If you give yourself a break...

Note: this piece was simultaneously published on June 28th, 2023, in Weighted Tangents, my Substack newsletter.

If you give yourself a break and spend a quiet evening reading, then the entire back wall of shelving in your closet will emit a menacing groan before cascading to the floor, taking down half your wardrobe and a stash of old laptops you don't use but can't bring yourself get rid of.

When the shelves in the back of your closet collapse you'll build precarious piles of clothing across every flat surface in your apartment. You'll assume that the fallen shelves are your fault and that the repairs will take days, so you ignore the problem, avoid calling maintenance, and convince yourself that you can adapt to living like this.

To convince yourself that you can adapt to living like this you have to accept stubbing your toe thrice a day on the edge of a laptop obscured by a blanket hidden under a stash of button-down tops with fancy patterns that make you think of Dan Flashes. These stacks of fabric dotting your home also mean swerving just a little bit every time you walk from study to living room to kitchen and back again. It's fine because you only make this walk 27 times a day.

It's on one of those walks that the only person that hasn't ghosted you on the dating app you've guilted yourself into trying asks you out on a date. These collections of clothing are evolving, mutating, and closing in. You need an escape and ask to do something outside. You mean hiking but they choose dinner. You're too preoccupied with the piles to say this is not ideal, and start to get nervous about the date.

When you're nervous you spiral, and when you spiral you make everything more important than it is. And despite the mounds of clothing around your apartment you're convinced that you have no date-appropriate outfits and so you start shopping online.

But when you shop online you realize that you don't know what your "style" is because surely leggings and an athletic top cannot be considered a "style," not if you want to impress someone you've never met at a dinner you don't want to go to at a restaurant you've never heard of. Since you've never heard of the restaurant you spend hours online making sure you understand the parking situation, the menu, and how to get to the outdoor patio without having to walk through the dining room.

When you're running a reconnaissance mission on a restaurant you've never eaten at to meet someone you've never met to talk about—what are you going to talk about?!—you're not spending time completing your homework, which is piling up at faster than the dishes in an understaffed kitchen.

With every passing day that you don't complete your homework and don't address the shelving and ignore the mountains of clothing that have somehow multiplied and are now covering every surface in your home, your anxiety blooms until you become fixated on this date at this restaurant you've never been to that you don't have an outfit for with a person you've never met who seems nice (but they did call you "girl" that one time and said you were pretty and is that reason enough to call the whole thing off?) and you think about this so much that you've stopped sleeping and are also worried about your upcoming cardiology appointment because it must be serious if you need to see a cardiologist, who will say "you went VEGAN?" with more than a note of disbelief before signing you up for another round of tests, and besides you have to drive to Chicago (Chicago!) for the medieval sword fighting class that you enrolled in and haven't stopped thinking about and so you drive to Chicago (Chicago!) and in an instant everything makes sense because you are in the city you love and the city you moved here for and you're swinging a longsword in a dark, humid room as your palm, slick with sweat, slips across the pommel but you don't care because it is a SWORD and you are SWINGING it! And you're surrounded by people like you, the people who were weird and nerdy and athletic in school and are now weird and nerdy and a little out of shape in adulthood and you're talking about history and medieval illumination and you're swinging your swords and for the first time in years it feels like you're home.

Home.

When you finally feel like you're home you dread getting in the car and driving back to the suburbs. But you fasten your seatbelt and drive away from yourself without looking back, headed towards some facsimile of yourself, off-center and dulled.

And when you get to the apartment where you live the piles are still there—the clothes, the anxiety, the unfinished homework—and you ignore them as you curl up on the couch, a cat to each side of you, and text your date "I'm so sorry I can't make it. The shelves in my closet fell down last week."