Missing In Action

You are alone in an apartment that is not yours. The walls are white here, like the cabinets and the doors and the sheets of the king sized bed you sleep on the edge of. If you throw your arm over you can rest your whole hand on the cold floor. They are white too, so white that you feel embarrassed by the random abstractions of hair trailing the few places you feel comfortable enough to just be. But you settle on leaving it all there. Because nothing else in the room tells you that anyone really lives here. You open drawers to find them empty, two closets sparsely filled albeit with designer clothes, a white keyboard piano the roommate has to impress girls covered in dust, a balcony with no chairs. You ask why the room is so empty and he tells you he doesn’t have time to decorate. But to you it’s not a matter of decorating. It’s a matter of living.

The forecast says 80 degrees and sunny, but you are wearing jeans and a jacket because you have not stepped foot outside yet and the apartment is as cold as the silence of this crowded room, a whole company you don’t know clacking away on code you don’t understand. You don’t remember why you decided to come here in the first place. You don’t remember all the situations you imagined, late at night unable to sleep, of what you thought this would be like. You feel… you feel everything, but above all you feel this panic you can’t work out with your violin at home. You play the one and a half pieces you know on the piano, over and over and over. You tell yourself that it helps you think. They tell you it makes their apartment feel like a nice hotel. You decide to write instead.

They invite you to play basketball, and you stand in the corner of the court spectating. The ball whizzes by and instinctively you back away while they pile on top of each other. Like the group dinners and company huddles, you feel like you are just getting in the way. You begin to retreat into yourself, try being productive, think about anything else that you can look forward to. You force yourself to go outside alone, walk around, look at art, while the person who invited you here leaves to do his own work. You find one like an acid trip, another a portrait of a girl with crackled skin, eyes covered. In the design district of ridiculously amassed wealth, you see a pair of red heels in the window of a store you would never step foot in. You wish that you could wear them, click them, and find yourself at home.

This weekend is not a part of the reality you hold. You constantly wonder when you’re going to wake up. You constantly feel like you’re going to throw up. His coworker tells you that whenever he visits Miami, it doesn’t feel like real life. His coworker talks to you more than he does. You find yourself laughing at jokes this other person makes, looking over to see his reactions, telling him all the things you do not talk about to the person you thought you came here to see. You say you are confused but you are not. You’re just sad. But the sadness doesn’t last in the way that it usually does. It fades away into the starkness of the white, morphs into this hilarity you want to tell your friends about. The good, the bad, and the ugly. In the humor, you begin to stand taller, speak louder. You feel more like yourself than you had since you came when you were ambushed by a group of people you didn’t know, a group of people you didn’t know you were going to meet. You turn the volume on the piano keyboard higher when you play and for yourself. You let yourself make jokes. You take the chairs you were scared to sit in before. And you pour yourself all the bottled Fiji water you want because it’s there.

You realize that he, who you once idolized and thought you could one day love, is just a ghost of a person. The more he has, the less he is. And he is completely fine with that. You pity him anyway. You try to figure out exactly when it was that you stopped finding him incredibly attractive and found him kind of… gross. It’s not that he doesn’t ask you anything - you love easily, regardless of reciprocation. It’s not that he’s changed because you’re pretty sure he hasn’t - but have you? It’s not even the discomfort of dinner table conversations about sex and drugs and exes. Or that he’s turning 30 and his age is starting to show. Maybe it was the aggression during basketball. Maybe it was when you realized that he’s not as charming as he thinks he is. That he doesn’t have enough to spend the way he does. That he has top tier golf clubs he does not know how to use, different sneakers for every sport he does not play. That his coworker tells you he only ever really talks about crypto and luxury goods. That despite it all you look for more, and there is nothing there.

You say goodbye to all his friends on your last night. You find that you like them. You find that you’re disappointed that you’ll never speak to these people again. As they head out they tell you you’re part of the family now. They tell you they’ll see you soon. You note that they did not say these things to the sugar baby his roommate brought to dinner the night before who apparently day trades SHIBA and the “volatile S&P 500.” You just smile and say good night. As he packs, you ask him why he wanted you to come to Miami when you didn’t even hang out. He tells you he wanted you to see how he lives. In bed, you ask him what this is and he mumbles half asleep that this is cuddling. You delete his contact even before he wakes up for his 6am flight. When he leaves he gives you a kiss and says he’ll see you later. You tell him to have a good flight. You take these few sleepless hours before yours to mentally say goodbye. You’re terrified that you won’t remember all that you need to remember to stay away. So you tell your friends everything, because you know you won’t make the mistake of disappointing them like you did the last time.

You say goodbye to the city you never got to really see. You are grateful for all the content and the stories, the urge to write again. You realize that the CFA is in three months. You make dinner plans with friends, find a restaurant for Mother’s Day. You hope that this version of you, so strong minded and alive, stays for as long as she can. You haven’t watched any shows. You haven’t done nothing in days. You think about the conversation you had with his friends, talking about how the entire city is a facade, albeit a very nice one. That the people are only surface despite having and spending so much. You decide at last to pick up your hair before you go. You make the bed and put away the towel, wash the branded glassware. You put everything back the way you found it. It’s like you were never here at all.