you know that feeling when the whole world just stops vibrating for five fucking minutes and you're finally alone in a room that costs three thousand dollars a month but all you want to do is sit on the goddamn floor because the chairs feel like they're judging your posture or your life choices... it's like this kid I see through the window across the airshaft, some graduate student probably, just sitting there on the hardwood with a white cardboard box of lo mein and the light from the fridge is the only thing keeping the dark at bay. you watch someone like that and you remember when your own internal clock wasn't just a countdown to the next pharmaceutical intervention but a real, ticking thing that meant something. I'm seventy-six years old and I'm sitting here on my own floor tonight because the sofa feels too much like a grave and I just needed to feel the literal support of the foundation beneath my tailbone. it's the silence that gets you in this city because it's never actually silent, is it? there's always the hum of the transformer outside or the hiss of the radiator or the sound of some asshole in a 4x4 gunning it down the avenue at 2 AM. but then there’s that internal silence, that sudden drop-off in cognitive load where you aren't performing for the neighbors or the ghosts of your parents or the husband who’s been dead since the late nineties. sometimes you just eat your cold noodles and you realize you haven't spoken a word out loud in forty-eight hours and your vocal cords feel like old, rusted guitar strings. it's a specific kind of anhedonia, i think, where you aren't even sad anymore, you’re just... static. you spend your whole life running, especially in a place like this where if you aren't moving you're being trampled, and then you hit this age and the senescence really starts to settle into your marrow. i look at that kid across the way and i want to scream through the glass that it doesn't get easier, the work just changes shape. back in seventy-four, i thought if i just got the degree, if i just married the right man, if i just survived the fucking winters, i’d reach some plateau of peace. but here i am, still sitting on a floor, still eating out of a plastic container because washing a dish feels like a goddamn marathon. it’s a funny thing how the executive dysfunction of your twenties comes back to visit you in your seventies like an old, shitty friend who never learned how to leave a party. sometimes i think about the person i was before i learned how to hide things. you know that feeling when you're carrying a secret so long it becomes part of your actual anatomy, like a tumor you’ve just decided to name and live with? i never told anyone about what happened the night the lights went out in seventy-seven, the things i took from that store when the windows smashed, or the way i felt a genuine, electric thrill seeing the city bleed. everyone talks about the fear, but for me, it was the first time the external chaos matched the shit going on inside my skull. i still have the watch i stole. it doesn't work, of course, but i keep it in a drawer next to my heart medication because it's the only thing in this apartment that feels HONEST. being old in a fast city is like being a ghost that people keep bumping into and apologizing to without actually seeing. you walk down to the bodega and you see the price of eggs and you want to start a riot, but then you remember you're too brittle to throw a brick. so you just stand there, looking at the fluorescent lights, feeling your synapses misfire just a little bit, and you wonder if the clerk can see the decay. i used to be the one who fixed things. i was the one people called when the world fell apart, the one with the precise vocabulary for every disaster, the one who could explain the psychological underpinnings of why we hurt the people we love. and now? now i'm just another body in a zip code that's trying to priced me out of existence. it’s the stillness that's the real killer, though. when the takeout is gone and you’re just licking the salt off your teeth and the kid across the way finally turns off his light. that's when the melancholia really starts to hum. you start thinking about the people you outlived and you feel a DISGUSTING amount of guilt for still being able to taste the MSG and feel the draft from the window. why do i get to sit here on this floor when better people are already under it? there’s no rhyme or reason to who stays and who goes, just the luck of the draw and maybe a decent cardiovascular system. sometimes you just want to stay on the floor forever. you think if you just stay still enough, the city will forget you're here and the bills will stop coming and the memories will stop scratching at the back of your eyes. i remember a girl i loved in sixty-eight—not my husband, but a girl—and the way her hair smelled like cigarettes and cheap jasmine. we sat on a floor just like this in a tenement that’s probably a boutique hotel now, and we thought we were the first people to ever feel anything. i wonder if she's sitting on a floor somewhere tonight, too, or if she's already gone. i haven't looked her up. i'm too afraid of the answer. the clock says 3:14 and my knees are going to scream when i try to stand up. my doctor says i should be more active, that i should join a group, that social isolation is a predictor of early mortality as if i don't fucking know that. as if being around a bunch of other people who are also waiting for the end is going to make the silence any less heavy. you know that feeling when you’re just waiting for the credits to roll but the movie is three hours too long? that’s the secret of being seventy-six. you’re just sitting on the floor, eating your noodles, watching the light change, and hoping that maybe, just maybe, tonight is the night the stillness finally takes.