Daylight Haunting
by Gauraa Shekhar
7 A.M.
We’ve been hooked on Diet Dr. Pepper forever, but they never have any in stock, so we’ve steadily downgraded from Diet Dr. Pepper to Diet Coke, from Diet Coke to Coke Zero, then Coke Zero to Diet Pepsi.
Today is a Diet Sunkist day. How the mighty have fallen. Diet Sunkist is no source of caffeine and it tastes like a CW product placement from ten million years ago. I have no idea why I’m drinking this. I consider putting on a pot of coffee but I’ve forgotten to grind the beans, and Elliot is still asleep in the bedroom—I don’t want to wake him up. Who knows what time he goes to bed? 3? 4? He made a joke, a few days ago, about staying up till 5 to watch Animal Crossing digitally replenish its bounty of pears and tulips. I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s on island time now.
I guess, I am, too.
Maybe we’ve learned to exist in shifts.
I’m sipping my disgusting diet soda at the table by the window, listening to the sound of a needle scratching dead wax. We’ve left Norman Fucking Rockwell spinning for god knows how long, and it feels fitting. I move the needle from the center of the record back to its periphery. I turn the dial to a low hum.
We threw a party when this record came out. We sat on the floor of my old apartment with our friends, drinking blue Curaçao out of coffee mugs, smearing patterns with our hands into a soft-spun Ikea rug. We took polaroids of ourselves, jokingly entangling our limbs to match a promotional poster of a teen soap opera that came out in 2003. Our friend Krista arrived late, and we stayed up listening to tales of her romantic misdemeanors, the latest of which entailed bringing a man back to her small loft studio. She said he was too big for her place. He didn’t fit right. Later, when we moved, we stuck the pictures we took that night on the fridge of our new apartment.
There are days that don’t begin with Lana and melodramatic renderings of friendships. This is not one of them. Some of our closest friends are leaving the city now, and it’s hard not to feel devastated when I can see them, still: in the kitchenette, making drinks and small talk with plus ones at our housewarming party. I can see them singing “The greatest” on TV-karaoke the day Elliot and I got married, or gathered around the coffee table, workshopping the stories we’d written. Or on the couch, after they’ve stayed the night, the TV still set to a YouTube playlist of Hot Ones.
There were always so many people with us. Someone was always stopping by with a six pack or a bottle of wine or a dish they’d made from scratch. We always had a record on, a debate to settle, another round of Secret Hitler to play. I regret every 2AM we felt too tired and called it a night.
I’ve since worn out the grooves of this record. Side B keeps glitching over the same line from “How to disappear”. I get up, adjust the needle, try turning the volume down. The dial rotates of its own volition, turning the volume back up. I wrestle with it for a while before I smudge the apartment with sage. It works. The smoke billows over the record, and the dial rescinds all control back to me.
When Elliot wakes up, I’ll tell him I saw a ghost, and mean it. He won’t believe me.
