On the way through, clasp your fists around the universe:
Nothing but ice-gravel.
But open your hands when you reach the other side. Quickly, before it melts.
– “Love Letter (Clouds)” Sarah Manguso
I.
Nick was married but I met him at the park anyway. We sat on a bench that faced a
manmade lake. A bird made a noise from above. Nick said if we only touched it
wouldn’t be cheating. I liked him so much. I remember how he breathed heavy and I
thought something was wrong. He got mad and walked back to his car. I stayed on the
bench for a while and thought about the rest of my life. Or maybe I just thought about if I
should stay out and not go home just yet. I think I wanted to stay out even though I had
nowhere to go.
II.
My psychiatrist writes persistent sadness in my chart and prescribes me Wellbutrin. Later I
will tell him it works too well, that I’m too happy now. It makes my ears ring at night. I
scream in bed and my mom comes in to see what’s wrong. “Do you hear that?” I ask and
she doesn’t. “I can hear my brain thinking,” I tell her and she offers me two Advil. During
the day I meet the guy I’m seeing at the movies and we smoke in the parking lot. At night I
take improv classes at a local theater. A lot of my time is spent in parking lots waiting for
day to turn to night, for one thing to turn into the next. It’s always hard to finally get out of
the driver’s seat and shut the door behind me.
III.
I kept meeting up with a guy from high school even though I knew it wouldn’t last. He was
on the school’s baseball team and now he played in college. He wanted to go all the way
with it, like a career and all that. I studied English and when people asked what I wanted to
do I said be a writer and then they never asked anything else more. My best friend met the
man of her dreams in London and I was spending night after night in Coral Springs in the
baseball player’s bed. I thought it was romantic. He’d say things like “I always knew we’d
end up here,” but really I was just blowing him at his parents’ house while they watched
comedy specials on Netflix in the living room. I’d hear them laughing while I was on my
knees on the bedroom floor.
IV.
My mom watches my Tamagotchi while I go into the doctor’s office. The nurse pricks my
finger and a drop of blood rises up to the surface of my skin. The clicking sound of the little
mechanism is satisfying. I hold a cotton swab tightly against my finger to make it stop
bleeding and then a Band-Aid is tightly secured over the wound. My mom doesn’t feed my
virtual pet for the entirety of my visit and it dies. I don’t speak to her on the car ride home.
My Tamagotchi reappears as an angel and ascends into a digital heaven. My finger is sore
and I take off the Band-Aid. I can’t find the place where it was punctured. There is no trace
of it anywhere.
V.
My ex-boyfriend’s mom used to make us a plate of cheese and crackers every time we came
over to her house up in Wellington. But she didn’t make it until we got there. An
afterthought, it always seemed. And she didn’t use a knife or anything. She ripped the thin
slices of cheese into rough squares and laid the buttery crackers out on a plate. I never had
any. I couldn’t shake the idea of all that cheese touching her hands. My ex always ate the
whole plate anyway so it wasn’t a big deal. She had a giant palm tree in her backyard and a
garden with a little manmade pond. The palm tree was so tall and sometimes the fronds fell
while we were out there and we had to duck out of the way. All that flora attracted so many
bugs and I always left with mosquito bites all over my legs.
VI.
I thought my trips home to Florida would heal me. I thought the ocean air and my mom’s
overcooked scrambled eggs would be the medicine I needed to get back up on the saddle of
life and ride high-ho-onward into my future. But I mostly laid in my parents’ bed and
watched re-runs of The King of Queens and ate challah bread my mom bought from Publix.
Sometimes I met up with old friends. We’d go to Atlantic Avenue and sit at the bar of a
restaurant that hadn’t been around when I lived there. We’d order appetizers and cocktails
and I would drive home wondering if I should move back. But then I’d get back on a plane
to California and drive myself home from the airport parking lot. If James was home, I’d
spend the night at his place. If he didn’t answer, I’d go on home.
VII.
My best friend’s brother’s girlfriend took us to Miami to eat at Nobu. We were only
freshman in high school. We didn’t care that it took over an hour in traffic to get there. We
didn’t care that it was sushi. We’d never tried it. We thought raw fish was gross. We only
cared that she’d asked us to go with her to dinner. The restaurant stayed open until two in
the morning. We sat at a table with two other older guys. The girlfriend did all the talking.
We wore dresses we’d once worn to Bar Mitzvah receptions in middle school, tight black
dresses that now hugged our bodies. We ordered sodas and beef teriyaki. We shared a side
order of white rice. The walls were tiled blue and it felt like we were underwater, like we
were in a dream we didn’t want to wake up from. We didn’t ask why her brother wasn’t
there. We didn’t ask why she’d chosen us. She was so tall and so skinny and cool. I don’t
even remember her name, but it must have been Angel or Destiny or Moonbeam, something
magical, her whole life—a fairytale.
VIII.
School was closed for a week because of the hurricane. Restaurants slowly started opening
back up again and one night our family went to an Asian buffet. The streets were still
deserted and it felt like driving around in the apocalypse. But the buffet was packed. Every
single table was taken. We waited an hour to be seated and then each of us took a plate and
got in line. There was every kind of fish rolled up in little circular rings of rice, a small piece
of seaweed wrapped around like a frame. I picked up a piece of California roll and ate it
right there in line. The texture was confusing, too many things happening at once. But I
took more on my plate and went back to the table. My mom said I shouldn’t take food I
wasn’t going to eat. She asked since when do I eat sushi. I ate a few more pieces even
though I didn’t like it. I saw a kid from school sitting at another table, but he was popular
and I didn’t want to go and say hi. He was with his family because there was nothing else to
do. He was sitting there eating the food from the buffet. He was eating sushi just like me.
IX.
I briefly dated my hairdresser when I was in between lives. He had a lisp and wore his hair
in gently gelled spikes. He always told me about his family and how no one got along. He
had a tattoo of a dragon on his arm and wore a silver chain around his neck. We went
clubbing one night in Fort Lauderdale on Las Olas and I wanted to get drunk so things
would be easier. There was a group of us, the hairdresser’s friends he’d known forever. It
was so hot outside. We were all sweating. The girls in the group were nice to me. “He hasn’t
brought a girl around in forever,” they were saying as we drank vodka mixed with cranberry
juice. The hairdresser did tequila shots and drank rum and he fell down on the dance floor.
One of his friends called us a cab. I sat up front and let him roll around in the backseat. I
didn’t look behind me. I just stared out the window until we got back. I put him in the
bathroom and closed the door. I slept on the couch and fell asleep staring at his fish tank, a
blue and yellow angelfish fluttering back and forth across the tank. I woke up with the sun
and took I-95 all the way home.
X.
I knew a girl who had a very successful boyfriend and his best friend was going to be in
Miami for the night. His name was Jordan and I’d only met him once at a dinner party when
I lived in LA. We never managed to go on a date then, but when he came to Florida I
wanted to try and make it work. I drove to the hotel where he was staying. It was the nicest
hotel I’d ever seen, the tallest building that shot up to the sky. Jordan told me to valet the car
and he’d pay for it. He met me in the lobby. Everything inside was gold. We went up to his
room and he asked if I wanted to go out and get dinner. I said I’d rather stay in and order
room service and watch TV. He smoked a cigar on the balcony and I wished I had a
cigarette. I drank champagne and wore a robe. I was waiting for him to make a move. Our
food came and we ate on the balcony and looked out at the water. He had to be back on a
plane the next morning, but he said I could stay and go to the beach if I wanted. Whenever
someone said I could stay, I never wanted to. I didn’t want to be there if it meant being
alone. We got in bed and watched Lockup and made comments about how wild all the
inmates’ cases were. Jordan never kissed me. I saw online recently that he got married to a
girl from Sweden who models lingerie. When I look up people online, I never find anything
good.
BRITTANY ACKERMAN is a writer from Riverdale, New York. She earned her BA in English from Indiana University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University. She has led workshops for UCLA’s Extension, The Porch, Catapult, HerStry, Write or Die, and Lighthouse Writers. She currently teaches writing at Vanderbilt University in the English Department. She is a 3x Pushcart Prize Nominee and her work has been featured in Electric Literature, MUTHA, Jewish Book Council, Lit Hub, The Los Angeles Review, No Tokens, Joyland, and more. Her first collection of essays, The Perpetual Motion Machine, was published with Red Hen Press in 2018, and her debut novel, The Brittanys, is out now with Vintage. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Find her at brittanyackerman.com.