Peachy?

I come into the first day of work to find nothing has changed, in that there has been a cavalcade of changes that will prove inconsequential. My colleagues have the same conversations as we wait to be let through the gate. A woman calls me Quackendaddy, which is the epithet bestowed by a girl who crushed on me (and subsequently made a graphic PowerPoint about blowing me). She has not been a resident here in years. We no longer house girls because we never should have. It was mismanagement from on high that someone thought it was the best use of the space and girls. Though this is not the sex offender facility, it may be owing more to a lack of opportunity than desire. The way the boys treated the very idea that they were housed behind razor wire with three to ten girls (or transboys) bordered on hyenas aware of a felled gazelle upstairs, behind only one locked door.

The guards are mostly newbies, some of whom I suspect I will not meet or should not remember. This is to be expected. The turnover rate is astronomical, and it was just summer. There are better opportunities for anyone with a steady pulse unless one is single, childless, and willing to work twenty-hour shifts for overtime.

My computer with all my files and access to my accounts was reimaged in my absence. "It was having that blue screen issue that was going around," one of my more techie coworkers tells me after I had tried every other laptop in the room with increasing resignation. I assume he means the Crowdstrike blackout in July. I expected something like this, if just by dint of Murphy's Law. Something would go wrong on my first day, and this is more of a temporary inconvenience than an outright tragedy.

Summer seemed like a wash, beset by little productivity and a vacation that was a literal disaster. I have a better direction for my current project, but I am months from having recreated the book enough to give it a proper read-through. Amber has gained more focus in managing parts of my career--in that they have designed new business cards and bookmarks for the events I will now be obligated to do. However, they still need to finish reformatting We Shadows. Otherwise, one would be correct to think I mostly urged myself to write for a season without doing much of it.

My September weekends are too full, which I might consider a luxury in other circumstances and may upon brief reflection. I need to know that returning to work will not mean my social life is extinguished, not that it is much more than glowing coals. My only ongoing social obligation is playing board games with queer people every two weeks, which I cherish, but which also lacks something outside those two hours on alternating Friday nights.

My supervisor, a man with whom I have worked since joining OCFS, has moved on to a job at Home Office. A part of me wishes I had followed suit, albeit not a large part. If it were not for the commute, I might have interviewed. It is not as though I expect to do much at this facility in this coming year. My accomplishments here are minor, and most students I coach through English 101 and 102 end up in adult corrections until they can join AARP. I would not be able to rack up even that many lives changed if I were dictating curriculum from the belly of the bureaucratic beast. Still, I would deal with the phrases "contraband weed vape up his ass" and "shiv made of computer parts" much less often. I might also kvetch in writing less frequently, which we all agree is charming and welcome.

I will miss my supervisor as a direct colleague but also as my anchor to more professional success. He had been a rock and reassurance, someone who remembered what it was to make the dysfunctional, if not functional, at least healthier. My previous facility earned Sanctuary Certification for Trauma-Informed Care with him, which is quite the badge to pin to one's jacket, and was received after the governor had already signed our execution order. The idea that my present facility would attempt this certification, let alone receive it, so far exceeds fantasy that it isn't worth considering. We are not trauma-informed. We are traumatized. Double our staff and halve our students, and then we will talk about open communication and democracy.

I expected a few of my coworkers to have found more suitable positions in the summer interim. It would make teaching harder, if not impossible, but it would be better to lose the cancer. I cannot imagine they remain out of loyalty as much as a torpor in finding something else to do, an ethic to which I cannot say I am immune. It is not arrogant to suggest I am better than this, but I am a practiced hermit crab and know how to use a shell.

The weather wastes no time cooling, so our air conditioner becomes superfluous, and Amber turns on our heat. They keep repeating "Spooky Season!" as though they can hurry Halloween. As I passed a twelve-foot evil scarecrow outside a golf course when August was still present, as I could buy Halloween candy on a hundred-degree day a few weeks ago, I cannot staunch the bleeding of holidays until there are not months as much as the foreplay to a festive climax that never quite arrives.

I don't quite know what is going on with me, except I am not happy. Chasing happiness is a recipe for misery, but I am not chasing it. I am simply lacking. Some of it is physical. I am tired. I have a cold. A sensible body would let me sleep this off. I am not so blessed. My body reacts with insomnia as though it intends to worsen me until I am nonfunctional.

I am not ignorant of or immune to my blessings. I know people whose circumstances are worse, those who would kill for my problems.

I read the other day that David Foster Wallace wrote his wife a two-page suicide note, formatted a bit of a book, and then hanged himself in his backyard. I don't think the formatting is a moment where he could have been prevented from his suicide, only incidentally delayed. Is that all my writing is doing, keeping me going because I have a loyalty to the obsession I claim is why I was built, one I neglect to do for days? (I am not suicidal.) How can I make such proclamations while anesthetizing myself with the internet?

On the other hand, I have published nine books and could have more, so I have several up on most people. I keep writing and publishing because it gives me the illusion of purpose. It grants me a sign I was here, for however little that matters. I am vandalizing. I am graffiti on a tower.

I would write more if I wanted to escape this rut. It is the only purposeful thing I do. I would not procrastinate. Amber says it is okay that I will write at work—and I will, which almost irritates me.

Today, albeit briefly, Amber and I came into conflict because I got them five peaches from the grocery store yesterday. When they went to the fruit today, mold had grown, and one looked bruised. I chose these peaches carefully and brought them home with the delicacy I might show to a bag of baby birds--though I do not know how birds would find themselves in this predicament. I did not want to be blamed for the existence of aggressive fungus and not apparently being aware peaches required refrigeration--they did without it in the store and, before that, the trees. Yet Amber seemed to treat the wasted peaches as my character failing.

I can ascribe my illness, the sourness of it, to the saying, but I will not let myself off the hook for the phrasing of "You make it hard to be nice to you sometimes."

It took me two breaths to put down what I was doing in the kitchen and say, "I'm so sorry. That didn't come out how I meant."

They do not say they accept my apology, which is unusual. I have crossed the

few steps to try the apology again with more oomph when I see they are weeping, a sight I hate like few others. I enfold them in my arms and say I am sorry. They reply that it is okay, sounding phatic. I disagree, noting that weeping is rarely okay.

It was the peaches, their waste, and disappointment (something I call a pricey but easily remedied mistake--there is no lack of peaches or even plums). It was also not the peaches, but in a way that I cannot parse fully. I would at once if it were a thing I could ease, no matter my emotional carcinization at the claws of inadequate sleep and a cold. It would be enlightened self-interest because I never feel lower than when I have been the cause of a solitary negative emotion in my spouse. However, I have consciously worked to observe this feeling rather than let the feeling overwhelm me.

Amber says it is good and healthy to have conflict over peaches. I cannot agree entirely, but I know it is better than fights about money or motivation.

I have fought the intrusive thought of Amber's leaving for months, maybe more than a season. Intellectually, I mark it as unlikely. Emotionally, I divide our furniture.

Moldy peaches won't break the camel's back, but I do all I can to prevent this beast of burden from needing chiropractic intervention. Take a load off. There's no need to stress.

My therapist will hear all this, but I suspect his help will be minimal—though his CBT is better suited to grocery scuffles rather than, as I did tell him, "Hey, sometimes a dissociate into someone cheerfully adroit in social situations, and he isn't me, isn't that weird?" which did not seem to register with him.

I can't untwist what I should from all this. If I endeavored to kiss the tears from Amber's cheeks—and do not—would I have deciphered prophecy from their salinity? I have to trust they will tell me when things are wrong, that their autistic mien means my mind reading remains as unnecessary as it is pathologic.

After unrooting myself from the apartment post-peach, I had a pleasant day of playing with my mother's new kitten, eating barbecue indoors in deference to an already passed squall, and mocking the antiquity of the shows and, judging by the three commercials per break for adult diapers, viewers of the game show channel. I forgot my angst, as I tend to do around other people.

last watched: Futurama
reading: Absolution