The Erasure of a Good Woman

Loving too hard always felt like more of a liability than a point of beautiful character.

She's a freelance stylist who lives off of the Myrtle Broadway J and M stop. She runs clothing racks to executives with walkie talkies and places lunch orders on the phone. When she is asked to, she consults succinctly about an outfit, careful to only offer what advice is necessary. Sneakers over heels. Remove the statement necklace. Try the Alexander Wang bag instead, it's better with the oversized trench coat. She is in high demand, but it isn't the same as feeling needed. She does, however, routinely exceed every expectation with a snappy, quick wit, much to the allure of clients who never forget her name when they call her for work again. Sometimes it's Nylon Magazine, sometimes it's an Amazon ad. It is the essence of her work ethic to put her all in to both campaigns.

She gets her eyebrows done every Thursday at 5pm before she picks up her laundry, and browses the fiction new releases at Three Lives & Company on Saturday mornings in between work calls and last minute pick ups at the Zara on Fifth Avenue. The Strand and the Barnes and Noble had too much stock for high school and college students – LSAT textbooks, stacks of Moby Dick and Great Expectations and the rest of that righteous 19th century anthology that bores her to death. She never gets around to finishing most the books. They stay on top of her side dresser for the next month or two, untouched. When she does read them, she likes to insert herself into the plot line, imagining she temporarily zips on the skin of the character and lives their life, drifting off in thought down W 15th st on her way to work. She goes to Pilates on Sunday if she doesn't decide to spend it with another emotionally unavailable bachelor The routine repeats itself ad nauseum. She never grows quite sick enough of it to change it. If it isn't broke, don't fix it.

In the morning, she wakes up and immediately assaults herself with the influx of digital information on her phone – Instagram, Gmail, The New York Times, unanswered text messages she drifted off to the night before – only because it gives her the reassurance of “staying on top of things”. Her eyes water in the morning in reaction to light exposure after being shut for hours. They are not to be confused with tears, which she reserves for a precise hour in which once a month the world decides to beat down with one too many unrelenting fists. She gets her period promptly the next day.

Love and emotion is a true source of liberation for her, one she only lets herself go in when she feels safe to do so. But when she does, she is free, passionate, engorged with life and experience. Everything looks more vibrant. She notices the green on the trees poignantly, the kids running around Madison Square Park with their nannies chasing after them as she sits on the park bench, eating a panini resting on her knees. One day, she knows she'll be able to find life in this way every day. For now, it remains a pipe dream. She keeps steaming the dresses on the clothing rack, picking out low rise jeans and scoop neck tops to pair with vintage bangles and hoops for models that don't need makeup to look effortless. If she finds herself wishing for an alternate life, she escapes to the lives in the books. She tells herself it's not a form of erasure when it's temporary.

She sits outside the coffee shop on the corner of Broome and Elizabeth st, tiredness pulling at her eyes as she stares at the blue light of her computer, half eaten scone crumbled on her plate. A stylish young gay couple shares kisses and cigarettes over iced cortados, crossing their legs over their jean shorts and knee high Ganni boots and leaning back into the metal chairs. They hold each other's right hand over the table. She remembers the last time she did that on a date, it was only thirty minutes later over a bowl of overpriced tagliatelle that she heard him utter the words “I struggle to find sympathy for other people” - including her.

She seems to habitually choose men who, after she meets with them, irk her so spiritually that it makes her feel that she needs to find God again. It is not because she believes what they have done together to be “unholy”, but because she seems to lose many ideas of herself and her grander purpose in trying to fit them in to her perfectly orchestrated life. She felt she always does better alone, focused on those shining moments she works towards in every spare hour, hoping for that dream career break that Anna Wintour might take her on at Vogue and let her browse the backrooms of Jean Paul Gauthier and Chanel and Loewe at her will. But she also does not wish to inherit the isolation and cynicism that her father has. That was the time when her mother started working until 10pm every night, her father matching a half glass of bourbon for every beer on the couch, watching UFC reruns while her and her brother made dinner for themselves. Love had made him hard, and she was too young to be so bitter.

She lays in bed, naked next to a vexing romantic prospect. He makes love like he is trying to burrow his fingers into her skin. He kisses her inner thighs and her stomach, slowly, gently, intentionally, like someone who holds a deep reverence for her soul. But when the long hour is done, he retreats, putting a foot's distance between their bare chests. They don't cuddle. It's a strange shift in personality, one that always jolts her slightly even though it is a predictable part of their routine. She hopes he might surprise her one day, catching a clue into her brilliance. He never does. She tells him he can leave at any time - it would be easier if he was the kind who didn't linger. But he always wants to stay. She frowns to herself as she turns away to sleep on her right side, facing the crescent moon hovering in the moonlight of the opposite window. When she goes to sleep, she can forget all about it again. It's simply a question of if. He falls asleep in thirty seconds. She can tell because he starts snoring gently next to her. But her mind keeps her up at least another twenty minutes, gears turning, thought trails whirring in the mechanic of her mind. I'll pick up the new Issey Miyake for Georgina tomorrow. That gawky Ted Baker dress that Barbara insisted on probably makes her want to stick pins in her eyes.

She sits at the inner corner of an L shaped safety orange section of seats on the A train, going uptown. A guy with stark cornflower blue eyes sneaks looks at her while she's leafing through her latest Third Lives purchase – Zadie Smith's “The Fraud”. She catches him once, letting him have her for two careful seconds. She then looks back down, sighing, determined to keep him in her periphery. He keeps waiting to meet her eyes again. She pretends to be more interested in a work email on her phone. We all know what becomes of momentary allure. After all, she had to get off at 145th, and he was going up to Inwood. What was really the point? Is approval so starved that it must be harvested in the passing glances of strangers? What about her own?

She is determined to not be lost to erasure. She believes her life ahead of her is too precious, the men too temporary, too inconsistent, turning over their shoulder to look for a better thing that doesn't exist, perpetually unfulfilled until they grow tired and old and alone on their leather couches, smoking spliffs on the porch and DMing their latest Instagram fascination. She would have thought her steadfast will, her ambitious web of goals, would make her stand out, but the problem ultimately was not with her. She has forgotten the shallowness of the insecure men she surrounds herself with too often, how they struggle with multiple choice and tip their erasers in the air, rubbing away the smidge of a chin, an eye, a chunk of personal integrity, as they go, believing themselves to be younger and freer than they really are. Of course, she knows men like this so well. It's part of her own blood.

Perhaps the only solution is to wait to give it her all, which she begrudgingly commits herself to. When she comes back to God, she is told that her most untapped virtue – by far – is patience. It is that patience that keeps her toes above the deep waters of cynicism.

She walks up to 150th and Riverside Dr, meeting a dear friend by the massive trees and stone wall between the street and the edge of the Hudson. They sit on the grass, drinking cheap beer and watching the sun go down in the late summer. She unhands her figurative pencil and her friend chucks it in the river - for there are infinite ways to discover joy, so many ways to be remembered, treasured, understood, that don't subject themselves to the threat of erasure. She has to remember that loving hard is a good thing to the people who are willing to receive it.

As if the world is testing her, she gets a buzz from her phone. A man has decided to return the part of her that he has erased. She laughs to herself, turning the phone over, watching the sun melt its deep orange into the glowing horizon behind New Jersey. God sure has a funny sense of humor.