👋 Bless You
The woman careened down the subway car, jolted side by side by the train’s jerky movements, twirling like a dervish around each of the metal poles she clung to for support. She had wiry hair and bright pink calf-length sweatpants hanging loose on her tiny frame, with barely any fat on her bones and nearly all her teeth missing. She trained her eyes from person to person, mumbling, asking for something—anything.
This isn’t an uncommon experience on subway rides these days, as passengers either look away, down with intensity into the abyss of their phones, or rummage through their bags for orange juice, a banana, or loose change to deposit into the seeker’s shaky hands.
Today would be a little different—there would be a twist.
Today was Friday the Thirteenth.
I hate the number thirteen.
Just two days prior, I was in the clouds drinking my favorite Rishi Earl Grey tea while munching on a third Delta-issued dark chocolate sea salt and seed “granola” bar, on a flight heading East from California. I looked out the window to a red-orange sunset, remembering my window seat thirteen years ago, on a flight on this exact day and time, when I officially moved to New York City to live with my friend Julie in a small-but-perfectly situated NoLIta apartment on Mott Street.
This year, the flight home marked the start of my thirteenth anniversary living in the city I love, and the most precarious year yet regarding my ability to stay (or not).
My aversion to the number thirteen isn’t just that it’s odd and ugly—13—blegh. Or that it’s my numerology life path number: 1+3=4, a “worker bee” with karma to clear. It probably started in childhood after hearing superstitious stories, noticing hotel floors skipping it entirely, and dropping further in esteem after learning that it represented gang culture in my state. It hasn’t done me any favors since:
I hated being thirteen years old; I cried myself to sleep every night for much of middle school.
I hated the year 2013, mid-Saturn Return, when my life seemed to disintegrate from the first day until the last, owing to heartbreak, damaged relationships, professional despair, and depleted bank accounts.
My business turned thirteen this March, and for the first time since 2013, I regularly wonder if the jig is up. So do the people who love me—most have gently suggested I look for full-time jobs again.
You can imagine that, given the evidence above, I wasn’t too excited to also ring in my thirteenth anniversary of living in New York. This is the year the city will probably kick me out. I’ve been hanging on by a pinky fingernail, but something about this year feels make-or-break in a way it never has before.
I’m between a very hard rock and a very hard place, I typed into my reMarkable journal during the flight. But these are the problems I’ve chosen, and I will keep fighting to find a way through. I don’t know what else to do.
Like so many Sinatra-inspired creatives before me, I have now adopted the refrain that I previously thought I was immune to: Should I stay or should I go? The well-worn question rattles regularly in my mind, even as my heart repeatedly replies no, please don’t make me!
Am I being stubborn by insisting I stay, or is it the responsible thing to go? This has also been one of the central questions of Doh since losing the six-figure corporate contract that helped me clear the mortgage every year.
So lately, I’m always looking for new signs—signier signs—to break the tie.1
Back to Friday the Thirteenth: A striking man, about six-foot-five, entered the subway car just before the woman in pink and sat down next to me. He was wearing a crochet skirt with muted colors, something you’d find at the Tibetan shop in the West Village (or perhaps Tibet itself), accompanied by tall socks with sandals, a cross-body bag, and a navy blue bucket hat.
As the woman passed by us, I noticed movement in the corner of my eye, a little close for comfort to my personal space bubble.
At first, I tried not to look. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell who is safe and who isn’t on the subway; best to keep to yourself.