Last Requests
I can explain why I quit. I was on the train back to my apartment when he stepped into the car. The past few months had been so bleak and unmemorable—carry out from the same Chinese and Afghani restaurants, weekly calls from my mom and sister in Detroit pleading with me to come home where it is “safe”, and the impossibility of feeling ANYTHING among the swarms of bundled bodies and (now) masked faces trudging down 42nd Street. I worked as an assistant to the assistant of a men’s outerwear designer in the garment district. The hours were brutal, and despite the fairytale depictions of ice skating at Rockefeller Center and carriage rides through Central Park, it had been a tough winter in the city. The unrelenting cold, on top of a virus whose name shall not be spoken, left everyone exhausted and hollow. I, along with most of my fellow New Yorkers, needed a win.
