Eleanore Tisch
When I start seeing my therapist in August of 2019, I come directly from work to her office and I lay on the floor and, most of the time, I fall asleep. The first time it happens I am embarrassed, like I’m wasting her time and my money and it is purposeless and futile. I am there to work. I am there to get over myself and become a better daughter, better partner, better person. The second time it happens, I get angry. I have to wait a week to talk about it because I spend the entire sixty-minute session snoring and drooling on the red and gold Persian rug, noise machine washing sticky city sounds, sirens and shrieks, temporarily, from my psyche. I fall asleep in the following week’s session, too. My sweet somatic therapist silently and steadfastly holds the space.
Every morning I rip myself out of bed and every morning it is devastating to leave my undigested dreams under my hypoallergenic duvet, splash water on my face, lament the dark circles under my eyes, throw on whatever smells cleanest, and hurtle myself to River North to make coffee. I work as a café manager for a company that sends poor twenty-somethings into offices that can afford “perks” for their employees. The perks include daily catered lunches, tiny bags of brand name popcorn, kegs of kombucha and locally brewed IPAs, and of course, the full-fledged cafes, complete with twenty-thousand-dollar espresso machines. Most of us are artists of some form or another; this is our day job. I am a medieval barmaid, dependent on the wealth of others to house, clothe, and feed myself. I make a few dollars above minimum wage and pick at the leftovers of the catered lunches, pilfering office supplies, bags of coffee, and whatever else I can get away with.
The café sits inside an historic, gargantuan structure overlooking the Chicago River. The entrance lobby is all marble: soft, forgiving light let in through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows – so big they are basically walls. I, and my team, are not allowed to use this entrance. We enter through the concrete loading dock, clock-in by snapping unflattering selfies under blinking florescent light. We take the service elevator up to our floor, navigate the labyrinth of ugly, unfinished hallways until we emerge in the tastefully decorated, newly renovated Chicago branch of the international, billion-dollar trading firm that contracts the company that employees us.
For several months, I am unsure of what they do there – something with stock options and futures and around-the-clock communication with Wall Street. For the most part, the people are pleasant: I learn their coffee orders and the names of their children. They learn that I am really good at latte art. I start making their drinks before they walk up to the counter. There is no register, they do not pay for their beverages. There is a tip jar that collects pennies, random rolled-up singles, paper clips. At Christmas, one of the bosses gives us each a freshly minted hundred-dollar bill. In the café area four big-screen TVs hang on the walls, constantly playing CNN and Fox Business and ABC News with no sound. For 40 hours a week, I watch the same stories repeat, escalate, become forgotten by the onslaught of the next news cycle. Around November of 2019, someone gets sick in Wuhan, the Chicago of China, and it matters just enough to be a blip in the morning reports.
***
Chicago sparkles in the morning. Even in the depths of winter when it’s likely been a month or more since its citizens have felt the sun soothe our dry, chapped skin. I have always loved this city in the morning, before the day has a chance to color it in and it’s just an outline—perpetual potential. On the grayest of days, as the sun rises over Lake Michigan, the burgeoning light announces the day shift. Solidarity of travelers in the rattling train car, coffee and cigarettes and a day not yet born. Mornings share a secret: the scent of clean laundry, the sound of other people still sleeping, the taste of possibility. My love forms early: at fourteen, I take the redline from Loyola to Harrison and pretend I am a grown-up commuting to work instead of a teenager on my way to AP English. One decade and two degrees later, I am an adult on my way to work and every morning pricks a tiny hole in my soul, out of which my spirit slowly leaks.
4:45, 5:00, 5:15, 5:30. The alarm punishes me. It is still, technically, the night shift. I am my own parent, cajoling and jostling and annoying. I work at this café for almost two years. I am exhausted beyond language, beyond my body’s capacity to reset through rest. I write no poems, no essays, nothing of note to show for those two toiling years. I am forced to wake before my body is ready. The job comes with healthcare, a rarity in the service industry. They pay me reasonable wages, I have weekends and nights off. Technically, I’m lucky. I should be grateful. I don’t quit.
So, for months, I go to therapy and I fall asleep. Every so often I have enough energy to breech the island of my mother and the boulder of her mother, my father’s dead parents, my long-distance relationship, the things I think I need to work through to become a better whatever. Once, she puts me under her desk and makes a wall between us of potted plants and blankets. From this cubby, unseen, it is easier for me to speak about secrets. But mostly, I sleep and she lets me and I learn to look forward to my weekly therapeutic naps.
The story of a novel virus is buried by Trump’s first impeachment, which I non-consensually watch on the TVs at work. Slowly, though, the stories become more consistent. The traders start to mumble about the effects of an illness on the other side of the world. The firm has offices in London, in Shanghai, in Hong Kong, and Singapore. They hire interns from all over the world. The easy-going attitude turns tense, the overall office coffee intake increases, everyone from the office manager to the most esteemed trader is wired and jumpy and I pull more and more shots of espresso.
November becomes December becomes January, snow piles up and turns black with pollutants, Chicagoans the city over trudge, sludge, and shuffle our way to work, dreaming of sweat and heat and sunburns. But for now, it is February 22nd, 2020, my birthday. I have brunch with people who mostly aren’t my friends anymore and I go out that night and take shots of tequila and sleep with a stranger because I can’t be with the person I really want to be with. Two weeks later the city shuts down, the trading firm says they’ll keep paying me for now, their beloved coffee wench, and I sleep for the next three months straight; waking only to eat, to despair, and to drink. Spring blooms while I’m sat on the floor of my kitchen at two p.m. on a Tuesday, drinking whiskey with a maraschino cherry and calling it a cocktail.
***
When I am sixteen, I start astral projecting from my bed. The first time it happens, it catches me by surprise. I am laying perfectly still, almost asleep, when something in my consciousness sharpens. An awake I had never known. The outline of my body, the atoms of my skin that collide with the atoms of atmosphere, electrifies. My consciousness dislodges from my organs – the way a key has a moment of epiphany when it succeeds in unlocking. My consciousness peels away from my matter and lifts, distinctly, up. I see without eyes, down to my body laying still in my childhood bed, and I – whatever that means – rush ever upwards. Rogers Park, the entire north side, the entire city of Chicago. I breeze pass the antenna of the Hancock Building, the Sears Tower. I am swung, I am of the clouds, bruised purples and bottomless blues, a watercolor vignette of the night sky. I reach an ultimate height, contain all of the potential energy. Weightless, I begin the downward glide home, returning to my body with a little puff, like a tiny snore, a little poof of breath.
After that, I start asking for it, trying to make it happen again. I develop a ritual, a way of laying so still, being so sober, that I can astral project on cue. I don’t know its name yet (that I learn later, at my Buddhist-inspired college) but I do know that it isn’t a dream. I’m not asleep. For about a month it happens like this almost every night, the same upward projectile of glittering consciousness. One night I go further than I had ever gone, so far up there is no more up to go; I start to seep out, laterally leaking myself across the atmosphere, conforming to the curve of the earth from thousands of feet above it. I spread thin. I reach a border. At the border I am paused by my body, tugging across the firmament, through the fragile tether that connects consciousness to corpse, saying “If you go any further, you may not return.”
I heed her. I return to my body. I never astral project again. A decade later, on the train in the morning, I still felt that separation between pieces of myself. How my thinking-thing is nested within my breathing-thing, matryoshka dolls: smaller and smaller bits of spirit and matter clattering about within each other. How I didn’t really need to be there while my body, without breakfast, stood for hours at a time steaming milks and cleaning syrup pumps and making small talk with stock traders. From behind the bar, I watched as the world around me irrevocably shattered into unexpected shards of future, and the city I had once shimmered above was shocked into its own kind of sleep.
—
Eleanore Tisch is a poet and educator from Chicago, Illinois. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University. Her chapbooks, Salad Box Poems and Water : Write : Wave, can be found at Bottlecap Press and Dancing Girl Press, respectively.