Severance

by Ling Ma

He smiled. You don’t know how easy you’ve got it. He said it without malice, but it stung anyway. I stepped into the elevator, pretending his comment didn’t cut me.

There was an insatiable frenzy to shopping in Hong Kong, to using a foreign currency that felt like play money.

If you are an individual employed by a corporation or an institution, he said, then the odds are leveraged against you. The larger party always wins. It can’t see you, but it can crush you. And if that’s the working world, then I don’t want to be a part of it.

In this dream, I can’t speak. I try to open my lips, but I have none. I have no mouth, and even if I did, I have no language. I have deep emanations though, indigestive blubberings coming out of my stomach. My mother seems to understand.

The crush of Times Square greeted me. The city was so big. It lulled you into thinking that there were so many options, but most of the options had to do with buying things: dinner entrées, cocktails, the cover charge to a nightclub. Then there was the shopping, big chain stores open late, up and down the streets, throbbing with bass-heavy music and lighting. In the Garment District, diminished to a limited span of blocks after apparel manufacture moved overseas, wholesale shops sold fabrics and trinkets imported from China, India, Pakistan.

The sobs heaved out almost euphorically, like air bubbles in seltzer water, that first crisp sip, as I gripped the sides of the sink, doubling over. My face touched ceramic. I wanted to disappear down the drain.

Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money. Like learn to be a better photographer. And even if we didn’t get around to it on that day, our free day, maybe it was enough just to feel the possibility that we could if we wanted to, which is another way of saying that we wanted to feel young, though many of us were that if nothing else.

To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless. To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?