the habit of being

I walked to the studio. It was sunny on the snow and white everywhere and my cheeks were pink from crying.

I didn’t have a dollar for the bus. There was a ten clipped to his wallet and I wanted to borrow it and go get change at the Marvelous Market. He said he just wished I’d “prepared for this,” and that it annoyed him that his money became my money when he left it laying out.

I never prepared for this. I sat down on the bed and put my head in my hands and just sobbed. About bus money. I gave him his ten back and I walked to work crying.

There was a guy with headphones on the stoop. I said I worked at the yoga studio, and he said “is that leather?”

“It’s suede, yeah,” I said, fingering my coat.

“A yoga teacher? Wearing leather?”

“I’m not a yoga teacher.”

“Oh.”

The coat was my mother’s, and her mother’s. I never really thought about it. I had fake-meat tacos for lunch.

The guy on the stoop wasn’t Eric, the guy I was supposed to meet, to install the DSL. He didn’t tell me his name. I stood behind the iron gate and he sat in front of it, on the top step, holding a paper coffee cup. He had on a black hooded sweatshirt.

“Where do you come from?” he asked.

“Georgia, originally.”

He’d come from Denver, in January, but he has friends down south, a bass guitarist in Fort Lauderdale. Atlanta, he said, was expanding, with hand gestures, and then he said it was grotesque.

He asked if I knew what time it was.

“About 1:45.”

“Wow. I got up this morning at 7:45. Then went back to sleep, you know. I don’t have the slightest idea when I got back up.”

I wanted to say I understood. That my life had been like his. That my life was still like his.