Despite quitting caffeine this week, I still managed to write! While survival without my morning coffee has been painful at best, I'm hoping this little detox will do well for my health. Anyway, without further ado, the song of the week:
I’m trying to write about the Atlantic City boardwalk , with its air hung low and heavy and thick. My body slows under its salty residue, vaporized pieces of the sea adhere to my pores. Fish and garbage and funnel cake battle for airspace overhead and the smell falls on me like someone just threw a blanket over my head in a hot attic.
Throngs of people push past one another, most of them drunk or high and just young enough to be lost in their own sea of miniskirts and stilettos. Pop music struggles to be heard, struggles for relevance in the cacophony, ends up sounding caricatured like that person in the group who just never feels heard. Except no one quite expects Jay Sean to struggle for the floor, creating a backdrop that gets lonelier and lonelier against the din, the carnival lights, the ambulance that has pushed past the revelers to collect a man who has overdosed beneath a dark and decaying pavilion.
I’m trying to write this in my head like the one person in the corner actually listening to Jay Sean, ready to nod and say “oh yeah, I got you, ‘baby don’t worry / you are my only / even if the sky is falling down.’ I was listening.” I’m writing this in my head because I’m waiting in line for the bumper cars, half-listening to my friends and everyone else’s, such a flood of conversation.
Dropped in the middle of all this humanity—the humidity, the thin and hopeful pop music, the flashing lights and bells and carnies trying to sell a seat on a barstool with a water gun—yes, this crush of humanity, I wonder how it’s escaped everyone. I want to open my eyes wide because maybe this is the end of the world. This place seems like the last sad, bombastic, completely bizarre outpost of humanity, as if beyond the light pollution orb of this noisy pier is just nothing—everything ending.
Yet everyone is going on like this is just another fun party, no impending apocalypse except maybe for that drunk girl writhing on the ground. Suddenly the haze feels too heavy, like I can’t stand, and I feel desperately lonely for a quiet night inside, far away from this carnival where everyone comes to overdose, to pay another human being to push them in a cart, to take a group picture with the casino lights smiling in the background.
Everyone still keeps talking, eagerly awaiting our turn to hand over those paper tickets for a ride, haphazardly crashing into one another as the floor and ceiling throw off sparks out of time with the music—another party.
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