Cosmic Shifts

When I first moved to New York, I was wrapped up in the throes of depression but more important than that, I was desperate for a job. Literally any job. But preferably a cliche restaurant job because I was about to start my full-time acting conservatory, and that’s just what I thought you did. I had just moved into a small bedroom on 5th Street off of 2nd Avenue that had recently been renovated with two roommates that I had found on Craigslist. It had clean lines and fresh white paint and my room smelled faintly of dust and spackle, had one window and just enough room for my bed; a full size mattress my Dad and I had carefully selected from Bob’s Discount furniture. I felt drearily empty looking at my white walls but I still cringed as my roommate took a charcoal pencil to hers and covered them wall to ceiling in quotes and looping designs, knowing full well that our lease agreement clearly stated if there was so much as a tack on the walls, our security deposit would not be returned. And that apartment was expensive. It was eleven-hundred dollars a month for that room, in 2009 mind you. And I had no job! So I left those walls, to my own chagrin, utterly bare.

I printed out resumes after I got the green light from a friend who would gleefully fib and attest to my “New York experience,” and I meandered around Alphabet City dropping into any place I saw. The neighborhood was half dilapidated, half gentrified by then. It was discouraging at first, and I wondered if this was really the way to go about it, but after a few days I finally landed a gig. I was to be a waitress. Three bucks an hour, plus tips. The place; a dingy, dive called Nice Guy Eddie’s. It was a staple of the Lower East Side, a “sports bar” on Avenue A and 1st street, marked by a sprawling, electrically colorful mural that included the tongue wagging black and white painted faces of KISS. You couldn’t miss it if you tried. It was dark and humid in there no matter the time of year; the wooden fixtures slowly rotting away, clouded plastic glasses that had gone through the dishwasher for probably a decade, and the kind of bar smell that permanently infuses your clothes, even if you’ve only spent a minute inside. There was no computer system, it was just hand-written tickets for orders of greasy burgers topped with processed cheese, soggy fries, and of course baskets upon baskets of sticky hot wings for the Sunday football games. The menu was a book, like one would find at a diner, but people only ever really ordered from the section of fried things. I was the youngest of the staff and I had a waitress station in the back, in between the floor and the kitchen. It was outfitted with one flickering lightbulb, my own well with ice and a gun for soda. We served knock-off pepsi, watery. Sometimes I found roaches in the ice. Once I grabbed a bucket to fill and a rat jumped out of it. I’m pretty sure I had an honest moment where I worried about scabies.

One of the bartenders there was named Annabelle. She was from Staten Island, or somewhere outside of the boroughs far enough for me to question why she worked there. She had sandy blonde hair with big, thick bangs and a wide Steven Tyler-esque smile that showed her gums and the gaps in her yellowed teeth, which had never been corrected with braces. She did have a strange appeal though, and looked a bit like Fairuza Balk, aka Nancy from The Craft. She wore big baubles of costume jewelry and dark, glittery makeup. Second-hand clothes with a slutty, seventies vibes. She was soft, plush, out of shape. And she had a steady stream of admirers. We chatted on slow afternoons when I wasn’t being traumatized by the creatures I would find in the shadows, or dodging the backhanded compliment-advances of the finance guys who came in for football. She was an astrologer, she told me. That was her “real” job. A reader of the stars.

“What’s your sign?” She asked me on one of these afternoons, after she had greeted one of the trollish bar regulars with a big kiss on the cheek and poured them both oversized shots of Jameson. “My birthday is March 12th, I’m a Pisces.” Of course I knew my sign, it was en vogue to know that even then, but I didn’t really believe in astrology. “Oooh, yes you so are, I want to do your chart!” She exclaimed, excited. “What time were you born?” I had never been asked this question before and after a moment of thought I realized that, huh, I literally had no idea what time I was born. I actually didn’t know a single detail about the story of my birth. “I don’t know.” I said. “You don’t know?” she gasped, dramatically. “How can you not know?” As if it was the most appalling thing she’d ever heard. “I guess I never really thought to ask.”

“I see.” Her eyes shifted, suspiciously, and I wondered for a moment if witches really existed. She seemed like the type who would try to cast a spell. And maybe the type who would actually succeed in doing so.

“I’ll find out,” I said. “I’ll text my Dad.”

“Ooh, great!” She cooed, shifting back to her default bubbly disposition and scampering off to take another shot of Jameson.

When I asked my Dad about my birth time, his response was that I was a scheduled C-Section and he couldn’t remember what time I was actually born. He said he thought sometime between the morning and the afternoon. Very specific, I thought, as I rolled my eyes and asked him to check my birth certificate. He wasn’t home and said he would check later.

At the time, I had mostly shied away from anything that seemed mystical. I’d just spent the previous summer out in LA entrenched in some pretty out-there things, so I was content being back in my own world and didn’t really press the follow-up. Things like psychics, palm-reading, tarot, and astrology kind of freaked me out. But I had to admit, the idea behind being able to see or predict the future was fascinating, and after all, there was some small part of me that had always believed and still wanted to believe in some kind of magic. I’d always erred on the side of romantic thought, believing in more than science but not knowing exactly WHAT it was I wanted to believe in. Perhaps I just possessed a dormant feeling that there’s just got to be more to life than meets the eye. But I was always worrying that if I were to participate, I was going to find out something utterly terrible about my future. Once, a few years earlier, a friend of a friend had nonchalantly told me that my life-line on my palm was really, pathetically, short. And they had laughed and been like, yeah, that suuuucks. (Insert wide eyed, terrfied emoji here.) And, being the sensitive being that I am, I was devastated. That fear had imprinted. What if I don’t have a future? What if my future is just waiting to be cut short in some tragic way? An accident, a sickness. Was I just going to drop dead? It didn’t help that my Mom had just died too, which had forced me to simultaneously inch toward but ultimately decide to run away screaming at the idea of facing my own mortality. I had become hell-bent on creating a positive and happy future, but I was white-knuckling through the motions to get there. I was still completely oblivious to the notion of my own power and the ability to take ownership over what I could control. Alas, my self professed sunny outlook was actually filtered with the anxious and the bleak. Also, I was just plain skeptical. I wanted concrete evidence, but how could anyone really know? How could something like the stars and the planets and the moon relate to the specifics of, well, me? I was one in six billion on this planet, and who knows how many other galaxies are out there beyond our own. Could there really be these intricate ties? Could a chart of my twinkling stars tell me when I was going to get married? When I was going to die? It all seemed just a little bit crazy.

Nevertheless, Annabelle persisted, and brought her Astrology tools (though I am still not sure what “astrology tools,” even are) to the next shift. I finally told her some made-up time for my birth. I don’t even remember what it was, maybe noon or two o’clock in the afternoon. And she got to work. She drew a lot of lines and a circle and made a lot of noises that sounded, to me, like pitied sighs. My heart was pounding in my chest as I floated around the floor, dropping beers off for strangers, distracting myself wondering vaguely what their futures held. Hangovers, probably.

“Honestly, you shouldn’t be alive.” Is what she finally said.

SORRY, WHAT?

You know how, in movies, when the main character gets some life-altering news, where the world starts to spin dramatically and get a little bit blurry, off-color, and the frame shakes a little bit and then you can start to hear their heart thumping and their breathing get heavy and they look around trying to find some kind of solid thing to cling to bring them back to the present? That was me.

“Yeah, your chart says there was an incident where you shouldn’t have survived. But here you are.”

Gulp. “What kind of incident?”

“Some kind of sickness maybe, when you were young, do you remember anything like that?”

My mind raced. I had pneumonia when I was seven? I remember having to swallow the chalky white medicine and gagging uncontrollably. I remember having a fever and my grandma put me in a bathtub of ice, or wait, maybe we just watched that one time on The Secret Garden? I’ve thrown up about 10,000 times in my life. I had mono not once but twice in college. I get a lot of colds.

“No, not really. Nothing life-threatening.”

“Huh.”

And that was it. She shrugged and scampered off like nothing. I stood motionless.

She’s so crazy. No. But. I don’t know. What the fuck! But. What if…

The damage was done. I was spiraling out of control. And it seems so innocuous, so silly, that some random odd-ball bartender could cause such a ripple. She was, actually, kind of insane in retrospect. But at the time, I was so vulnerable and I was so green. I was a flickering hologram. I took people at face value and took everything to heart. I was not yet standing on my own two feet, and this kind of “cool” city chick was just trying to introduce me to a whole new dimension right? I don’t know! I do know I was full up to the very brim of grief and fear. It leaked from my eyeballs. For weeks I couldn’t get what she said out of my head. I clung to the notion that I should be dead. It just must be coming. Any minute now. My heart will stop. I’ll have an aneurysm. Cancer is growing and multiplying cell by cell minute by minute until *poof.* I thought of my mother, skeletal, trying to get herself up from the hospice bed to go home. I felt haunted by it. Suffocated. I constantly checked the lines on my palm, like a complete psychopath. I had nightmares, there in my small bed, in my small room. I was afraid to cross the street. My right eye started to twitch. I fell into an even deeper well of depression. So much so, that a little voice inside of me chimes in that it was time to really get some help. Because I wasn’t going to end up as another fucking crazy person in New York. Not like the ones I walked by all the time, vaguely identifying words in their mutterings and feeling sorry for them. So I went to see a therapist, and I agreed to take medication. Anti-depressants. Great. Sounded just great.

So I started taking them. I chewed them and they were bitter and they didn’t go down easy. And I waited for the miraculous change.

And I didn’t sleep for four days. FOUR DAYS! Instead, I laid awake in my bed, wide-eyed and worrying and worrying and yep, worrying some more. My heart raced. I think I hallucinated at one point. I had a vision of being swept away by a wall of water, crashing down on me. And on the fourth night, I google side effects and wondered if THIS was finally the moment where I would kick the bucket and I just couldn’t take it anymore. NO ONE SHOULD HAVE TO LIVE LIKE THIS, THIS IS CRAZY. I got up, threw my covers to the side, threw the pills in the trash, walked outside, and I looked up. It was the middle of the night. I was looking for anything. An answer. Hope. I guess I was looking for the stars.

Well, I didn’t find much up there, from the dirty sidewalk of 5th Street and 2nd Avenue, considering it was after all, Manhattan, and there are always bright lights and it’s a known fact that you can’t exactly see the stars in the same way you can see them in wide-open non-city spaces.

So is this it? Is this what I get? Is this going to be my life? As a pebble in the sand. On the sidewalk. Wedged in the crevices of someone else’s shoe?

After a few moments I closed my eyes. I took a breath. And I surrendered.

And lo’ and behold, I experienced something there. A rearrangement. An epiphany. A spark. A lightbulb flicked on. I don’t know how else to explain it, other than it had to be some kind of cosmically inclined paradigm shift. In that moment, I had a realization. As I looked up across the buildings of the East Village to the sky, the simple thought floated into my consciousness. I had made it to New York. I had made it to this block.

“You shouldn’t have survived. But here you are.”

Who knows if that shit was true! But one thing was: Here I was. And in that moment, my forced sunny outlook took on the moon. I’m here. “I’M HERE!!!” I shouted. I didn’t care if I looked like the other crazy people on the streets. This was New York City. I’m alive, here and now. It’s ridiculous to be thinking so much about death, what about the now? What. Have. I. Been. Doing?! And I thought, I will keep going. I’m going to find my way. I’m going to find people to help me find my way. I’m going to find a better astrologer! I’m going to go to yoga. I’m going to feel better. I’m going to be happy. I have my dreams. I WANT things for myself. And standing there, gaping out down the block, knowing that I was a part of this vast, exciting place, I felt oddly in tune; maybe even spiritual, though at the time I didn’t really know what that really meant. Because I was convinced, deep down, that there was more. There HAD to be more. There just had to be more than that dark, heavy bar. Than Annabelle, who laughed, no cackled, the next time I saw her. Than sitting in my ever-tightening skin. Than barren, white walls and the milky way and the moon and laying awake at night alone. There had to be good news waiting on the other side, since I had already made it to this one. There had to be more to me.

And as cheesy and Piscean and romanticized as it seems, I made a promise to myself right then and there, that no matter how bad I felt, I would always, from that point forward, be chasing that.

Even if that meant I had to chase the stars.