& Then,

I Became.

A Work Forever In Progress   
Authored by Basya Wuensch

This is an honest recounting of events. Do not mistake this to mean the following is true. I will attempt only to relate what it is I perceived at a given time. The details will become clear. Or as clear as I was capable of making all this muck.

I will start at the end. It is my freshest memory. I will then fall back to somewhere in the middle and may never address the beginning. This is how I remember it. Do not let this bee-boppitting around confuse or alarm you. The order is irrelevant. The pages of this tale can be torn out and thrown in a windstorm. Whatever order you recollect them will be sufficient. This is not a story of a linear quality. This is hardly a story at all. It is a series of evolutionary flashes. A list of integral ingredients.

This is how I became.

1

Somewhere in a city where no one individual can be easily picked from the crowd was a man employed to manufacture lasts. Every day he came to work and made what would be the last of its kind. His job: to engineer last meals, final feasts, for those on death row. Not a glamorous role, but someone had to do it. This position had formerly been assigned to the mothers or closest relative of these inmates. They were never able to finish the task without erupting in a seizure-like fit or collapsing like someone kicked, hard, in the back of the knees. So responsibility was shifted to a panel of elite chefs. The country's finest, but these elite were never able to subdue their own ego to create enough space for the compassion required to complete these dishes. The panel was fired. This, being the first rejection of their talent and induction to failure, sent them hurtling into despair. That because they'd always mistakenly measured the validity of their existence in successes. They formed a suicide pact and were dead the same day they were let go (from a position which had not even been particularly desirable to begin with). Thus, a man of simple culinary background was hired, not for his ability to cook, bake, or broil, but because he was born with no sense of self at all. This, while being a tragic fate, made him exceptionally capable of slipping into the minds of others. He could look at a person and understand immediately how they like their eggs to be cooked, how much sugar they take in their coffee, and whether they prefer well-done to medium-rare. Not that any of this mattered. No one touched the food. A fact that coincidentally also did not matter, because it did not stop this man from creating these dishes with hairline precision. He became all consumed; divorced his wife, sold his home, and put his two children up for adoption. He kept only his car and what little clothing he would need. The car for trips that could take days and weeks to buy a particular cheese or maple syrup. The clothing because that was the way of this country - and even though he cared less than nothing about anything at all (with the obvious exception of these meals) he was still socially conditioned and almost contractually obligated to abide by these arbitrary rules.
I sat on the subway across from this man. I smiled at him with tired eyes. He did not smile back, but I saw something flicker there. I doubt it registered in his mind. I got off at the next stop and moved to a neighboring car on the same train.
After all, this is not about that man. It is about me. Should you like to read more about such a man, I recommend you find yourself a different story. He will not make any more appearances here, at least not directly. He will be seen only in the way his story touched me, noted only through whatever tiny or ginormous shift his life exacted on mine. As will all the stories of every character that will come to pass through these pages. This is not a matter of egoism. It is simply the human condition. And to try to tell you that I am able to know these people beyond the scope of myself would surely be a matter of extreme egoism. I told you I would be honest. I cannot deny my centricity.

2

At the next stop, I got off and found myself meandering towards a trendy coffee shop in the nucleus of Park Slope. Park Slope being a trendy city somewhere in Brooklyn built on business corporates posed as free thinkers. A lot of bullshit goes on there. I loved it. I was walking briskly as I always do, with the air of someone who knows exactly where they are going and why. I never actually know where I am going and only ever cryptically why, but I always walk this way. I opened the door flanked on both sides by flyers for concerts and open mikes and other such hip events and inhaled deeply the scent of brewing coffee. The pain in my chest subsided a little after that first breath. I ordered a soy Chai Latte. Extra hot, no whip. The barista gave me a tired smile. This time I was the one to not return it. I took my drink with a tight-lipped thank you and sat at the window near the front. I pulled from my black leather backpack a cherry red leather bound journal that had cost my mother a ridiculous amount. I wrote these words:

When one suffers, as we humans so often do, either by the hand of injuries sustained from outside the body or a rampant self-inflicted brutality of the mind, it is one thing. We are able to feel with vibrant and distinct clarity the magnitude of our pain. The way it whispers into every bone and sinew. The way it vacuum compresses the very air we need to survive, a survival our self-battered mind is no longer even interested in maintaining. This is a terrible feeling. But it cannot and will never compare to what a truly invested friend feels when theirs are suffering. The utter vastness of the possible funhouse of horrors is abhorrent. The fact someone we love is stuck somewhere in that bleak infinity: unstomachable. It is impossible to be distracted from or ever heal from this pain because it is not ours to digest or bandage. It lies there, a gaping wound come face to face with its own limitations. We cannot heal our friends. We can hardly assist another with this grappling in darkness when we are so entirely lost in it ourselves. So we bite the bullet and watch the bough break over the backs of our loves. We throw back our heads cursing at a starless sky, at the Gd we have all sorts of trouble believing in, and warn that motherfucker never to pull this sort of shit again, or else.

Our friends laugh at our haughtiness, talking to this Gd that we have all sorts of troubling believing in that way and all.

A laugh is all we'd wanted.

We collapse, exhausted from the effort.

The story repeats itself.

"Exhausted from the effort." I was exhausted from the effort. It was like my soul and not my body was afflicted with something like mono contracted from letting my heart love all over the place with no foresight of the consequences.
My phone had been in my pocket now for 26 minutes. I knew there would be missed messages because I put it there in the middle of an intense argument. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I pulled my phone out. When I finally worked up the courage to look at the screen, through my lashes I read:

I have like eveeyone else a complicated psychological i have reasons i half know

Written just like that. The message had clearly been written in haste or some strong tempest of human emotion because the spelling, grammar, and word choice were all off and the name printed 5 letters strong in front of it belonged to a brilliant boy, and incredibly gifted writer. A fact made obvious by the depth of the message despite its illiteracy. God, I loved him.

I will interject here to inform whoever might be reading this what he might have meant by that. I have no way of knowing for sure. I will never know, but neither will he or anybody. I can, however, speculate that he was making an observation on his psyche, the myriad of layers he has to sift through before ever coming to a specific conclusion. A difficult task when the mind is infinite and physical action so pitifully limited.

The matter needing to be decided: Whether or not this boy and I should kiss, and if so, to whom the responsibility of leaning in first landed. Why the discussion and not just the following of our urges as they arose says a lot about the nature of this boy, myself, and the nuances of our complex relationship; a relationship born in a chemistry lab, raised on an oceanfront, and maturing in an upstairs bathroom of a great big house in an incident involving dark blue hair dye.  The blue dye didn’t last. Despite the label on the box that read permanent it washed out after just a week’s worth of showers, but the feelings born in that upstairs bathroom of a great big house have been a bit more resistant to shampoo.

I thought back to the man on the train. An engineer of lasts. I decided in that moment that I would become his antithesis. I would live my life in firsts. I am hardly philosophical enough to claim I had any idea at all what that meant. But, dammit, if it didn't mean I was going to lean in first to kiss a brilliant boy, and incredibly gifted writer.