SUN BASI

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static on the line.

My phone was smooth. The cream matte finish that once felt great to the touch was worn down from my static decisions in life. What once was supposed to be a transition had now become a permanent residence. Pursuing a career in investment banking was always supposed to be a temporary decision, but to balance the demands of my high-maintenance fiancée, I didn’t see any end in sight. Her favorite sister was in town, so that meant they’d both wake up sometime in the afternoon and then continue to shop and spend money all day while being supported by a steady diet of mimosas, nose candy, and finger foods. Also, this wasn’t her real sister (she had three she rarely spoke to), but her sorority sister. She saw her biological sisters only once a year, during a mandatory Christmas celebration, and only to appease her father so he wouldn’t cut her out of the family will. Convincing her that some of us had normal lives and couldn’t just take off whenever we felt the need, was always a true test of patience.

“One drink with us won’t kill you,” she slurred.

It was 10:30 am. This was early… even for her. Normally she’d be in a coma well past lunch, but she must have been dipping into her prescribed uppers a bit early.

“Listen, I’m at work, also I don’t even think Cara likes me… you two will probably be better off doing your own thing,” I said, knowing full well, the answer wouldn’t suffice.

“You always do this. You always find some excuse to not hang out with her. Now you’re not even trying? Just flat out saying no?!”

“Keep it down, she’s going to hear you…”

“I don’t care if she hears us! I don’t care if she likes you or not, I want you there. Your fiancée? Have you forgotten that commitment? Darling, everyone knows you don’t care, just pretend for a change. Make me feel like for once you actually support my decisions in life and want me to be happy. You know, for someone who says money isn’t important, you sure like to prioritize work over quality relationships! And you say I care too much about money?!”

She wasn’t wrong that I care a lot about money, but the part she neglected to mention was that most of it went to keep her in a lifestyle she was accustomed to. It was already difficult keeping up with bills as is, but this wedding looked to be the death of me. It wasn’t that her father wasn’t paying for the main event, it’s just between the engagement ring, the photo sessions, the lavish vacations for Instagram pictures, and the never-ending celebratory parties, I just couldn’t keep up financially. It also didn’t help that the two-thousand-dollar stipend her father gave her a week either went on her feet or up her nose. She was a walking, talking, erogenous hot mess, but I loved her, which meant I usually did what she wanted, even to my own detriment.

“Fine, I’ll be there soon Anna. Where am I meeting you? The apartment?”

“Heavens no, we are on our way to eat breakfast at Tiffany’s. Cara thinks she might have met ‘The One’ and wants to pick out the ring ahead of time!”

Talk about putting the cart before the horse… it’s amazing what people can get away with when they are attractive and rich.

“Make sure you don’t buy anything. We need to start saving more if you still want to get that house in upstate after the wedding,” I said, hoping my words weren’t falling on deaf ears.

“Details, details! Besides, we have love, what else do we need, right? Be there at eleven, sharp. You know I don’t like it when you are late,” she said in a tone that made it clear it wasn’t a joke.

I was being told not to be concerned about money by the most materialistic person I knew. It was days like this that I wasn’t even sure why I was marrying her. Come to think of it, I wasn’t even sure if I was even content with her anymore. Things just got so comfortable, even amongst the chaos.

Anna took a ton of pills, mostly prescription. If it wasn’t for ADD, it was for PTSD, and if it wasn’t either of those, it was for general anxiety. She told me the pills helped, but I wasn’t sure about that. In fact, I wasn’t even sure what she was properly diagnosed with ever. She would never show me any of her medical papers or let me even meet her psychologist. At one point I figured that if she was complaining about me to someone twice a week, I should at least get to share my perspective, but that was a hard “No” from her.

“The time I have with Dr. Freidman is a special time between him and me. I’m sorry, I can’t have you going over there and trying to twist things around with your words. You know you’re a better talker than me darling, and I won’t have you steamrolling over me verbally to make a point. If you care about me, you’ll understand.”

The truth is, I had my suspicions of Anna for a while. For one, she was a pathological liar. She even once lied to me about eating some macaroni and cheese my brother’s wife had made for us. I mean, who feels compelled to lie about that? The conversation went like this:

“I didn’t want to hurt your feelings darling. You know how overly sensitive you can get over the smallest things.”

“So why didn’t you just try a bite or two?”

“Eww, did you see what it looked like? Absolutely not. Plus, too much cheese gets me bloated, you know that.”

“One bite?”

::Click::

When she didn’t like where the conversation was going, I’d be greeted to brief silence followed by a loud beeping noise that almost sounded like it was saying “IDDDIOTT, IDDDIOOTTT, IDDDDDIOTT!”

It was almost Pavlovian in nature by now. I began to fear being hung up on… and the days and days of groveling that were soon to follow this cycle. Eventually, she would calm down and forgive me, but I really did worry about how we would even make a marriage work at this pace. The truth was I was just a rat being conditioned, one electrical shock at a time until I no longer had free will, but just the concept of it. Anna was the puppeteer, pulling on all my strings, but I couldn’t blame her. I was free to leave at any time, but she was always the one dumping me and I was always the one running back. No, this wasn’t love but more Stockholm Syndrome, a relationship of mutual pain, some real, some perceived, with both of us just too scared, or stubborn, to find true happiness.

They say that some people can be addicted to a certain type of sadness and I think we were both guilty of that. While I faulted her for her excessive spending and addiction to uppers, I smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish. I guess we were both slaves to our vices and in turn chained to one another, feeding our misery like a nonstop playlist of infinite sorrow.

I figured I didn’t want to be in the doghouse for a fortnight, so it would be best to just acquiesce to her demands and meet up with her and Cara. Fortunately, my boss was overseas in Europe handling an issue with some bad convertible bonds, so my absence should go unnoticed.

It was hot outside. Ever since the most recent housing market collapsed, the days of private car rides were over, so I took the subway to save a couple of bucks. Hell, even if we still had private cars, I don’t think any of us could get into the limo without a protester throwing an egg or some sort of paint on us. They said they were tired of the 1%. I get what they were saying, I wasn’t fond of dealing with those pricks either, but what did they want me to do? A job is a job. I have to pay obnoxious New York rent like everyone else.

If you’ve ever been to New York City on a hot, humid day in July, then you know the only place that is hotter than the street is underground. Waiting four minutes for the next train was like taking a trip to the sauna. Though I had my maroon Hermès handkerchief to keep my brow dry, I sweated profusely through my shirt; Anna would not be pleased about this. In fact, she wouldn’t be pleased I took the subway at all. “Peasant travel” is what she used to call it when I tried to convince her to take it. She preferred the life of glitz and glamour and felt it was a fate worse than death to have to live a life anything short of that. In fact, the only time she ever engaged in normal human behavior was to take photos on her Instagram to seem more relatable to her 89,000 followers. She was a social media influencer, but the truth was it was mostly smoke and mirrors. About 70% of her followers were bought off of some shady marketing website and she did it just to make it seem like she had a full-time job so her father would get off her back about having a career. She was a lot different when I first met her, but I guess that’s why they call it the “honeymoon phase”.

When I hopped off the subway, I saw I had five text messages and three missed calls… all from Anna. My watch showed that it was five past eleven. For a girl who was often late, she sure didn’t have much clemency for the slight tardiness of others. I hurried up the platform stairs, ran three blocks, and bolted into Tiffany’s to meet her.

“You’re late… Cara and I would have left, but we were waiting for you,” Anna droned, clearly well beyond our three mimosas cutoff before noon rule.

From the syrup stains on the white linen and the lone grape that had escaped the bunch, it was safe to say that they were not waiting for me to dine with them for breakfast. No, they just wanted me to pick up the check, which from the looks of their impatient waiter, seemed to be sitting there for quite a while now.

“Well darling, aren’t you going to say hi to Cara?” she said, her eyes glaring directly at me in a caustic manner.

I shifted my attention from the breakfast aftermath and focused my gaze on Cara. She looked exactly like my fiancée, except with a few new trinkets. She had the latest Fendi bag in cerulean blue, which meant that Anna would be soon to follow in suit. It was like a horrible game of keeping up with the Joneses, where neither the neighbors nor the Joneses worked at all.

Cara’s boyfriend was some Abu Dhabi oil tycoon (who, racism aside, did have some shady business connections), so Anna often felt the need to try and keep up with her spending habits to seem like they were on equal footing financially. It often put me in situations where we had to spend well out of our means.

“Honey, be a dear and square this up for us? I think the waiter needs the table,” she purred in a voice that she thought sounded enthralling, but bordered on being obnoxious.

$251 fucking dollars. Most of it was just alcohol. We were in no shape to spend like this. As painful as it would be, I had to have a talk with her tonight about her spending. Cara was in town for two more weeks, and I doubt my credit cards would be able to take a Tyson-esque beatdown. No, as much as I’d like to chastise her now, it would have to wait. Heaven help me if Cara found out that we were- GASP- upper-middle class. Before I could even finish paying the bill, Cara and Anna were already headed to the jewelry section.

Have you ever stepped into a store like Tiffany’s? It really is a thing of beauty. From the turquoise-colored walls to the beautiful glass displays with diamonds that shined like rainbows after a thunderstorm… it really is an orgasm for the eyes. But that’s not what sets Tiffany’s apart. No, it’s the name. People buy Tiffany’s for bragging rights. You could get a better diamond at a fraction of the price near west 47th street, but that would come from a mom-and-pop shop and what good would that do if you can’t flex your name brand?

And the sales associates don’t make it any easier. They know people are there for the name and they make sure to subtlety drop that fact if they even think for a second you are wavering and coming to your better senses. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, the manipulation of the value of diamonds is nothing short of robbery.

“O-M-G, your friends are gonna die when they see that on Insta!” the salesgirl said as she placed a 5 carat Halo diamond engagement ring on Cara’s hand.

To make it worse, she even asked to see Anna’s engagement ring, a mere 3.2 marquise, and followed up her smirk with a short, but calculated “That’s cute.” Anna turned sheepishly and stuck her left hand in her dress pocket; a pocket I didn’t even know existed until this very moment.

I’m not a violent person, but at that moment I could have choked the life out of that salesgirl. While she probably only had a monthly income that was 1/5th of what Anna had, she had a higher IQ than Cara and Anna combined. She was playing them both for fools, knowing just what to say to get them primed for a proper financial flogging.

Then again, I think Cara’s boyfriend and I were the biggest imbeciles of all because we saw the psychology of what was going on and still did nothing about it. Over time, I was trained to believe that a happy Anna meant a happy me, but the truth was more that a content Anna meant momentary peace… not so much sustainable bliss.

While Cara left empty-handed (she hadn’t properly landed her golden goose yet), the minor slight about Anna’s “puny” engagement ring rang to the tune of $2320, the cost of the latest Fendi bag. While it looked very similar to her current teal bag, this one was a shade or two different which apparently made a world of difference. Oh, sorry, I meant to say that it cost $2358 because once we bought the bag at a nearby luxury department store, we had to go back to Tiffany’s breakfast section to take a photo of her drinking a glass of champagne while holding the bag.

“Sorry, but it’s for the Gram darling.”

As the bubbles tingled on her artificial lips, I experienced a level of self-loathing that would make Rodney Dangerfield blush. It was at that moment that I decided I no longer wanted to be with Anna… no longer wanted her to be my trophy wife, no longer wanted someone who could automatically tell you how many Instagram followers she had, but not the birthdays of any of her siblings, let alone her mother and father. In fact, that day I decided to break up with her after Cara left in a couple of weeks, but I didn’t get the chance because she called off the engagement when I talked to her that night about credit card debt, and how we didn’t have a “money tree” in the backyard.

Even though it’s ultimately what I wanted, it still stung. It was like she had a sixth sense of knowing when someone was going to leave her and discarded me before I could inflict the same courtesy upon her. Two hours of me holding back tears, six gin and tonics, and a handful of insults later, she finally left, calmly telling me she would send someone to collect her stuff in the morning.

“Oh, and if I wanted to marry someone for love, I would have married Greg, my Yoga instructor,” Anna said without flinching.

Ouch. Callous to the end.

Do you know why I don’t pity people like myself? Because we know exactly what we are signing up for. You sometimes see these guys complain about how awful their girlfriend, fiancée, or spouse is, but what did you expect? Instead of picking the smart, confident woman with her head on straight, you picked the hottest woman who would sleep with you. And then you’re shocked that there is no substance? You picked a person on superficial aspects, but are appalled when they do the same? Self-loathing is a dangerous game. If you do it too long you become numb to it, and when you’re numb to it, you can’t feel a damn thing.

I drank all through the night and had slept well into the afternoon. As I stumbled to the kitchen, just dressed in a wifebeater and boxer briefs, I noticed most of the appliances in our apartment were gone. It seems Anna took the liberty to not only empty out all of her stuff but half of mine too. On the counter was a single note with a few words scribbled on it.

“I’m keeping the ring.”

“I guess it wasn’t shitty enough to return,” I muttered to myself.

It was hot in the room as if someone had deliberately turned off the AC on the way out of my apartment, a subtle act of defiance. Fortunately, the fridge was too heavy to lift, so I grabbed a cold beer and sat down on my leather couch. As I rested there, I realized how sterile my home looked without Anna’s personal touch. No fresh flowers, no photos in frames, and no subtle perfume fragrance lingering in the air. In fact, it felt more like a model apartment that was shown to prospective tenants when they check out a new building. There was simply no character, no soul. For lack of a better word, it was rather depressing.

By the time I finished drinking my beer, my leg was sticking to the sofa as I tried to get up. I peeled my skin off the couch, flipped the AC on, and headed back to my bed. I wasn’t going to worry about this now. Yep, like most things that bothered me in life, I’d worry about it later.

Everyone needs something to live for, something that gets them up in the morning, and I didn’t really know what that was for me anymore. I looked in the mirror and saw a haphazard mess of a man staring back. My beard was scraggly, my skin was breaking out, but what really scared me was when I stared into my sunken eyes… I couldn’t sense anyone looking back at me. It was as if I had lost my soul to the Devil. I’d like to say this was caused because of the recent string of bad luck I was having, but I think it resonated from a place formed a long time ago, just sometimes it takes a bunch of unhappy events to finally admit it to yourself. Nobody wants to admit their life has no meaning, but I think we all think it from time to time. I was about two Jack and Cokes away from doing my best Hemmingway in Ketchum impression, so I decided to sleep it off. Before I knocked out for the third time I texted Anna, “I love you” but it was left on “read”.

I passed out in my work clothes and woke up in a puddle of my own drool. My feet omitted a terrible stench and my breath smelled like death. I could have slept for another eight hours, but I forgot to shut the blinds and the hot sun pierced through the open cracks making me feel more dehydrated than an astronaut’s dinner. 

The one thing that became even more apparent in Anna’s absence was how we had completely different views on what the city was like. Anna still saw NYC with rose-colored glasses, a product of her learning about this city from old black and white movies and classic books where the protagonist comes here, a penniless and bright-eyed transient, and becomes a permanent fixture and living embodiment of the old adage that anyone can make it in New York. Yes, as if it was more a choice you make, that if you promised to work hard and pay your dues, you, too, could embody a success story that other fresh, young faces would talk about when they saw you grace their presence at a cocktail party they were fortunate enough to be invited to.

“Who is that?” they would say in hushed whispers.

“She’s the editor for Vanity Fair.”

“Wow, maybe one day I could be the editor of Vanity Fair!”

“Sure, it’s all possible in New York!”

But it wasn’t. This was only a part of the marketing magic that started well before you even decided you wanted to move to The City. The same magic that was spoon-fed to boys and girls as they grow up. The more obscure the location you call home, the more reason to come here. In fact, if you had never been to a major city, even better… but even if you had, no matter… New York was different than the entire bunch.

And if a skeptic, whether it be an aunt, parent, or friend, were to challenge this preconceived notion that New York was anything less than perfect, it would be met with a simple eye roll at best because to even imply such a thing just illustrated the qualities of buffoonery that New York did not tolerate, and you did not have time for that. Besides, you had to figure out which dress to pack so that when you hopped off the plane everybody in the airport would know that you weren’t arriving in New York, but coming back because you always belonged here. I mean, how could she not be a New Yorker? Look at her… she’s beaming from every pore of her body.

There is something about this place that could molest twenty-something-year-olds and they’d keep coming back for more and more. It was as if it was some weird sort of Stockholm syndrome. No matter what The City threw at them… rent payments higher than their parents’ mortgage, being forced to take a second job to keep food on the table, dirty crowded subway rides with homeless folks touching themselves, the hot stench of garbage in summer… they saw it differently.

The high rent was simply the cost of admission to an exclusive club, and they walked around as if that stench was jasmine and all those hardships were just some elaborate learning lessons set up by God personally, to see if they really could make it. And if they really struggled and rode it out, once they made it to the other side of the tunnel, well then it would be revealed that all of those random hardships were really just synchronicity leading them to a perfect version of life. Yes, if you played along, all your wildest dreams would come true and you would be the envy of all your friends.

For folks who were born in New York (or in my case moved over from New Jersey at a young age), the City had no glamour. We saw how it spit up and chewed out revolving door youths who once thought that they could make The City a permanent residence because in their small town they were “the pretty one” or “the creative one”, which meant the only logical move was to go to New York and become a model or write a best seller because of course, we had a shortage of wannabe models and blossoming novelists.

No, we didn’t smell jasmine, we smelled shit… just shit. We didn’t have the time to specifically classify it and sure as hell didn’t see it as some sort of symbolism for the struggle to accomplish the American Dream. We hated working 40–60 hours a week and still eating Cup Noodles for dinner, or unable to take a proper vacation to somewhere with, GASP, fewer people, because we were tired of bumping elbows with every Tom, Dick, and Sally on the subway cart. We knew that hard work didn’t get you everywhere, especially when everyone else was working their fingers to the bone too.

To us, New York City was a well-tuned clock and we were simply interchangeable cogs. When you began to show rust, slow down, or omit any sort of distaste beyond the normal amount that was attributed to the New York “charm”, then you were replaced. Either you left to go find normal rent so you could live a comfortable, average life, or you stayed in The City, changed your attitude, and gave up the dream, but served as a constant reminder of what happens to most folks who move to New York City… you become one of the eight and a half million residents who live here. Just a nameless extra whose only job is to make The City look a bit fuller… as if it really needed help with that in the first place.

I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again… there are only two ways to thrive in New York City… really rich or really naïve.

Either way, she was gone and it was time to move on. I yearned for her, but at times I wondered if it was only to try to comfort the quiet sadness that permeated deep inside. Perhaps I was using Anna as much as she was using me and we were just two individuals dancing with one another on clouds that never had any firm footing to begin with. A waltz that was destined for freefall from the first step.

Anna had a way of making me feel like I was the only man in this world that mattered. For all the complaining I did when she was around, it was moments like this that reminded me that I needed her in a way that was satisfying to my soul. At times I wasn’t sure if she was my sunlight or my next heroin injection, but it didn’t matter. The way she stared at me with those doe eyes and infectious smile made me eager to be alive.

It appeared that not having Anna’s attention and affections were proving to be a fate worse than death. Every night my heart ached and I knew I soon had to throw out any mementos that indicated to the world that we were, indeed, once together… it would be the only way to stop the constant reminders of a life without her still in it. 

I had never come from a home that had a lot of love, especially not the open kind, so I was very susceptible to Anna’s style of love, which was all in like a kamikaze pilot on a hell-bent mission. In fact, within three days of dating, she was already saying “I love you” and it only took three more before I started saying it back, something I rarely said to family members, let alone someone else. As I said, we just didn’t express love that openly in my family. 

Anna loved so fiercely, that was the best way I could describe it. Yes, fierce was the only way to describe it, in fact, I even used that exact word on the handwritten card I gave her on her last birthday (with a mountain of other gifts of course). Unfortunately, fierce could work both ways.

It took three months of dating, but eventually, I saw Anna’s wrath. The first instance wasn’t even aimed at me, but a server who had the acrobatic task of transporting six bowls of piping, hot, clam chowder to a hungry table sitting next to us at a restaurant. While passing our table, the server lost her footing and fell to the ground with a great crash.

There was an audible gasp from the collective members of the restaurant, and face down, in the middle of a pile of broken fine china, silverware, and soup, was our server. While the tiny cuts on her face indicated that some of the broken china fragments hit her, that was far from the worst part. The scalding hot soup had burned her and she made an almost howling-like pain noise that to this day still haunts me. Several patrons called 9–1–1 on their phone, and both staff and customers alike flocked to her side to see if there was anything we could do… well mostly everyone. When the paramedics came and we all settled back to our meals, I noticed Anna was already seated. In fact, it seemed that she hadn’t moved at all since I left the table. As I sat down, I could feel her eyes piercing through me, in a rather uncomfortable manner. She then, almost in a manner that could befit a sociopath, calm and coolly stated, “Are you done aiding that whore who spilled soup on my Prada bag?”

It was at that moment that I realized that Anna’s sweetness could not be equaled by anything but her indignation. If there was any doubt about this hypothesis, it was quickly dispelled when two months later I made my way into her reticle after forgetting our four-month anniversary (which I still don’t think is a real thing). But as they say, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and when we look back at people, we tend to remember more of the good moments… perception bias in motion. That being said, while I still loved Anna dearly, I just was so damn tired of feeling broken, the byproduct of being on the wrong side of her ferocity.

Before I could finish throwing myself a pity party, my phone rang. I darted to it hoping it was Anna coming to her senses. No, just my sister… who I never speak to. Why would she be calling me? And especially this late at night?

“Astrid, why are you calling me at 2 AM?”

“Pete, they said dad… dad, he…”

“You’re scaring me, Astrid, what happened?”

“Dad tried to kill himself tonight. He’s at MercyOne. It’s bad Pete, he tried to hang himself with a rope. They said there might be irreparable brain damage. He must have gotten cold feet because he tried to call someone immediately after he started, that’s how they got to him in time.”

Jesus Christ.

“Pete, are you listening? How are we even going to care for him? I mean I’m all the way in Cali, and you work god knows how many hours a week? I didn’t even know things were bad with him; I thought we were good. I mean we didn’t talk, but it was easier that way, right? Right? Pete are you there!? What are we going to do!?”

I dropped the phone and headed back to bed. I wasn’t going to worry about this now. Yep, like most things that bothered me in life, I’d worry about it later.