I don't even care (12.20.22)

It's only on the occasions that it's raining in early NYC winter, tired with the weight of the year's end looming, that I ever climb my sketchy chipping metal fire escape high up on the sixth floor of my massive rent stabilized building to make my way on the supposedly prohibited roof of my building. I don't know if any of the other tenants in my building have seen it. There's an alarm that blares for two minutes straight if you try to go up the inside stairs. The only way up is 100 ft from the ground on the skinny metal fire escape ladder running outside the building. It's only a mere 30 seconds of unrestricted fear, I tell myself, until it all goes away like a puff of smoke unraveling in the creases of the mind. It is the kind of feeling you forget until you do it again. Or maybe I'm just a master at downplaying the things that scare me the most.

The first time, it was New Years in 2020. I got off the plane at LaGuardia at 11pm on December 31st after plunging in to the purple-black sky of the city, the gold glowing light below becoming smudged astigmatisms in the rain. The parking garage monitor cursed me out for being 15 minutes past my pick up time. My friend had a tentative party in Bushwick in which I imagined I had the choice between sitting atop the slanted graffitied roofs that lay exclusively between Dekalb and Wilson Ave in the company of people I don't know all that well, or finally discovering what lays beyond the sanctified, scatheless roof of my building. Turns out, not much. Despite the white knuckled grip on the slippery metal ladder to the top, the roof had an edge a foot tall and no previous relics of wild parties or hushed living situations. There were no empty PBR cans, no white mattress turned brown in the rain. The soldered white painted pipes bulged out of an occasional corner. The uneven ground was shiny slick and peeling. At midnight, the fireworks went off like a panoramic in five different places. I got the feeling as if they were copied and pasted in the sky around me. It was still captivating, if only for five minutes in which I felt as if the whole thing was not really real. A loud firework close to my building shot up and popped loudly followed by a sad trail of green color, and that was the end of it. With a shrug, I then descended back down, crawled through my window, anti-theft metal gate rolled to the side, and went to sleep. I knew that either choice I made that evening between roofs and the notability of the new year would soon be lost in the demands of work, the depression in the anti-climacticism of it all, the memories that are quick to do the same dispersing act in the mind until we do it all over again.

I haven't written for a while for the same dumb reason that stops me creating music. Well, who cares? Maybe some of that is projection – there is certainly a lot of music out there that I really don't care for myself. It doesn't, however, negate the fact that other people deeply care for it. Care is subjective. Not everybody can possibly care about the same thing. Not everybody values facets of their life in the same way, and we take it more personally than anything else when it doesn't align. How could we not?

It's a virtue to live in this world and not care. It is a strength to put yourself out in situations that yield unfavorable results and pretend to be okay. We always talk about being bold, risk takers, constantly stepping closer to our dreams, but we hardly talk about the in between spots of time that run empty in the name of patience, the dreams that are nothing like what we thought they would be, what happens when it fails, and in particular – the immediate moments following the downfall. It's as if the negative is ignored for fear it is harped on so heavily it will break us.

As women, we're constantly told not to care so much in relationships. We're told that making yourself smaller, more distant, more cold to the world, is the way to make yourself more attractive. We're only wanted when we don't want. In music, we're told to not take all the rejections personal, when, in fact, the process itself may not be so personal, but it does indeed affect us personally. Some folks speak it in to the void of social media. Most folks let it rebound endlessly in their sleepless mind, tuck it away so that nobody will ever see, put a patch over the heart and call it fixed. I might wonder why my nose is bigger than I remember, why I curse my height when I never used to think about it, why my body suddenly seems gargantuan like rolling hills and suffocating and none of it in the sexy or good kind of way. It’s eight vodka sodas on any given Tuesday as if to give another reason to hate existing in your body the next day, in all the words we never said, in lonely hours where we wrap ourselves in our own arms because there's nobody else around. The crawl down the slippery ladder after the fireworks, the dying curiosity of the roof above the sixth floor of the building.

What I want to know is what's the glory in not caring when as humans, we actually seem to care so deeply it disables us bit by bit to let it eat us up inside. Maybe it's that society as we know it will disintegrate. Our capitalist compatible functions operate most smoothly on our ability to sublimate our care. Our current machine of a working economy, the looming 501k, the livelihood of the children we come home to, are not built to handle such things.

We have watched everything fall apart. Pulling oneself up by their bootstraps remains a concept, a rare dream. Flight attendants to China still wear hazmat suits. Homes are carried away in hurricanes and apocalyptic orange skies. I watched ash rain down on my car in 2020 as I drove away from one of the only people I ever really loved. It has been almost three years of terror. It has only been a handful of years to normalize therapy and collectively begin to realize how off the deep end we are. I believe the full realization may never be reached.

There are some severe traumas and feelings you don't forget. It is as if they didn't happen yesterday, months ago, years ago, but in the living and waking moment, running hot in your blood. The most dangerous act is that they seem to evade the concept of time. I think this is what constitutes the crippling qualities of trauma, of the consequences of caring. When that used to happen to me, I started to lose consciousness in public. It is only natural that one learns to place one degree of separation from the rest of the world each time it dawns because our bodies have an easier time if it all simply disappears in to the sea of consciousness like it never really happened.

We are all perpetually yearning for, or missing, something that we may never find complete. This is what I mean when I talk about anti-climacticism, about fighting for a dream that may not be what you thought it would, about traumas easier to forget than to pay the mental and physical price of reliving. We are constantly in a state of unfulfillment, of partial dissatisfaction, of terror about the state of the future, our jobs, our livelihood. It is an eternal fight for the happiest end outcome that usually never comes anyway. Like what we have been forced to do so long with our overzealous care, happiness will come as quick as it dissipates. We still pretend as if we can have it forever.It's an act of survival. But everything fleets.

The mistake is in telling ourselves that we don't care as much as we really do. About everything.

It's always on the first snow of NY that I walk against the freezing wind, leftover taste of whiskey in my mouth, that I feel like a ghost. It is only so that I pretend I do not feel everything that I do at that moment, for fear it might cause my head to combust. I am lost to the world until summoned by a metro card station, a homeless person asking for change, a street light counting down from 10, slipping back in through the outer membrane. Shut on, shut off. Headphones with no music. It's as if I want to be as empty as possible. Umbrella fighting the whipping wind to the backdrop of the diagonally falling snow and half empty Christmas tree lots on 7th avenue. My mom tells me she's worried about me. The way I know the holidays have a habit of making my stomach turn. I still battle with disassociation like a comfort blanket in the same way as the harsh realities that make me squirm in my seat as if to cause real physical pain. I bring the stuffed animals back out. I know she misses them.

It has only been since I started living alone on that sixth floor of the monolith building that the tinsel tree in the pre war lobby every December flashes a dollar store bulb playing lo fi distorted Christmas jingles to the sound of the rain that was not quite cold or beautiful enough to become snow as if to make a mockery of me. Of all the rooftops I did not care for, of all the feelings I selectively choose to not acknowledge, of all the microscopic crystal formations I refuse to acknowledge form in my tears.

The mistake is in telling ourselves that we don't care as much as we really do. But the only thing scarier than caring is letting people see you fall apart.