There Must Be Some Kind Of Way Out Of Here!!!

mary x getting a grip, 1k words, slowburn coffeeshop au no tentacles

Good Afternoon! Good morning! Whichever! How are you? I’m good. Not actively decomposing, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at my fingernails. 

I woke up at 4:30 this morning to open the cafe. Hours of sleep: approximately four. Remaining bottles of oat milk when I arrived: three. Machines broken: two and a half. Baristas on shift to deal with it: one. Hello! Good morning! Good afternoon! 

After the first morning rush burned itself out, I locked myself in the bathroom for my breather. State law grants me one break per shift, but I grant myself at least two breathers, named as such because I spend them silent-screaming at the mirror until I’ve huffed all the air out of my body. While I was breathering, I got three notifications on my phone in quick succession. The first was from a radio station, letting me know they were not going to give me the job I applied for two days ago; the second was from a friend who had just been to see some paintings of mine at the library, and wanted to let me know how much they’d liked them; The third was my friend Grace, apologizing, because she was heading back up to New York pretty soon and was not going to have time to come and visit me after all. The combined effect of these three things felt a lot like having someone shove me to the floor, lean down to hand me a bouquet of daisies, then straighten back up and drop a bowling ball on my stomach from shoulder-height. 

And then I looked back up at the mirror and noticed that my skin is going to hell. Which makes sense, given that I’ve spent almost every day of the past week sweating in a fog of kitchen smoke and atomized bacon grease. In terms of skincare I might as well be scooping handfuls of mayonnaise from the sandwich bar and slathering them all over my face. I’m not good at crying even when I feel like crying—the only thing that can always reliably bring me to tears is a sharp whack to the head—but I did muster up a few damp noises when I was looking at my red face in the mirror. I think I just needed to get something out of me. Then I readjusted my ponytail and went back out onto the floor, thinking, as I do at least thrice per shift, I can’t keep doing this.

When I got home and bewailed all of this to my mom, she naturally latched on to the job rejection, so I got going about the job market, and the algorithms that kick your resume out of the pile because you didn’t use the word “management” enough, and how biased and complicated and impossible it all is. She said, very tentatively, “well, maybe you should make some sort of plan.” 

Right. 

Well, when I started at the cafe, I was planning on one of two things happening: either I’d get one of the cool exciting jobs I was applying to, or I would be subjected to coffee-related horrors so profound that I’d just snap completely and start a new life halfway across the country. The first thing obviously hasn’t happened yet, and as for the second, I’m pretty sure I swiped a dead fruit fly out of my lip gloss at work yesterday, so if that didn’t send me off the deep end I really don’t know what will. What’s going to get me out of here? What’s it going to take? 

I need my eyebrows threaded and my tarot cards read. I need to wax my entire body until I’m shinier and squeakier than an inner tube; I’d also like to see a dermatologist for an extraction, get all the kitchen grime out of my pores. I need a perfect playlist, a full tank of gas, a good cup of coffee for the road, and—most importantly—an invitation. A job. I need something waiting for me when I get where I’m going, something that opens up a side door into my real life, because this can’t be my real life, can it? Slinging coffee, texting Grace from two hundred miles away, driving an hour to see one friend once a week? Drinking screwballs in my childhood bedroom with the door closed? No. I wouldn’t have spent a real year of my real life doing things like that. I’m still in the waiting room, and any second now a woman in a denim pantsuit and go-go boots is going to call my name and drag me into some kind of wild, glittering mess. 

If I’m completely honest with myself, the problem isn’t even that I hate my job, because I don’t. I like the customers, I like my coworkers, I like free drinks and merry chaos and having an actual reason to feel exhausted at the end of the day. The problem is the general state of being stuck in my hometown working a food service job; I find it boring and frustrating, and now that I’ve been bored and frustrated for a while, I feel like the universe owes me a cooler life. I’ve Suffered, you see, so now I should get a Treat. Never mind that living in your parents’ house for free can hardly be considered suffering, never mind that my job isn’t that bad. I want someone to hand me a letter of acceptance into a life I can be excited about, one where I’ll never be bored again. And I’ll engage in all manner of self-centeredness and willful ignorance to keep that fantasy alive, because the alternative—accepting that life might just be kind of lame for a while, maybe forever—is not something I can allow. 

After I clocked out of my shift today, I went on a bender. I drove for half an hour through one of Connecticut’s more fucked-up cities just to stand in a Barnes and Noble, and I ended up buying two books: Susan Sontag’s On Photography, because none of the libraries near me have it, and Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, because the cover looked cool. I drove home, emitting a loud grinding noise (I think the hole in my exhaust is getting bigger) and thinking over my woes, and by the time I pulled into my driveway I was so mad that I kicked the brake and just sat there for a while with my arms crossed. Curled up in the driver’s seat, fuming, glaring a hole in the windshield. This lasted about thirty seconds before I realized how ridiculous I must look, and then I started to laugh. 

vacant lot behind the coffee shop, my beloved.