Jade Sharma - Problems

“Peter, I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean any of it. I’m not pretending. I love you.”

“No, Maya, you did mean it. All you do is push yourself away from me. I can feel it.”

“It’s scary to emotionally depend on someone.”

“It’s supposed to be hard. That’s why it means something, and that’s why it never meant anything to you,” he said.

“You don’t want to be alone, Peter, c’mon.”

“Maya, I started looking as soon as we got back, and I’ve already put the deposit down.”

“Where is it?”

“Bushwick.”

“That’s what fucking happens. You fall in love, and in one way or another, you end up in metaphorical or literal Bushwick. This place of just total shit.”

“I’d rather live in Bushwick than here,” he said.

This human being would rather get drunk in a shitty apartment in fucking Bushwick and risk dying alone than be with me.

One day I’ll be strong enough , I thought. One day I’ll just go and jump off a bridge .

The following weeks were the opposite of a blur. Raw and sharp. I cried so much I didn’t even know what I was crying about. I forgot to eat. Dread was the first thing I felt when I opened my eyes. Peter gave me money all the time, and I took Xanax and heroin all the time. We both knew it was the only way he would get any sleep.

I told him I would kill myself, because no one was allowed to just leave someone like that. He didn’t respond. Was I actually going to have to kill myself to prove a point?

I looked out the window at a child wearing an oversized book bag in the courtyard, waiting for the bus. There was a world where kids went to schools and the postal service mailed letters so people could communicate, and there were train conductors conducting trains and buses picking people up so they could get from one place to another, and there were nurses using wet Q-tips to moisten the lips of people in comas and people who volunteered to cradle babies who didn’t have parents. And there were wars, and people died. And I was always in a room, crying.

I lost my job at the bookstore. This douchebag had shown up, who was supposed to be the one to supervise textbooks but was put in charge of the whole staff instead. This made Michelle quit. And then, one by one, he fired everyone. We had all been friends, and now we were like a slowly dying family. We talked a lot of smack, but no one actually wrote nasty letters to the owners. No one quit. We each waited our turn. We looked at the douchebag’s blog and laughed at him for being a Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast and groaned at what an awful human being he was. In one post he wrote, “Had to fire a girl today. But she couldn’t get with the program.” He said things like, “Get with the program.” People who worked there for years were booted and replaced by eighteen-year-old girls the douchebag called “sweetheart.”

I don’t know why it is that when some men call you “sweetheart” or “honey,” it makes you blush, yet when other men do it, you want to hurl.

There was no order or reason to it. He fired everyone, the hard working along with the lazy. After the firings got underway, every time a customer asked about a book, I would go on Amazon and show them how much cheaper they could buy it from there.

I stole everything I could get my hands on.

I watched everyone get replaced before the e-mail arrived at two in the morning informing me I didn’t need to bother coming in the next day.

I looked on craigslist for jobs.

I finally landed a temp job at a labor union in the East Twenties. The middle-aged man who interviewed me leered. He asked me personal questions (“Do you live alone, or?”), made stunted small talk (“I used to live in the city. .”), and periodically checked to see if my breasts were still where they were the last time. He was cross-eyed, so he could check on both. He was one of those old, gross men who went through life trying to muster the courage to commit to sexually harassing someone instead of just being a slimy perv.

I took the place of a woman who had kept a calendar with cats that had very unoriginal things to say about Mondays.

Boys wearing headphones inhabited the beige cubicles dividing the office floor. Nobody talked. I wanted work to be around people. But I was always alone there.

I told Peter to pack while I was at work, but he didn’t. He did it right in front of me instead. He stood in front of the bookshelf with his eyes squinted, looking for his books. When we got married, we threw out duplicate copies of the books we owned.

“Just give me the shittier pots and pans, but don’t take them all,” I begged him. He told me I should have felt lucky he was taking as little as he was. He didn’t have to be nice anymore. It really didn’t fucking matter what we said or did to each other now.

All the best memories suddenly rematerialized the moment he told me he was leaving. Those fuzzy memories of the beginning. Going to the beach, laughing in bed, making love while Steve Earle blared on the stereo. The way he always held the umbrella to completely cover me. The human mind plays the worst tricks.

Everyone thought his leaving was the right thing. “Just let him go. Believe me, it’s a blessing,” Ogden said.

I did dope in the bathroom at least three times a day.

Somewhere along the way my sleeve snagged. Using was my life. Not using was my life. One or the other, I couldn’t get out of the cycle. Everything revolved around it. My life was one boring game of heads-or-tails. I could only use or not use. I could never be totally free from the whole fucking thing.

It wasn’t like it slowly happened. It wasn’t something that gradually took over my life. But when Peter left I thought to myself, Just be a junkie now .

Heads.

Get high all the time. Why not? Pure hedonistic joy, and then when I found a man, I would clean up for him.

Tails.

Sometimes I stretched out in bed reading books. Sometimes I wrote poetry. Sometimes I tried on clothes. Sometimes I cleaned the whole apartment and ate a pint of ice cream.

Douglass, Elizabeth’s ex, moved in right after Peter left. Douglass was in his fifties, and I had never liked him, but anything was better than being alone. He walked like a caveman, spoke in a deep voice, and used big words just to make you feel dumb. He had always been dismissive of me. But once I gave him a free place to live, I started seeing what Elizabeth saw in him. He could be kind. He would make me food. He would come back after disappearing for hours with cookies or a bag of oranges. Women swooned over him. He had a ripped body, even though the only exercise he got was walking to and from a drug dealer. The gray in his dreads didn’t age him; it really did make him look distinguished. He wore beat-up jeans that hung from his hips. He had spent his life being supported by some poor girl who had really thought she could change him. As long as I had money, he didn’t mind running for me.

The reasons people have runners are: they don’t have a connection themselves, they don’t want to take the risk of scoring and walking around with dope actually on them, or they are lazy. Normally, you pay a runner twenty bucks, which is two bags. I bought Douglass more than I should have for running. If I didn’t, he would just steal more of my bags.

Amy had sent me a five-hundred-dollar check. Ogden sent me a grand. Everyone sent me money because they felt bad, and it all went up my nose, not to mention the money from my job. I barely looked at food. Whenever I did eat a cookie or a slice of pizza, my body would ache for more, but I wanted to be skinny almost more than I wanted to get high.

There was a guy, one of the cubicle boys with the headphones, who made the mistake of flirting with me. He took me to lunch. I came in the next day and got so high I told him I was high. Later that night, he texted me to leave him alone forever.