in footsteps, to turn toward the sun or sway with the wind. You can never throw yourself to the earth and roll over to watch the clouds galloping overhead. You can’t even close your eyes for a few minutes and stumble on blindly with only the warmth of sunshine on your face to guide you. You have to be constantly checking around corners, watching for traffic, dodging pedestrians going another way, listening for bikes behind you, and all the while there are millions of advertisements calling for your attention, store names that you can’t help but read and then try to imagine what kind of business they do there, windows that make you weigh the risks of peering into them against the risks of somebody peering back out at you, bright colors, swiftly moving metal, the glint of sun, the too-short shadows of tall buildings chilling your shoulders but not shielding your eyes and the sound of cars, the smell of cars, the reek of diesel and the dissolving acrid stench of exhaust and the stale taste of air breathed by millions of other humans all at once with not nearly enough plants around to recycle it.

So even though I was outside, I wasn’t calm, only no longer frantic, and I didn’t relax until several minutes later when I walked into the bakery and shut the glass door against the noise of the street. Inside, it was warm. The door had a bell attached, and it tinkled to announce my arrival. There was one other customer at the counter already. I hung back and browsed the shelves, waiting for them to finish business. I knew from experience that neither of us would look at each other, and I felt safe.

The woman at the counter took several minutes to contemplate her order, and plied the employee with several questions about ingredients and baking schedules. I ground my teeth as she asked the latter about several different loaves of bread, and got the same answer — 7AM — for all of them. I could have told her that they were baked early this morning and would be cold by now, but not stale. It was exactly what you would expect from a bakery late in the morning. How could she not know that? She makes sure to show off her knowledge of the names of the different kinds of bread, but doesn’t know anything about the way they’re made. I can feel my contempt for her growing, so I force myself to read cake names aloud under my breath, and I try to think one generous thought about her (she must be very busy preparing a feast in celebration of a friend, and she’s just a bit distracted right now) as she leaves.

As I walk up to the counter, I keep track of the sound of her coat swishing to my left, and that part of my attention is consumed until the door opens and closes again. In the meantime, the rest of me is engaged in looking at the menu. I almost make my regular order, but the thermos of tea in my hand stops me — no coffee today. Gritting my teeth, I instead ask for a muffin. Only after I’ve decided the flavor do I first make eye contact with the person at the counter, and I see a young woman of roughly college age with brown eyes and a dusting of freckles on her nose. Her hair is pulled back into a bun. She’s chirpy, and says “no problem” as she bends down to pull out a muffin.

I want to say at this point that I am not a creep. I know, I know, the lady doth protest too much, but I’m confident on this point. If I were a creep, I would stare at the bakery girl and imagine her kissing me on the cheek, or me whispering in her ear, or holding her hand at my family’s thanksgiving dinner, or her naked on the floor. These are all weird things to think about a stranger because they all assume a high level of involvement. It’s weird to imagine dating someone you don’t know — it’s weird to imagine being friends with someone you don’t know but you’re attracted to but you don’t want to admit it because you mistakenly think the sexual attraction is the creepy part so you pretend you’re not attracted and just want to be friends but you remain weirdly obsessed with the person which is the creepy part and everyone can tell you want to sleep with them and also that you won’t admit to yourself you want to sleep with them. That’s how creeps act. I’m not a perfect guy, I’m plenty antisocial, but I don’t do that kind of thing. I don’t transplant my desire for intimacy onto every attractive stranger who smiles at me.

So when she bent down to get the muffin, sure, I looked. She was wearing a loose shirt. If I were a perfect man I would have glanced at the ceiling or something, but admiring the view is, in my opinion, not weird. And I didn’t have any kind of parasocial thoughts about her. I glanced away after a little less than a second, well before she stood back up with the muffin held in a little piece of wax paper. She put it in a brown paper bag, and handed it to me with a smile. I smiled back, and said, “Thank you.”

She tucked a curl of hair behind her ear, and I briefly considered making a play for her number. But it’s a bad idea to do that at any place where you’re a regular, and I wanted to come back here, so I shoved that thought aside and paid for my food. I did, however, wish her a good day as I left, and she said “you too” which might not sound like much but it felt good to have someone else express goodwill toward me, however perfunctory.

I walked back home, holding the muffin close in a vain attempt to keep it from getting any more stale. I put it in the toaster oven for a few seconds, and tried to focus on the ticking of the timer rather than the sounds of the building. When the vents aren’t humming from the fans, I can hear the whirring of elevator cables down the hall as people leave and return on their various errands, which is much worse, because it makes me think about what they might be doing. It’s not the right time of day to be going to work, unless you work an hourly job somewhere, but maybe they’re visiting someone, or maybe just going out for lunch, or doing some shopping? Who can tell. But I feel like I have to know, and even worse is that there are probably multiple people per elevator car, and I can’t tell whether it’s going up or down, and I can’t tell when it’s on the ground floor or a higher floor, and I don’t know if people are getting on or getting off and there’s so many unknowns that fill me with terror. A normal person would not think this much about an elevator car — a normal person would not even realize they heard it — but I am obsessed with knowing what the people around me are doing and it drives me insane to only know a tiny piece of context, to not be able to infer what’s going on, to know that things are happening under someone else’s will and not know what they are, because some irrational piece of me is afraid that those things might suddenly grow to involve me, and I will have to understand everything all at once in order to do the right thing, and how can I do that if I don’t know the context? I want to know what’s happening before it happens to me. Never mind that there’s no chance anyone in those elevator cars will knock on my door — my mind needs prepare for it like a beaver needs to build a damn.

I put on my headphones and turn on a video to drown out the other noises — a movie review, this time. I sit down on my comfortable armchair and eat my muffin and sip my tea, which I brought with me intending to sip on the way there and back, but didn’t, but it’s fine because the thermos is a good one, and it’s still hot.