The letter said, "Where are you?"

It made me think about not eating, and about subway maps and envelopes that are sealed but still need stamps. I thought, “I live inside of waves” and “I don’t really live anywhere.” The letter made me sad.

The letter was from a time when I posed in the center of photographs. Before I preferred to be the shadow in the distance, casting darkness onto the subjects, or the sparkle in their eyes. Their secret.
It’s cleaner now that I don’t have to file it all in folders. But I like getting letters in the mail, sometimes.

I was not thinking about the letter on my way home from work. The 7 train was not running and I had to take a shuttle bus to the N. I was actively trying not to remember last night’s long, white corridors with bright yellow doors, and his studio apartment that had no blankets or paintings on the walls or bookshelves. I tried not to remember hailing a cab and thinking, “he could have killed me. Or I could have killed him,” and that it wasn’t a homicidal thought or a fearful thought; it was just a thought. An observation. I preferred to remember falling asleep in my own blankets, cradling my phone against my face.

I was reading a collection of erotica by Stephen Elliott, My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats me Up and the N Train took a long time to come. It became easier and easier to focus on the words, and not the yellow doors, even though the plot of the story and my memories were embracing and breaking, then embracing again, wrapping around each other like a spiral staircase.

A woman bumped into me with a trashbag she was dragging across the platform, jolting my concentration. She looked about my age, or a few years younger. At least she would have, if things were different. She had broken front teeth and the kind of dreadlocks that form accidentally and haphazardly when you don’t wash your hair for a long time. Her eyes flared with challenge when they caught my own, and I turned abruptly back to my book. She was halfway across the platform, but I smelled her. I smelled her coming closer.

I tried to read the words and I also tried not to move. She was directly in front of me and I could see her figure in my peripheral vision, staring at the artwork on the cover of my book: a redhead in black leather, dangling handcuffs. She sized me up in circles, ducking up and down, trying to force me into eye contact. The smell seeped in through my nostrils and filled my lungs. I held onto something mentally, some strength in my empty stomach. My sense of smell is intense; it’s my weakness. I get nauseous when someone enters my office wearing too much cologne. This was not cologne.

It felt like an hour but it was probably a minute. Two minutes, or maybe three. A voice came from behind us. “Are you alright?” An officer in uniform. I wasn’t sure which one of us he was speaking to. She scrambled towards the stairs, looking back frenetically, like an anxious hamster. The officer didn’t follow her, and I didn’t feel grateful that he interrupted her stare down. The train pulled in.

I thought about the times that police officers made me feel safe, and also about the times that I feared them, mostly for stupid reasons, like driving with stupid things in my purse. I thought about a baggy purple shirt with black stripes that I wore in high school to hide how skinny I was getting, and the officers staring at me sympathetically when they stormed in. I remember the angry fear in my mother’s eyes as she passed me on her way to speak to the officers in the basement and that I could hear everything she was saying about my brother.

He can be very manic but he’s not dangerous.
I don’t think he has the capacity to lie.

I remember the officer’s warm hand on my shoulder in the kitchen, and his deep brown eyes reading me. He was my D.A.R.E. instructor in elementary school, five years prior. I liked that he trusted my side of the story. I liked that much more than the sympathy, which made my stomach turn in static circles. I don’t think he has the capacity to lie. She has the capacity to lie.

The train rattled to a stop at Grand Central and a middle aged woman in a peacoat sat across from me. She was wearing pearl earrings and her hair was polished in a bun, but I noticed crumbs on her upper lip, and immediately decided she was crazy. She began to read a newspaper upside down, smiling at it intently. Her pockets were filled with peanut shells, and she emptied them onto the floor in handfuls. The couple sitting next to her got up and stood by the door, holding onto the handrails and whispering to each other.

I used to worry that I’d go crazy, but I don’t worry about that anymore.