Concrete under my shoes, always concrete, cracked and sweating in the summer heat like it’s alive, breathing up at me, and the smell, god, the smell, burnt copper, and bus exhaust and that sweet rot from the dumpsters behind the bodega. I walked past the Brazilian man’s coffee cabin this morning, who I’ve been buying coffee from every day for the past five years and who greets me every time by name, but I still have no idea who he is or what his name was. His name’s probably Marcos. Or Jorge. Something warm. He waved, his hands all soil and veins, and I lifted my chin but couldn’t make my mouth move, couldn’t force the sound out. My throat just… closed? Like a rusted hinge. I take the cup, mutter obrigado like a tourist, though neither of us believes it. The coffee’s too bitter. I drink it anyway.

On the piss-stinking underground, a blind kid’s playing accordion near the turnstiles, La Cumparsita butchered into a dirge. Wrong notes, but the tourists eat that authentic struggle shit up. His sign reads HUNGRY & HOMLES GOD BLESS — the missing “E” in “HOMELESS” thrills me. I toss a pound coin into his Starbucks cup (grande, iced). “For the proletarian struggle…or a better disguise—that Ralph Lauren vest is last season”. Blind my ass. A commuter clutches her tote bag (This Machine Kills Fascists) and hurries toward the escalators. The kid starts another song. Bella Ciao. Wrong key. Wrong century. Wrong everything. I hum along, off-tempo, just to feel his jaw tighten. I text my financial manager: Dump Ralph Lauren stock.

My seat’s still damp from someone else’s raincoat. The guy standing in front of me was peeling the label off his beer bottle, slow, methodical, like it was the most important thing in the world. His fingers left smudges on the glass. I think he was another homeless. I wondered if he loved someone. If he ever lied about it. The train jerked, and he stumbled into me, muttered ’scuse me without looking up. His breath smelled like mint and cigarettes. I wanted to hiss something at him but my tongue just sat there like dead meat in my mouth.

Sometimes I catch my reflection in store windows, not the whole face, I hate my whole face, just fragments of it. A cheekbone. An ear. It doesn’t look like me. Looks like someone wearing my skin, and has done a very poor job at it. My sister called last week and I didn’t pick up. She left a voicemail: Hey, it’s me. Mom’s asking. You should… you know. Call. I deleted it. Deleted the birthday reminder too. TWENTY-NINE. Jesus. Twenty-nine and I still eat cereal for dinner. Still make the housekeeper do my washing. Still sleep at 3 a.m.

There’s a hole in my chest where feelings should be. Maybe it’s not a hole but something denser, a lump of gross, stinking, wet socks. I read somewhere that your body forgets how to cry if you don’t let it, that the ducts dry up like old sponges. Maybe that’s why my eyes itch all the time now. I tried to cry once. Stared at a video of a donkey drowning to death in a flood.

They call this living. A series of equations where each variable of it - love, ambition, fear, is rounded down to the nearest integer. Every one everywhere is interchangeable. Flay them, and you’ll find only circuitry, the same frayed wiring that animates the elevators and the streetlights and the drones annihilating children in wars.