Am I the only one who feels like a ghost in a room full of living people? I mean really, does anyone else spend their lunch hour sitting on a cold steel Matco toolbox feeling the heat of the shop floor seep into their old bones while everyone else is in the breakroom sharing some joke you’ll never understand because you’re seventy-six years old and trying to learn how to flush a transmission while your hands shake just a little bit too much? I sit there every day, every single day, with my turkey sandwich on white bread because the crusts are too hard for my teeth now and I listen to the cacophony of the impact wrenches and the boys—they are boys to me, all of them under forty—shouting over the radio about things I haven’t thought about in thirty years. It’s the cognitive dissonance that gets me, that’s the term for it, when your reality doesn’t match the internal schema you’ve built over seven decades of living in this city where everything moves so fast you can’t even catch your breath anymore. I used to have a desk, I used to have people who called me "Sir" and now I’m the "old man" or "Pops" and I’m just trying to remember the torque specs for a cylinder head without having to check the manual every five minutes. They have this shorthand, this social cohesion that functions like a well-oiled planetary gearset where every tooth fits perfectly into the next one and I’m just a loose bolt rattling around in the oil pan. They don’t mean to be mean, they aren’t cruel, they just don’t see me... they look right through me like I’m a piece of shop equipment that’s been there since the building was commissioned. "Pops, you seen the half-inch drive?" and that's the extent of the dialogue, the sum total of my human interaction for the afternoon. I think about my wife sometimes while I’m wiping the grease off my knuckles with those blue shop towels that never quite get the black out of the creases of your skin, the deep dermatoglyphics of a life lived too long. She’s been gone six years and the apartment in the Heights is so expensive now that I had to do something, I couldn't just sit there and wait for the atrophy to set in, the progressive muscle wasting of the soul. So I took this apprenticeship because I thought it would be tactile, it would be grounding, but I’m just an outlier in a dataset of youth. Am I the only one who feels like a biological anomaly in their own life? I see them grouped together by the coffee machine, huddled over a phone laughing at some video, and I’m just here with my WD-40 and my memories... it's a very specific kind of isolation when you're surrounded by noise. It’s the loneliness that has this specific tactile quality, it’s cold like the chrome-vanadium of a 10mm socket in February, it’s a heavy sensation in the chest, a sort of chronic pericardial constriction that you just live with. I make fun of myself, I tell them I’m just here to keep the average age of the shop from plummeting into puberty, I give them the "eccentric old guy" performance because it’s easier than letting them see the profound social displacement that’s eating me alive. I’m a clown in coveralls, a geriatric jester trying to figure out a serpentine belt while my heart is breaking for a conversation that lasts longer than "pass me the pry bar." I make these little jokes about my hearing just so they don't see that I'm actually listening to them talk about their kids and their weekends with a desperate, starving hunger. Every day I sit on that toolbox, every single day, and I look at the grease stains on the floor and I map them out like constellations, trying to find some meaning in the patterns of leaked fluid. I wonder if anyone else is faking it this hard, if anyone else feels like they’re a different species entirely. I use the diagnostic scanner on a 2019 Ford and it tells me exactly what’s wrong, "P0300 Random or Multiple Cylinder Misfire Detected," and I wish there was a scanner for me, something to plug into my temple that would spit out a code for why I can’t seem to connect with a single human soul in a building with twelve other people. It’s a systemic failure, a total loss of signal, a complete lack of interpersonal resonance. Sometimes I think about just not going back after lunch, just walking out into the city noise and disappearing into the crowd of people who are also not looking at each other, but then where would I go? I’d just be sitting in a different chair being old in a different way. At least here I have the smell of gasoline and the feeling of being useful, even if I’m just the guy who cleans the drains and gets the coffee. Does anyone else do this? Does anyone else stay in a place where they’re invisible just to avoid being alone in a room with four walls and a television that talks to you? It’s a pathetic sort of compromise, a real lack of executive function on my part, but I keep showing up, every day, every single day, waiting for someone to ask me a question that isn't about where the brake cleaner is kept. I suppose I’m just a relic, a piece of obsolete hardware in a world that’s moved on to solid-state drives and cloud computing. My joints ache with a dull, persistent arthralgia and my mind wanders to the 1970s while I’m trying to bleed a brake line. It’s funny, really, if you think about it—the absurdity of a man my age trying to start over at the bottom of the food chain. I laugh at myself when I drop a nut and have to spend ten minutes on my hands and knees looking for it with a flashlight, my knees cracking like dry kindling. You have to laugh or you’ll just sit on that toolbox and cry, and nobody wants to see the apprentice crying into his ham and cheese... it's just NOT DONE. Is it just me or is the world getting quieter even when it’s loud?