Each time the voice says, like echoing from a godly tin can: ‘THERE is a TRAIN APPROACHING the LOCAL track’, I feel the urge to jump. I have lived in NYC for five months and have never done it, but I still leap back from the line, yellow and bumpy like candy buttons, just to be safe.
            On the subway, I check the electronic map, like it could show the distance between stops, the next one getting closer and closer. A New Yorker brushes me with his umbrella. Is it supposed to rain today? Perhaps if I carried an umbrella I would feel more responsible. The New Yorker with the umbrella apologizes.

“Sorry.”
he mutters.

            This is something that happens in my head, when I’m running late for work: Dialogue tags. I think they come in times of stress. It happened during my job interview, and it was hard to think of answers when I was assigning tags to my boss’ questions.
            At work, I sip flaky coffee from the Keurig and watch the glass doors, waiting for my boss. He is a fast walker. There is limited time to make a nice impression.        
            My boss read on my resume that I went to an Arts college, but I do not think he knows I am crazy yet – and I don’t even mean crazy crazy, I mean artsy. I practice saying good morning in my head.
            A coworker comes in. I pretend to write something down and my hand throbs.

***
            Sometimes I think about what other people think of me and it takes up entire commutes, or I’ll be sitting in front of the computer with the cursor hammering at the beginning of a chapter and I am trying to weigh how many people there could be that hate me with no cause versus the people who hate me with cause.            I think it could be my secretly-encroaching and ever-enveloping fear of the subjectivity of others. To narrate is to be the star of the story. There is no right and wrong – only opinion. And here, in a book, mine is the only one that matters. I am whipping up my life’s novel in my head and I know it is vain and stupid. And I am actually writing a book.
            All of this – the dialogue tags – started happening to me before I started writing a book.
            I know it is a Writer’s No-No to use anything other than the standard: he said, she asked, they yelled. Anything else is distracting – they piped up, she wailed, and, if you’re Victorian, he ejaculated.


***
            I am late getting to the bar. I am trying to look at my phone less and so I don’t look up the directions. I am meeting my two friends – but really it is my one friend and his boyfriend. I do not know yet if his boyfriend likes me. My one friend and I told his boyfriend all of our crazy stories from Arts College and I worry he thinks that I will try to hook up with my one friend. I don’t want to; it is not even like the train tracks. I worry they look down on me because they both work at theater non-profits and I make a lot of money for reading books while waiting for the phone to ring. I am trying to read four books each month.

“What happened to your hand?”
he asks
he asks, pointing at my hand
he asks, pointing at my hand with a concerned expression.

            My hand looks like a balloon animal. I tell them I fell off a Citi bike. Really I punched a wall in my apartment. My one friend and his boyfriend say that if I get my hand put in a cast it can help me get laid, because it makes me look like a luxurious pillow queen who is helpless to flights of passion. The word ‘helpless’ echoes in my head when I go to pee and someone outside jiggles the door handle. I yell that I’m in here, and it sounds desperate, like I’m trapped in a cave or the apartment building in The Towering Inferno.
            Back to our booth, I think I see The Stranger at the bar. I check to make sure. Not him.

***
            I think I see people who know me all the time. Maybe it’s because everyone in my half-gentrified part of Brooklyn looks like they went to Arts College with me, but it is more than that. It is their essences. It is like they are the same background from an earlier scene, in the row behind me at the movies or crossing in front of me at the grocery store. I stare at their faces like they are the optical illusion of the pretty lady and the hag. This happens everywhere.
            The Stranger is different, though.
             I count my steps on the way home to my apartment. I only used to do it sometimes, when drunk at Arts college, as if that’d keep me from throwing up.
            I live with two people and two cats. We have three bedrooms. I have the smallest one and I always lock my door whenever I’m inside, even if I need to walk back out to use the bathroom or make dinner or leave my shoes on the slidey mat by the door.
            I wanted to watch every episode of The Twilight Zone from the beginning, but I turn it off. Almost every actor in those episodes are dead or dead-old. Almost every female character is a naggy wife or vain actress or a robot made to comfort men serving their jail sentence in outer space.
            I watch John Mulaney stand-up again. I wrap my hand in a dusty ace bandage I find under the bathroom sink. My fingers are sticky and orange from the Goldfish crackers and bag of kettle corn I just ate.

***
            I was thinking about The Stranger when I punched the wall. Once, I thought of him and chucked my phone into traffic. It did not get run over, though I wish it did. I look at my phone too much.
            I call him The Stranger because I am sick of hearing his name in my head and once I even said it out loud, while looking in my fridge. It’s “The Stranger” because he is French and sounded like he was constantly speaking in cursive, and once he made fun of me because I pronounced Albert Camus as ‘Albert Camuss’. I think about this whenever I look through a bookstore window.
            I mistake passerby for The Stranger because I think about him all the time. In Arts College, it was only when I was curling up to go to sleep or getting drunk with my four friends or masturbating that I would think of him. It mostly stopped when I dated other people but now it is back and I cannot walk from my desk to the bathroom without thinking of The Stranger, or between brushing my teeth and flossing. I replay the Albert Camuss moment and lots of others but also I write scenes in my head – me and The Stranger drunkenly fighting in an imaginary hotel room, where we end up having sex or just cuddling while crying. I think of snappy dialogue like I would when we would fight but now sometimes I feel my mouth forming the words.
             I perfect speeches of what I’d say to The Stranger, but I am not planning on ever seeing him again, so this practice is for nothing.

***
            Sometimes I say things out loud. It is mostly the tail end of sentences, or keywords: you, no, brewski, shit, shut up. I try to pass them off as a sigh, or humming, or like I’m working out a problem in my head. I know that New Yorkers don’t care about other New Yorkers, and on the next block they may see a car crash, or Larry David, or a homeless person peeing between trash cans.
            My brain is like a dog that does zoomies when let out in a yard. Or my brain is like a dog on a tight leash, roving and shitting in the same places, thinking of the same things over and over again all the time, turning around and eating its own shit.
            I try to articulate this like one day I will actually run into people that I used to know, and I will have the opportunity to explain myself. I will set the record straight on my past behavior, and then I ask myself, from the other side of the desk, shining the lamp into my eyes, what past behavior? And then the barking and running start all over again, and this is a mixed metaphor.

***
            On weekends, I try meditating at a studio in Fort Greene but music starts playing in my head or I hear jingles from old commercials or make lists of names of people I’m not friends with anymore. I babble nonsense noises silently. Names for my protagonist fire at me like from a Baby Name generator –

Carrie, Anne, April, June, June Bug, Buggy for short?

***
            I have insurance now through work, but I don’t know if that means my boss will know what I spend it on. I go to the therapist anyway.
            This therapist is an older woman. Her pale white face twists out into her nose like a fancy dinner napkin. I am worried she will remind me of my grandma because she is old, and that I won’t be able to tell her all my sex stuff. I am worried that she is not woke and that she will say something microaggresively racist. I want to deal with my ingrained racism, and a white old lady might not be able to help me. Worse, she may sense my apprehension and say she digs it. We sit down and she says let’s jump right in.

“So, let’s jump right in.”
She says, shifting on her overstuffed armchair.

            I’m trapped in an armchair, too, the sides like upholstered blinders. I tell her about the train tracks, but I know everyone gets that itch, and I am not like everyone. I want to stress that it frightens me enough that I take caution to stand against the tiles, but I’m worried that I will oversell it and she will think I am lying. I tell her that I take notice of and worry when children are near me without parents. I worry that they are lost, but I am also worried that I will curse at them or molest them. And, when I was little, my babysitter would take me to the playground and I would suddenly consider pushing her down the slide. I don’t like to hold babies because I am worried I will spike them like a football.

“Maybe, you feel the urge to throw the baby so you won’t molest it.”
she suggests, blinking.

            When I take her business card I know I will not speak to her again, unless she overcharges me and I need to call and use my serious voice. I am working on my serious voice. Right now it sounds a lot like yelling.

***
            I try dieting. I try fasting and only eating between the hours of 10 am and 5 pm. I try cutting out bread and then dark colored vegetables and try finding spirulina in the maze of Whole Foods. I eat canned tuna from my bodega because I read protein is important. I read that going vegan clears your head. Or maybe it was going keto. Maybe it was cutting out dairy.
            At work, I order Chinese takeout for lunch and eat three egg rolls in twelve minutes. I have to leave work early. I am paranoid that my coworkers think I am hungover, because I am running back and forth to the bathroom and am the youngest person in the office.

***
            Maybe being crazy works for writers, or maybe it’s just male writers. I don’t think I will be able to get any work done if I go full crazy. I can get barely any work done now, and I sit at my job doing nothing. I have a book to write. I got through sixty pages but I realized it was crap, and that’s why I punched the wall, too. I want to give the protagonist a new name.

Mary, Marie, Laurie, Lena, Lenny, Laura?

***
            I tell my one friend and his boyfriend that maybe I am crazy, so it will not hurt if and when they say it behind my back. They will know that I know that I am crazy and they will know that at least I am self-aware, if also crazy.
            My one friend says that he knows another friend that recently went on medication and feels so much better, because before they were waking themselves up five times a night to check that the gas stove was off and pulling out their eyelashes. I do not want my one friend and his boyfriend to think that I think my situation is that dire. I do not want them to think I want to swallow medication without fixing the real problems with my personality that they must know that I possess, maybe know more than I even know.

“Medication could be a good idea,”
he says, looking at his drink
he says, looking at his drink to avoid my gaze.

            I tell my one friend and his boyfriend about yoga and meditation and how I drink a lot of water. I have one cocktail and I can almost wrap my raw hand around the glass. Tomorrow I will admonish myself for having a drink on a work night, and admonish is a good word to use on the fly in a thought. I am impressed with myself.

***
            The psychiatrist’s office is between a Connecticut Muffin and a soul food place. I am forty minutes early for my appointment. The soul food place has pink tile floors like stale bubblegum and faded photos of every menu item. I pretend to want to buy something, and then I pretend to get an important phone call so I can leave without buying anything. I circle the block and change my route when I think the family sitting on the steps of an apartment building might think I’m casing the joint, like I am planning to come back in the night and rob them.
            The psychiatrist shares his office building with a pediatrician and a tax filing office. For reasons I cannot discern, there is a poster taped to his wall about Diabetes. Maybe he will take my emotional eating problem too seriously. I am worried the psychiatrist will ask me if I masturbate and then ask me if I like it. I guess I will lie, but hopefully he won’t ask.
            He is a West Indian man with spongy gray hair and little moles dotting under his eyes. I turn my phone off and I tell him I am turning it off. I wonder if his other twenty-five year old white female patients do anything so courteous. I am not sure if I am supposed to ask for drugs and if I do it I look like I’m planning to peddle them. My one friend warned me that some doctors write prescriptions just to appease Big Pharma. The psychiatrist tells me I need blood work done first.

***
            When I get my bloodwork done, I worry I have STDS, even though I haven’t hooked up with anyone in two and a half years. I went to the gynecologist last year, when I was still under my dad’s insurance, and she tested me for STDs then. She even opened the metal umbrella inside me, prepared for rain without checking the weather. I was clean.

***
            The psychiatrist looks at the results on his laptop. He also looks at a sheet of paper and makes notes. I tell him that I am sure I need medication though I don’t know if I’m supposed to plead my case. I do not want him to ask me if I triple-check locks or curl up into a ball or mutter hexes or twitch, because the answer is no. I am worried he will tell me to try meditating or yoga or a diet or screen detoxing. He doesn’t; He gives me two prescriptions.

***
            I go to a 24-hour perogy place with my one friend. The perogy place is run exclusively by Russian ladies with crusty eyelashes who don’t say please or thank you. It has been three weeks or a month since I have seen my one friend but I didn’t do it on purpose.I tell him that first. I don’t want him to think I am being dramatic or that I think I’m special for being on medication. I want to look around before I speak, like someone from Arts college is sitting nearby, in earshot, or the Stranger, coming through the door. The bell on the door rings, but I don’t look. I don’t need to. My one friend is in front of me.

“I’m on medication now,” I say, looking up at him and then down at my seltzer.
I say, looking up at him
I say

“I’m on medication now.”
“Oh, you are? That’s good.”
“I know.”

            On the walk home from my train stop, I imagine the hotel with The Stranger and I perfect the line ‘first I thought I was in love, then I thought I was crazy, then that I was a victim of abuse…turns out I’m just mentally ill, with a flare for the dramatic.’
            I type this into my phone notes with my bad hand. Together, my bad hand is almost back to the size and color as the other.