Sunday.

I’m sitting in the sunken, golden light, listening to the dishwasher and thinking of how many stories that gentle sound tells me each time that I hear it.

These are those stories.

WILD COLLEGE NIGHTS

The dishwasher is purring, reminding me of my first apartment and how much I loved listening to that white noise while I lit candles and stretched out on the living room floor with books falling like leaves around me.

My roommates used to come and go all night long, boyfriends and friends and bottles of god knows what in their arms, and I was there, on the floor, reading Joan Didion in the candlelight. It only takes a few frat parties to know that Didion and Zadie Smith make for far better company on a Friday night than Johnny from two doors down. I am, more than anything, relieved to be relinquished from the social pressure of college. Academic work was never what weighed me down.

A PERSONAL STORY OF SORTS

It was around the same time that I got my first job, hostessing at a restaurant downtown. In the beginning, before I really hit my stride as a minimum wage worker, I got the night shifts. While I wouldn’t sign up for those again, I loved them at the time. I loved them like you love the first person who ever kisses you, for no real reason other than the newness of the whole thing. You only get that just the once, and this was mine.

On cold December nights like these, when I wasn’t reading on the floor of my apartment, I was meeting the cool and interesting people of downtown nightlife. Sometimes, they were awful. But most of the time, I relished in the reciprocal relationship of hostess to guests. Sometimes people would give me book titles or tell me exotic stories of their summer travels.

I loved pouring them water and answering menu questions and feeling that I was, for the first time, in charge of something. It was strange to feel that power. I had never known it before. Suddenly, I was the person that people were coming to for help.

BEING A GROWN UP

I remember one night, particularly, a family came in with a little girl. She wouldn’t stop staring at me, telling me that my dress was pretty and that she liked my hair. It occurred to me there, with my heart in my hands, that for most of my life, I had been that little girl, looking up at the world.

There is a special admiration for older girls that all women remember from their girlhood.

Older girls and sophisticated women are like mythical creatures that you want to be just like and then—you become one. You become one without realizing it and it is nothing like what you imagined. And then you are that messy college kid, that baby on the mere precipice of life, and there is this little girl looking at you like you contain miracles that you forgot you used to believe in. You see yourself from the eyes of your own younger self.

We get so caught up in wanting more that we forget how many of our old dreams have long since become our waking reality. Her sweet looks of longing reminded me. 

MUNDANE MEMORIES

I also just loved the mundane routine of those nights. I would take my break at the bar, flirting with the twenty-six year old bartender, the very act that I believe was solely responsible for the new rule they emailed us about shortly after, informing us that breaks could no longer be taken at the bar and that socializing is for off hours. My bad.

I loved the final hour, when I would bring in the candles and turn off the heat lamps. I would change all of the trash cans, carrying giant plastic bags through the kitchen, ducking under railings and propping heavy doors open with a wayward brick. I became friends with the dishwasher, José, who would smile and laugh, probably not so much with me as at me as I attempted to speak Spanish. I loved those momentary greetings because they meant the end of the shift.

I loved opening the door and throwing the giant trash bags into the bins in the alley, feeling like every movie protagonist ever.

I loved putting on my coat and walking through the icy winter air, pepper spray in hand as I passed homeless people sleeping under bridges and on street corners, all the way to my car where I rolled all of the windows down and drove home with the twinkling city in the rear view mirror.

It would be late when I unlocked the door to my apartment, my roommates either asleep or out. I would make a cup of tea and drink it on the floor next to the little Christmas tree we put up, listening to the dishwasher purr, taking a few moments to breathe before waking up early and going to class the next morning.

HOSTING BRUNCH DOWNTOWN

Pretty soon, I earned the coveted morning shifts and those nights were long gone away from me. Almost as far gone as they are now. I was responsible for setting out the pastries and opening the umbrellas, not chatting it up with José as the hours dwindled and he snuck cigarettes.

These shifts were elite.

You needed a hint of masochism to survive hosting brunch at a downtown hotspot all weekend, and I had it. I spent the next year returning again and again, every weekend. I knew all of the regulars and where they liked to sit. I knew how to train new hosts, not that they ever stayed long enough for it to matter. I knew the woman with purple eyeliner who came every Sunday and that she was always eager to see what extravagant outfit I was wearing. I also know that I can still smell the food, can still feel the wrath of a stressed manager, and that “corporate” will always be a triggering word, for it was corporate who shut the whole thing down.

So it ended.

Over the course of a few days, we went from cursing ourselves for working there at all, to wishing it could stretch on just a little bit longer. I never understood how a place so chaotically crowded all of the time could have closed its doors, but close its doors they did. Something about “dropping the ball”, something about money.

But the end of that job was the start of many other things. It was the job that funded that first solo trip to New York, the one that cemented so much for me. It was also the one that the disappearance of led, waywardly, to the start of this blog. So these memories take up space in my mind, and I let them.

I let them because I love them. 

Now I am here, light years away, yet still just able to feel the pulse of that other life beating beneath this one every time I hear the dishwasher run.

Can you?

Love, m.

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