By the river

“Hey, are you okay?”

The answer is no, not that you’d ever admit it to a stranger. Your therapist thinks that your intimacy issues are the gummy residue of a childhood dictated by an imperious tiger mommy whose love you were never good enough for, and you tell her that makes sense even though you know deep down that, really, it’s because you’re a piece of shit and nobody could ever love you. That’s why you’ve never been in a successful relationship. That’s why you have no real friends. That’s why you keep redownloading Tinder and Bumble, fuck and delete, fuck and delete, but how long can you keep this up? You’re almost thirty.

“Do you want to talk?”

You’re out on the banks of the Hudson, staring at coruscating ripples on the surface of the slow-moving river. You’ve been here for hours, the uncreased copy of Moby Dick beside you your ostensible purpose for coming out, but you’ve barely paged your way through three inscrutable pages since sitting down on this bench. The Sun is setting, glistening a golden path on the water out toward the horizon — The Horizon, a Jersey City waterfront highrise with a penthouse that recently sold for six million. Would a six million dollar apartment make you happy?

“Is— is there a way that I can help you?”

The woman steps before you in the path of the Sun, shrouding you in her shade. She’s tall. Pretty too, with vibrant, e-girl pink hair; wide, cerulean eyes; pale, snowy skin. On another day, you might have tried to hit on her a little, even despite her savior-complex demeanor reminding you of those cultish church girls you spent your entire childhood avoiding. But today, you just don’t have it in you.

“Look, who are you with?” you ask. “Trinity? St. Paul’s? I can assure you that I’m fine. My soul does not need saving; your God is not required here.”

“My gosh, look at you,” she says, and for a moment she looks distraught. You’re taken aback by the sheer distress rapidly spreading across her face. Apocalyptic despondency, as though her entire universe were coming to an end. A despair that’s so terrible and so complete that it would seem almost bathetic in banal reality if it weren’t so heartfelt.

But in her eyes, beneath the distress, something else burns so brightly that you almost need to look away. The indomitable will of the tenacious post-apocalyptic heroine; the entire world’s fire in a single pair of incandescent eyes.

“Your soul,” she says, “Devastating from afar, but up close, it’s… indescribable… God, who did this to you?”

“Look, I’m fine, I—”

“Your eyes are so empty; your heart is so hollow… how—”

“You really don’t strike me as the crazy type, so I don’t want to—”

“How… how do I help? What do I need to do to save you?”

You need to leave me alone, you move to say, but the words die on your lips. Are you really in the position to refuse anything in the shape of emotional sustenance, even from someone who’s clearly got more than a few screws loose in the brain? Don’t you know where this road you’re on is leading down? Hedge fund partner at thirty-five, married to some ditzy bombshell at thirty-seven, two kids and a ten million dollar penthouse at forty, bullet to the brain at forty-five — don’t the cliches just line up right before your eyes? Can’t you picture it, your gorgeous widow bawling stupid eyes out onto a closed casket; your two pathetic sons on either side of her tugging at closed palm and crepe dress; your apathetic mother delivering an reserved eulogy to a stifling room stuffed with sycophants?

Wouldn’t you do anything to be saved?

“Take me away. Anywhere. I don’t want to be here anymore.”