The Nothing Days, by Jenny Bahn

There are days when I hate this place.  Days when I get off at the 34^th Street subway station, weaving in between swarms of people I don’t want to be that close to – these are people I’d rather just watch on some Lifetime Original soap show reenacted by “actors.”  Days when I pass Penn Station, watching junkies steady themselves on the sidewalk, and I just want to buy a ticket in the LIRR to anywhere else but here.  Times when I’m lugging two thirty-pound bags of groceries the ten blocks to my house, the heavy friction of the handles burning my hands and the seams of the bag screaming for mercy, and I want to trade this whole life in for a car and a diet Coke.

But then there are days like today: light, airy days, when the air is crisp and your leather coat is enough to keep you warm and when the shady side of the sidewalk is refreshingly chilly and the sunny side like a dip in a warm bath.  These are the days when the city has levity, when the city is happy.  And when the city is happy, everyone’s happy.

Today I wake up and sit in bed, downing some coffee and writing about girls.  There are clouds outside, hazy clouds, and I check the weather report.  41 degrees.  Damn.  I sit inside for a few more hours and keep working on my future life while the day passes by.

Eventually, the clouds migrate to cover someone else’s apartment and a blue day begins.  A friend calls me.  We meet in a park and watch children on little scooters and watch a woman doing yoga wearing jeans and Chuck Taylors.  She uses no mat and lies in a pocket of sunshine.  We walk up the street and I watch my friend eat a salad with pumpkin and pine nuts.  He orders a San Pellegrino because he really likes bubbles in his water.  Money is exchanged, tips are left, we move on.

The New Museum is sometimes impressive, sometimes not.  Today is largely the latter.  Each piece seems oddly aggressive and/or overtly sexual; even the sexual ones are aggressive in some capacity.  I like art that separates me from reality, not art that plants me firmly within the most depressing or obvious parts of it.  Give me what I wish my whole life were really like.  Give me art that is fantasy.  Give me escape.

No matter how bad the art invariable is, the rooftop is a treat: blue skies over a cityscape that turns shadowed and purple as it nears the horizon line it obliterates.  It is colder and sunnier and my hair whips around my face, over my jacket and past my scarf.  My friend tells me about a documentary he watched on the building of the Brooklyn Bridge.

We wander through the museum’s bookstore but then I remember I can never focus enough to commit to any one book, even casually.  It’s like watching basketball: I never know who to look at and it’s impossible to keep your eye on the bigger picture.

My friend wants dessert but I don’t know where to go because I don’t really eat sugar in any capacity.  I apologize for being boring but say I will do my best to find a suitable place for a sweet.  There is a coffee shop with a tarnished brass bar.  He orders a croissant pudding that is covered in chocolate and served in a little aluminum tin.  There is a jar of cookies that look delicious and he orders two of those: one chocolate chip and one double chocolate chip.  To wash it all down he gets a plastic cup of blood orange juice.

We sit outside on a bench that is too narrow for our butts and too straight for our backs.  The little table he places his snacks on wobbles.  None of these things matter because it is so beautiful outside.  Across the street a tree expands with it’s blooming flowers.

Now I want a coffee and we walk to Saturdays but before we step inside I see my friend Colin coming up the stairs from a basement shop that I didn’t even know existed.  Colin introduces us to Oliver, a man with a fantastic beard and the accent people read Angela’s Ashes to.  His store is all worn leather and flannel.  I pick up a tiny pair of ancient baby shoes and I think how strange it is that the person that once wore these is now gone forever.  We grow so quickly and then we are gone.

I order a warm coffee for my lightly chilled hands.  Colin interviews me for their blog and I find out that I am not good at interviews.  Often I ramble and I say things that don’t make sense.  If I were a person to be interviewed regularly I would most likely be pigeonholed as completely insane.  The truth is, I am only mildly so.

Colin takes us to another place I’ve never been and even though it is just a furniture store, it assumes the importance of an art gallery.  The building itself is cavernous and meandering.  The concrete walls are painted white and a little plaster ear the size of my brother’s is molded seamlessly into the wall.  In the far back corner there are giant pieces of planked trees in the shape of the petrified wood my rock hound grandfather used to collect.

The rest of the day is spent wandering aimlessly in and out of shadows and light, peering into the windows of vacant storefronts, chatting about nothing in particular, popping into giant white art galleries.  I leave my friend after he orders a giant bottle of more bubbly water from a bodega.  On my way home I walk past an art store and buy some pens and paper, both purchased with the intention of actually using them.  Two blocks later I walk into another gallery on my own.  Another block and I buy some hummus.  Another few blocks and I am home with an hour before the sun goes away, ten hours before I wake up and do it all over again.

How wondrous just a day can be.  Just an ordinary day.

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