It’s an outcome too obvious to be ironic: that I expend so much effort carving out time and space for myself to write, only to end up spending that time in the throes of illicit boredom. It’s not like becoming paralyzed; it’s a feeling closer to having been in the sun too long. A kind of floating, under-hydrated lethargy. But it’s not quite that, either. It isn’t simple procrastination, and it isn’t writing “block” so much as amnesia, a forgetting what it was I was supposed to be doing in the first place. Sometimes I’ll come to at the end of my carved-out space and realize I spent the whole time reading, or cleaning, or that I took a nap. Sometimes I’ll have just stared out the window. I don’t know what exactly to call the thing that happens to me.

            What I remember of the night in question was that it was one of those perfect autumn evenings, the kind the city sometimes has — one of the idealized nights that eighty percent of all film and television and daydreams about New York are based on, so that you might come to think of the place, from a distance, as always either delightfully pleasant or ethereal with falling snow, which two states account for a combined two weeks of any year.

            But it was delightful. And then there I was, ensconced in my carved-out time and space, sitting at the desk pushed up to my open bedroom window. I was reading through stories I’d written before grad school, maybe with the initial hope of reworking one of them, but soon settling into a detached appreciation that none of them had been published. Often I would glance out the window, at the perfect air and the brick-and-stone facades across the street, the ironwork fire escapes, the pigeons: New York.

            I feel now that I almost willed my phone into ringing, the way someone in a movie might stare at a glass of water or a spoon until it slides across the table: one moment I was trapped in the amber of my dim-lit apartment, the next there was this humming against the desk, a crack in the evening’s stillness. It’s grandiose to come out and say, but I felt like it was the city that was calling me.

            And it was the city calling. Calling in the form of my old college friend Leah.

            Leah works for a bank, I think, or something like a bank — she’s “in investments.” Here’s what I know about that: she gets invited by a good number of people with a good amount too much money to help celebrate how well they’ve donated tax-deductible portions of that money: galas. Leah gets invited to a lot of galas. I never get invited to galas except by Leah, but even still, I’ve been to a few.

            And Leah’s date for the night had cancelled on her; she wanted to know if I wanted a fancy free meal, with drinks, in exchange for dressing up and listening to rich people self-congratulate into a microphone.

            Yes, I was supposed to be writing — yes, yes, but. I’d carve out time the next day, to make up for it. I’d skip a workout or something. And you never know what will inspire a story. And I hadn’t eaten since lunch. And, anyways, it’s not like I’d actually been writing.

            […]

read the rest of “Superpositioning” in Issue 18 of From the Depths, where it won the 2020 Haunted Waters Press Award for Fiction