Too Soon, Too Late
by Erin Gallagher
A guy sends me a message on a dating app, “hey Erin, I hope you’re staying safe and well during all of this *emoji*,” followed quickly by a second message, “Also, you’re absolutely gorgeous and thicc as hell *emoji emoji emoji*.” In Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes on love, “...not the means to anything but the alpha and omega. An end in itself.”
I watch the small bubbles of poetry arrive in succession; I let out a long exhale and a little bit of a laugh. It’s the morning? Sunlight slips through the gaps in the blinds, forming perfectly spaced lines on the wall behind me to draft my reply. I have a haiku in mind. The guy downstairs who installed my curtain rod and hung the mirror on the wall told me that there isn’t a single right angle in this whole building. The walls around me meet at varying degrees and the ceiling lives on a slant and everything is crooked but nothing is crooked and I haven’t gone further uptown than Tompkins Square Park in over a week. I didn’t even go that far into the park. I sat on the first bench I passed. But this guy, in Bushwick, hopes that I’m safe and well. I feel comforted. We’re all human, all looking out for each other. Someone had asked me to meet for drinks at the end of the week, I said no because I wasn’t making new friends, or seeing current friends, or old friends, or anyone at all. The next day he had a fever, and I felt like I had been narrowly missed by a looming presence, a thick material that seemingly seeped into all of our lives overnight, as I typed, “is it...you know?”
I moved out of my sixth floor walk-up in less than three hours because it wasn’t fair to leave it empty and I couldn’t stay. I didn’t have a job anymore. My roommate and I passed in the kitchen between jobs and friends, but when the subway started to empty, bit by bit, day by day, the panic set in. The stress of the line at Trader Joe’s on Grand Street pales in comparison. She told me that I should prepare my will. The apartment being tiny was charming until it was my whole world, and my feet were beginning to blister from walking on eggshells. I could feel them break beneath me, while I made coffee on my tip-toes, wrapped up in a soft blue bathrobe. I could hear them crunch, cacophonous and distracting, as I passed the fire escape and slipped into my room, the world of my own, shutting the door behind me with a soft click. The man painting the entry hall held the door open every time I came down the stairs, arms laden with bags and bags. How many times can you paint a hallway white? If you peeled it back, layer by layer, I hope you would find a nice wallpaper, floral and muted with age.
In the suburbs, days grow longer and shorter all the same, and my interest waxes and wanes accordingly. Another guy left an empty apartment for somewhere else. He and I send videos to each other of trees swaying in the breeze. We send videos of lightning in the sky, wax poetic about film and war. I open my window and sit at the edge of the bed, close enough to smell the rain through the screen. He wishes me well in the last minutes of my birthday. He writes like he’s penning a postcard from a long, lost time. He wonders about going for drinks in July, or maybe September, but I know we never will. Timing.
I let the likes on Hinge sit untouched. I send a screenshot to a friend; there are over one hundred that I haven’t addressed. Nothing matters, until they do matter. Effort is the alpha and omega. I cut my hair in the bathroom before I’ve finished my coffee and I talk on the phone all night, but not FaceTime, because I cut my hair in the bathroom before I’d finished my coffee. I focus on skincare and I grind my teeth. I don’t text back, and then I do, and then he doesn’t, and I focus on something new. You. Not you. Me. Everyone.
I worry about the guys at the bodega down the block, both actually, down the block in both directions. I worry about the man who was painting that day in the hall, the women at the laundromat. I picked up a bag of laundry the morning that I left the city, sheets and towels and one dress. I didn’t realize until later that that dress, my favorite dress, soft and blue, with white flowers, was missing. I wore it on one of the last days that I did anything, a perfect day. I sat in the park in my blue dress and drank coffee and felt the sun and, a little bit nervous. I hope it didn’t end up in a mismatched heap of things left behind. I hope it was folded, perfectly, the way that I could never fold my sheets, in a bag of someone else’s. I hope they’re wearing it.
Erin Gallagher is a writer in New York City. Her work has been published in Maryland Bards Poetry Review, and X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine. You can find her on Instagram as @erinagall.
