She heads back into the office. I stand outside in the cold, imagining myself working even faster, faster than the speed of light, working so hard I become even more of a blur, not sleeping, not eating, woman as machine. I picture Sasha’s insides, the pink of her womb, the eggs in her ovaries shriveling, already rotten.

“I was talking to the rest of the C-level team about this the other day and I wanted to share it with you. We are on a rocket ship together. And this rocket ship is headed to the moon. The moon is us going public. Which we will, if you all keep up your hard work and dedication to our mission.”

The city wears away at all of us, wrenching open mouths full of a rage that explodes out of us, turns us into self-immolators or sacrifices to commuter trains or people who relentlessly scream our pain into the night.

“You know what I’m fucking sick of? You two. You two and your fucking jobs. You’re constantly overworking yourselves and buying into this tech hustle culture bullshit. At my job, we work like normal people.”

“Our jobs?” I ask. “What do you mean? We have to work. That’s the only way we can afford to be here.”

“Oh, fuck off. You don’t need to work ninety hours a week. You only like those jobs because they make you feel like you’re better than me.”

The winds of her storm pick up. I try to smooth things over.

“No, no, it definitely isn’t that,” I say. “We don’t think we’re better than you.”

“Oh, fuck you both,” Nicole continues. “You and your secret projects and your panic attacks.”

“What?” Maria asks. “What the fuck did you just say?”

“We’re just trying to get by,” I say. “It’s hard to live here.”

It’s the wrong sentence; as soon as the words leave my mouth, I know it is. Nicole rears back like an arm about to throw a hard punch.

“Hard to live here?” Nicole shoots back. “It’s sooooo hard for you, huh? Soooo hard to be in this beautiful city and make six figures. Nothing is good enough for you two! Nothing! You’re bottomless pits. You’re ungrateful bitches! You’re two black fucking holes!”

The butcher was young. He wore a black rubber apron over a white coat. There were telltale drops of blood on the white fabric. If I were a detective, he would be the prime suspect.

“We’ll take your finest steaks,” my mother said proudly. “My daughter is moving to California and we are celebrating tonight.”

The butcher and I stood in the silence of no one having asked her for those details.

e.g., Everything I knew of love was built on this crooked foundation. In our lives, we must hold two truths at the same time. And the same way I must hold the stinging and the eruptions, I must hold something else: a sweet memory of my mother.

We were in the kitchen. I was ten years old. Her favorite song, an Elton John song, came on the radio. She was heating up dinner in the microwave, the Salisbury steaks scenting the air.

When my mother was young, she would listen to Elton John on her record player, endlessly. She’d wear out Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. There in the kitchen, when the song came on, she got young again. She couldn’t see herself like I could see her then, how bright she became. She pressed a hand over her heart in the kitchen and began to sway. She sang the chorus, she sang AhhhhAhhhhhAhhhh and it was beautiful to watch because she loved to belt that note so much, she sang it with beauty and with pain, all of the pain of her life coming out of her mouth in that note, she transcended herself and became the note, and I loved her most then, when she was that note, swinging, swaying, electric.