The Style of Your Life
I had a Blackberry all throughout college until I smashed it on the porch of my shared house. I was on the phone with my mom, trying to articulate that I didn't want to live anymore. The past summer, I’d taken an old bottle of Vicodin from her medicine cabinet, a prescription she filled at the pharmacy and never used because she didn’t like the way painkillers made her feel. She preferred her Advil and never even noticed the pills were gone.
There’s a quote, “April is the kindest month. April gets you out of your head and out working in the garden.” But April was not so kind to me. It was when everyone around me solidified jobs, set their futures into place so all they had to do was step into them.
I was an English major. I loved school. I loved going to class and hearing my teachers lecture. I loved listening to discussions in the classroom. I was shy, so I never participated much, but I enjoyed any free-writing time, or when one of my workshop leaders gave us prompts and let us tackle them right there in our notebooks. I loved how hunger and the cold kept me awake, how I was always fighting my way to get through the week with the purpose of completing projects and finishing papers. But as the school year dwindled to a halt, it felt impossible to move on. I had no idea what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go. I didn’t want to apply for a teaching job, and I hadn’t taken any education courses anyway. I didn’t want to continue school, go for another degree, another few years that would stunt my life’s true beginning. I felt the pressure to begin, to start something new like all my friends.
I knew college wasn’t the real world. I knew that adult life was next, but I had made no plans. I had believed that an opportunity would arise, that it would come to me like some magnificent dream and point to me, choose me. But that never happened. The miracle never came, and so while everyone celebrated next steps, I was left behind. My friends had landed jobs in finance, tech, social work, media. They were moving to New York, Chicago, Boston, Texas, Denver. I trolled Craigslist on my laptop for copywriting jobs, jobs in editing or tutoring, but even when someone on the other side of the email replied, I didn’t respond. It never felt right. I couldn’t see myself copy-editing or spinning press for some marketing company, doing SEO work. I didn’t even know what that meant. The only thing I had a passion for was writing, but I didn’t know how to turn something I loved into a real life.
I was talking to my mom on the phone, telling her all of this as the Vicodin took hold. I had taken the pills by the handful, purposefully not counting. The prescription had been written for her lumbar pain. It had gotten so bad, the way she had to roll a towel up behind her lower back in order to sit comfortably on the couch, the way she was beginning to hunch, developing what her doctor called a “turtle neck.” She was supposed to do physical therapy, stretch regularly at home. She went on her daily walks, which sometimes made the pain worse. She refused to wear sneakers and only wore her Skechers GO WALK platform sandals that she got on sale at Dillard’s.
I thought it was easy to deal with physical pain, to take a pill and have the agony melt away and out of the body. But what about emotional pain? I had no physical ails, so what would the Vicodin do? Where would it travel in my bloodstream? What would it seek to fight?
My mom’s voice shrunk away from me. I felt like I was in a hollow tube. I used to love the Space Mountain ride at Disney World as a kid, and this felt like that, the blue light propelling me forward. Instead of enjoying the cosmic rollercoaster, I became angry. I hallucinated blue and white beams surrounding me, the whir of machinery in my ears. My body was gone, as if it had been enveloped in a black hole and was lost to the laws of the galaxy. My brain closed itself up with a zip like in cartoons; a pitch-black room that a character exits by jumping through a hole that fastens closed behind them.
My mom said it would be okay. Her voice shot through the static of space on the line. Life flickered. She believed in me. She said I would find a job. She had hope. She told me I should never let go of hope. I said I felt sorry for myself, bad about myself, I wished things were different. But I didn’t tell her about the pills, how I’d locked my bathroom door and reached into the cabinet, how I knocked back the bottle and swallowed, that while I waited for the pills to kick in I went outside to the porch and called her.
I couldn’t picture the whole rest of my life. It didn’t have a shape or a form, or even a feeling. I wasn’t excited about my future the way I’d been excited about school, about reading and writing. Everyone seemed exhilarated by imminent timelines, and I could barely envision the next day. Something was wrong with me. Something was really wrong.
My mom’s plea for hope, the thin wire of her voice that was pulsing its way in waves across cities and states to get to me, filled me with guilt and regret. I wanted to break the spell of the pills. I had the realization that I guess some people have when they try to die—that they don’t want to. I felt like something physical, some radical action, might end the curse. I raised my arm and threw my phone down on the brick steps as hard as I could. My Blackberry shattered into pieces. I didn’t hear the phone meet the ground, but its pieces spread out across the steps with viscosity like a celestial goo. I knew I was high, that things were happening askew to reality. I saw the connection between my mom’s voice and mine unhook and fly apart. I imagined her back in Florida on the beach, sitting in a lounge chair, leaning up to listen for my voice, her body curling forward and the rounded shape of her back. I pictured the sun extending its rays across her skin, animated rays that sparkled gold and white.
I began to walk away from my house. I started down the sidewalk that led to a main street on campus. Then I ran, hoping that to sweat would eradicate the effect of the pills. My heart pounded. I had never done anything like this before. Sure, I smoked weed, sure, I drank, but nothing to the extent of real danger.
I lost myself in the running and before I knew it was at the edge of campus. The trees climbed high and I felt them growing taller before me. I wondered if the trees could hold me, if I ran into the forest where college kids went to collect morels, if I felt the bark of a tree or the slick belly of a leaf, if the natural world would catch me, hold me, and let me stay. I ran this path freshman year, before things got difficult, before I felt the distance between me and everyone else. For a moment, I became that former self, the girl with so much time ahead of her, four more years to spare. I stopped at the edge of the road where the pavement met a wall of green. I looked up at the powerlines above me, all that aluminum and carbon and glass fiber connecting voices across the country—friends making plans or recounting nights out over the line, lovers missing each other and wondering what their futures hold, daughters calling their mothers, daughters forever calling their mothers.
A breeze shifted the leaves and my sight began to refocus. And then, a spring rain.
My mom used an entire paycheck to get me a new phone, but this time, an iPhone. I loved my Blackberry, but iPhones were the phones of the future. We had gone together to the AT&T store once I flew back to Florida. The sales associate tried to sell my mom all these packages and add-ons and my mom wasn’t having it.
“I work retail,” she told the guy at the store. “Are there any discounts if I work at the mall?”
“No, sorry, ma’am,” he’d told her and had looked at me as if to say with his eyes, Is this lady kidding? I had given a shrug back like, You don’t know the half of it, pal.
We left with the most basic plan, one that had a data limit I couldn’t go over or else we’d owe more money each month. My mom made sure I understood how to check and monitor my usage and the sales associate told me that I basically could use the Internet for maybe five minutes before being charged extra. But I didn’t want to browse the web on my phone. I hated how all my friends back at school had been so connected all the time. Their phones were like mini computers that extended from their bodies and never left their hands. Their eyes were glued to screens all the time, especially senior year, especially when this new app Instagram came out where they all posted and shared pictures of their food and sunsets and themselves with their tongues out making silly faces. The images were heavily filtered, all rainbow-tinted and overexposed. I thought it was so stupid, so pointless.
I remember being a kid, getting lost in the void of my dad’s desktop, making “rollercoasters” on chain emails and sending them to friends with warnings like, If you don’t send this to ten people in ten minutes you will die in ten days. The emails were copied and pasted and forwarded in what seemed like endless threads of text. When you scrolled quickly, your eyes focused in on the rollercoaster ride, the symbols of asterisks and ampersands and exclamation points widening and shrinking to mimic the motions of an amusement park ride.
On the computer, I clicked through a grid of squares with hidden mines scattered throughout a game board. I instant messaged boys at school who sometimes answered and would talk to me for hours until their away message released them from the web. Sometimes I messaged girls at school and tried to make jokes, rise through the popularity ranks, but back at school, the things that happened online weren’t discussed or even acknowledged. The Internet was a separate place I had to go to and venture into. There was a threshold to cross.
Recently, I’d discovered YouTube. I liked typing in the search box and finding videos of virtually anything. The videos were mostly poor in quality, recorded and re-recorded and posted online, but it was entertaining. The only other thing I used the computer for—besides typing up my papers back at school—was checking my emails, which now were depressing because they were all from the head of the English department, who was trying to figure out how I’d get my diploma.
My sudden departure from school couldn’t be considered a leave of absence because it was my final semester. I had completed more than half of the courses I was taking and was all set to graduate if only I attended my last few classes. I had to speak with each of my professors, explain the situation, ask if they could give me my finals via email. Thankfully, all of them agreed. I felt like they didn’t want to deal with the drama, or maybe they felt bad for me and didn’t want to add to my already shitty situation.
There is a sort of ceremony to walking with your documents to the English building and sliding them under your respective professors’ doors. Often they will want to meet with you one last time to discuss your efforts of the past semester and chat about your plans for the future. They will wish you the best of luck on your endeavors and you might shake their hand or collect your papers from them, put the pages in your binder and into your bag and walk out of the room, along the hallway, down the stairs, and exit the building. You will feel free and complete, like snapping the last puzzle piece into place.
But I didn’t do any of that. Now, I get emails asking for this assignment or that revised paper. They seem to come more frequently on the new phone, an adjustment from waiting until I got home to check my inbox. I see the appeal of the iPhone, the constant contact with the world, but I don’t want connection to my past world. I don’t want endless reminders of what I had done, what the consequences turned out to be.
And the emails about graduation are the worst. Letters from the school president, notes of congratulations wishing the graduating class the very best of luck when I don’t even have a diploma yet. I know the emails are sent en masse, but I can’t help but take them personally, the tiny digitized blows.
Sita gives me a box cutter and tells me not to lose it, but I also can’t take it out of the store because then I'm walking around the mall with a box cutter. Sita is the head of merchandizing. She has long, beautiful black hair that runs down past her butt. She always wears it up in a bun though, a bun fastened with what I imagine to be hundreds of bobby pins. My mom’s told me that when they cross paths in the bathroom, her coworker is always inserting more bobby pins into her hair, never removing them. She has deep brown eyes and wears a beet-red lipstick that I can’t stand. Maybe Sita is annoyed at the nepotism, how I got my job here because my mom got it for me. But my mom and Sita get along, bonding over talks about Sita’s kids, Sita’s marital quandaries, Sita’s perpetual back pain and arthritis. In this way, my mom is the sage mother of the store. Everyone feels comfortable divulging personal problems to her, maybe too comfortable.
Sita shows me how to slice into each box, carefully as to not cut into whatever merchandise is inside. She demonstrates breaking down the boxes afterward and folding them up to be tossed in recycling along with any plastic or tissue paper. Unboxing can happen at any time of day, but merchandising has to happen before or after store hours.
Part of me feels like I’ve known Sita forever because my mom talks about her so often. But Sita seems like all business today as she chaperones me around the floor. She gives me so much information that I feel like I should be taking notes, but when I tell her this, she says it’s best to learn by doing. She says that I'm not quite ready to partake in the art of merchandising, the figuring out where things should go according to what might look best, sell best, and that she’ll be telling me what goes where for the time being. Eventually, I’ll have an eye for how to style a display all on my own. She assures me this skill will come in time.
I watch Sita move in tandem with the rolling rack. A royal blue Polo wavers as Sita turns the corner but then rocks back into place with the rest of the shirts. I can’t help but think of my dad, his ever-present black Polo and jeans, the Versace cologne, the smell of cigarettes. The rolling rack drags across the tiled floor the way smoke drifts, all curling and inviting, tempting me to follow it wherever it goes.
Brittany Ackerman is a writer from Riverdale, New York. She earned her BA in English from Indiana University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University. She has led workshops for UCLA’s Extension, The Porch, HerStry, Write or Die, and Lighthouse Writers. She is a 3x Pushcart Prize Nominee and her work has been featured in The Sun, MUTHA, Jewish Book Council, Lit Hub, The Los Angeles Review, No Tokens, Joyland, and more. Her first collection of essays, The Perpetual Motion Machine, was published with Red Hen Press in 2018, and her debut novel, The Brittanys, is out now with Vintage. Her Substack is called taking the stairs.