an entire month of car repairs (10/16/25)
That odd time between books, when you have completed one and not yet begun another, that odd time in my life where I am caught between a romance which fails to end and another which fails to begin, waiting, waiting for something to break underneath that building weight above — this is how I find myself, walking. Walking that odd concourse cut beneath Winter Street, once an excess storage space for the morass of hulking department stores above, now a pedestrian walkway adjoining the twin complexes of Park Street station and Downtown Crossing station, though technically belonging to neither. The pillars have been painted, obviously over the course of decades, in varying shades of bright Orange on one side and bright Green on the other, corresponding respectively to Downtown Crossing’s Orange Line — on which I once lived — and Park Street’s Green Line — on which I now live. You can see both colors at once, and signage for either subway line contradicting the other in a demonstrable uncertainty about their own placement — though at least this is still definite, at least here I know where I am going, to which platform I am headed. A scene from the Northbound Orange Line platform: a man is standing beside a black-and-yellow JESUS SAVES sign, easily overlooked among the similar caution-tape colors of the station work advisories adorning Downtown Crossing’s ever-renovated factuality. He speaks proselytizations to a woman whose eyes now cake over with boredom, herself moments earlier having allowed the station missionary to corner her, a choice born from a sense of begrudging obligation and intermittent guilt; a genuine thought that she might really see the salvation of her eternal soul beside the stinking Orange Line train, it being among the unlikeliest of places for such an occurrence making the ordeal only that much more salacious to the her internal poetry; the idea that she might get Something, Anything from it in any case. Though she has not been given any of these things by this meeting with the dull man, him unable to rouse Christ within her — perhaps, though, she will be swept off her feet by the Hare Krishna she is to encounter next week in the very same transfer-stop along her commute? — she is now transparently regretting her preened impulse decision. There is no fleeing her choice, here, doubly so as she is invisibly crushed underfoot the high-rises above. Only a few hundred feet away, there once was a graveyard, cleared in the late 1800’s to carve a right-of-way for the underground trains — she does not know this, yet feels a sort of kinship anyway with the foul air of the subway, still lingering off the site of the long-removed dead. The missionary continues, unfettered but so aware of the woman’s predicament, the unconvinced demeanor so detestably clear on her face, his eyes chafing at the thought of ever meeting hers and seeing this conclusively.
I could no longer take witnessing such things. For some time I have maintained a personal belief that, to truly consider a locale your home, you must hate it at a certain angle; love is reserved for the tourist, and an improper trajectory to your bile means you ought to simply leave. Perhaps I have not yet found this golden angle for the city of Boston, which still sits so awkwardly in the way of my life’s plotted trajectory (should it have one at all), though I have built an adequate distrust of its transit system, the spiderweb network of buses and trains which sluggishly amble across the Massachusetts Bay before at last being put out of their misery, nightly. My distrust reached such a pitch that, recently, I reneged on my prior pronouncement — that I shall not own a car again — foreclosing on what, depending upon my present mood and the shape of my thought process, was either a decision made for reasons of grim finances or just simple lifestyle. In some ways, my purchase of a 2007 Toyota Yaris was, in fact, an admission of personal defeat: saying, here I do not truly have access to the urban amenities, the Real City life that I dreamed of from the suburbs. And that I do not wish to be landlocked to this city and the winding, intermittent spurs of its dysfunctional Commuter Rail. Whatever personal symbolism that the resumption of car ownership comes tangled up with in my life — I recall that, historically, a vehicle has mainly been a means for rapid exit from a city I detest, full with people I hate, typically adjoining times of general radical actions — it does not matter, because the car cannot leave my driveway. The very same day I bought it, through some absolute contrivance of bad luck, God’s specific hatred for me, or perhaps the Devil, the car’s alternator broke and the engine failed to start. And in the weeks since, enlisting the help of a mechanic friend of mine (or, a friend-of-a-friend of mine), I have embarked on a wrangling process of car repairs. What I had momentarily seen as the object of an uneasy progression in my life has, for the past month, only been a symbol of my own impotency, the narrowing of whatever possible actions I can take as I consign more of my time to a job which does not fulfill me, a school which teaches me nothing, and a capture-the-flag game for whatever scraps of my day remain played by my two would-be suitors (my ex, my friend). The Yaris is now a project car — a ridiculous thing for a Yaris to be — though it is not my project, and it propels my life in no direction at all. So for this still-enduring period, I have found myself in another odd position: I own a car, yet not enough to drive it.
The process of repair has stretched on in part due to a simple social contrivance; Mechanic Friend is frequently sidetracked by an emerging sexual escapade alongside one of my roommates, and now my car has become the inert object over which they engage with this budding romance. It is her excuse to come over, and in this my broken-down vehicle is merely a plot device for another person’s story, a consistent narrative throughline in some secret which I am not fully aware of. Always, there emerges a new defect to be repaired — alternator, alternator bracket, some manner of solenoid, belt tensioning, pulley bearings — to such an exaggerated point that I begin to suspect myself of having been strung along, unwitting, in service of the continued courting of Roommate by Mechanic Friend. To provide for her an unending supply of reasons to come over. I dismiss this conspiracy as ridiculous, too convoluted and outlandishly unethical to ever be true; though I often hate what I do not know, and the prospect of this invented narrative somehow being factual appeals in at least some degree to an interior excitability, an appetite for righteous indignation and stories of romances that stumble around with little regard for anything, partners falling over one another quite literally and breaking glasses, furniture, car parts, as they go. A shame nothing so simple could occur in my life. Though, neither in theirs.
This time of numerous, overlapping interregnums has become an unbearable feature of my life; college transfer fairs, months-out internship prospects, my car someday repaired, my romances someday decided. Unclear, not finding revelation on the subway platform or in any of these unlikeliest of places — this which I know cannot happen beneath all the sediment of my modern guilt and skepticism. I feel as though I may be forever caught, waiting, waiting — I can see the intrusions, sometimes, of another world, vaguely the imprints of its own alternate iteration of myself, the traces of her life’s course. It is not so much a hopelessly optimistic world, it is still crushed underfoot capital, etc.; though it is one in which I see myself living out a better life between the scanlines. As I watch, horrified, I feel as though I am missing out on a nondescript Something, myself an absentee in my own life, numbly waiting for something to pass on the city bus. In this dull moment, and in all dull moments such as these, I take mutual notice of an attractive stranger as well in wait. A body which I can use to tug at the loosened bra-strap tied about my now-dormant sexuality. Imagine a world outside my present hangups and waiting and the abounding gridlocked love triangle. The innocent paths we make our eyes take across the bus so as to conceal that we are really aiming to observe the other’s dumbly-clothed body, or to better approximate our imagined picture of the body underneath said clothes by referencing a personal index of fetishes, remembered sexual encounters, and pornography. These visual arcs take a slight curvature, inevitably poised toward the other, excitedly anticipating the fraction-second of their soon meeting — and we rake our own sightlines against the other’s in a brief moment’s sexual reprieve, and then we move on with the rest of our eyes’ course by force of what we claim is inertia. We do not lock eyes, this would be unthinkable, would it not? This scraping of vectors persists, again, again, hoping that one might approach the other and put a stop to the game. Or we do not hope for this, perhaps because we derive too much pleasure from the almost-almost of it all, the precarity and the impermanence of the situation that very thing which makes it worthwhile — it is unstable, and will end when one wordlessly leaves the bus, until next time — we find it better to caress eyes than to risk discovering that we find the other detestable. Or, perhaps they will sit beside you for an entire bus ride, though still fail to say anything at all for its duration, not until the very end: nothing more consequential than “I like your sweater,” then sputtering — “it’s cute” — then leaving with only a shared “have a nice day.” The torturous routine I enjoy too well. I think to myself, perhaps when my car is repaired I will not have to suffer this bus any longer.