Julia Rose Eng

When i stepped out of the hotel i did not feel this way. i am bobbing up the sidewalk like a ghost hung from elastic avoiding the cracks because i love my mother. the buildings lean and reverberate in my hair and in the backs of my eye sockets. the ministry of interiors has more security lately and as I step past each barricade I can hear their hup two’s shining off of their badges and the acute pressure of each semi-automatic in the arch of my foot. hotel caramel hotel caramel, these words roll around the cabinet behind my eyebrows. what about limbs? my feet in my little black shoes are being pushed by the aim of a crew-cutted, flash-tatted officer with a cigarette in his left hand. the limestone is breathing, solid at my feet, soured coffee and refined sugar and husky piss and a century of rain. the sidwalk bulges out in impossible reach then narrows in front of a gilded gate like a Kardashian timeline. 

this is my yellow brick road, lutetian stone, a healing rigidity…hotel caramel is sticking to my shoes which i bought on sale, on soldes, are these shoes on soldes? fifty percent off is a good deal for the red but the black ones are classic so they are not on sale. so the red ones and the black ones were soldes to me because of course i want a classic. he is a classic. he is not for soldes. he is sitting at home waiting for me to call him but calling costs twenty five cents/min so i told him no. he knows that this, me, him, me on the street is all about minutes and not about seconds, but not yet about hours because calls are expensive like my shoes. with my shoes i could have called him for one thousand nine hundred and eighty minutes or thirty three hours. the difference is that the shoes get me places and he is stuck to me like chewed up gum across a whole wide big pot of cerulean mirror shards. how long will i walk until it, rather than snapping, ceases to link us like the quiet collapse of a rope bridge?

a moped grouchily braces its tires against cobblestone right past my face and splutters onto my stockings and i see myself in the rider’s helmet. reflective as it is, it seems no one is driving or riding the moped. they could be no one or even anyone. they could be George Bush. or Willy Wonka, or even my child hood best friend. but all i see is me. I am trying to run myself over. i was once told that when i walk i look like i am trying to keep myself from falling and running my face into the earth and so now i walk to the beat, straight up like i am tied to heaven with little hair ribbons. hotel car-mel, hoe tell car melt (sung like an angel eating peas and egg whites and halo top) bump bump bump bump life vest cross walk down town green frog hoe tell mow ped lib tard snow flake fash ist and i am keeping my pace while a girl wearing one of those pinkish bluish white scarves brushes past me and interrupts me and i feel her presence behind me in the wings of my shoulders like a phantom disruption.

i am angry. i have complaints about how all of the thinness of the sidewalk should have been invested in the thinness of the people, and how i am not stupid, so i know where she bought the scarf before i even saw her turned-out tag because i am not stupid like she thinks i am. i was busy battling the wind and the rain up the street and sticking him together in my head with saltwater taffy and instagram posts that i treat like faded newsclippings like an absent parent proud from afar.

the girl disappears around the corner and the semi-automatics quiet their gaze. if i hit myself in the head a bit harder than i did this morning he will stick. if a door swings open today and bruises the top of my knee then he will stick. if i see my kind of taxi out of place then he will stick. i am getting stuck to the city but it will be okay if he sticks with me. he is not planned obsolescence, he is not for soldes, he is classic. he will stick, even if i sink into a catacomb, even if my limbs get shot off, he will have a flannel to cover my ears from the ringing wind and maple syrup to bring the sweetness back to my face and some embarrassment to share with me. if i trip and fall into the sidewalk, if my feet get stuck, if i stick my middle finger up at a cop or at the girl or at myself in a helmet he will tell me

Julia, it’s fine. You can just take off the shoes.

and with that i have arrived at your monstrously red-doored apartment. you stuck very well.