My dad can’t leave the house because our manual elevator needs a new part. It’s unclear when it will come, but my mom thinks maybe after the weekend. He likes to visit Eataly, sometimes Janovic, or Blick. It’s a weekly ritual for me to pick up his cane from wherever he leaves it in the neighborhood, like Easter eggs. Once he’s filled his cart with materials to renovate different parts of our loft he uses it for stability and forgets about the cane.

My ex-boyfriend and I recently broke up; it’s hard when things end amicably because there’s really no such thing as an amicable breakup. What happens then is you have to break up with yourself over and over in the coming weeks so you can properly mourn. I spent most of this year alone. I realized we needed to break up watching a TikTok. I started frequenting the Oculus, riding the escalator to Eataly alone, walking back down the white hallways to Sephora. People need to get angry at each other and I’ve never been good at that.

My first experience at SLAA was perverted. I went to a co-ed meeting and every man was addicted to porn, the only other woman in the group just wanted to fuck the muscular guy. The next time, in a woman’s meeting, a drunk woman came in and sat with me; we were across the street from a recovery center near Union Square. She grabbed my notebook and started reading from it aloud. As they kicked her out, she pointed at me and wailed: “Take good care of this one!”

NA and AA are great places to connect, make friends, find six-figure jobs. There’s no upward mobility in SLAA, just women with undiagnosed mental problems mixing their feelings into a concotion of “I’m a fantasy, codependent, anorexic love addict.”

My sister worked at Aesop, so now I work there. Everyone looks prettier in a mask and that’s why I think they make us keep wearing them. My boss complained about an Amazon truck parked on our block because it ruins the experience of our store. Although she sympathizes, it stops us from doing our morning wash of the street, a tradition in which we douse the block with water and our signature Aesop oils to remind passersby of that dauntingly attractive man who smelled of vetiver that all their friends tried and failed to sleep with. The water would run down the sidewalks, disturbing the Amazon workers trying to eat lunch and carry packages on the truck’s landing.

Aesop was bought out by the corporation that owns The Body Shop, securing its downfall within the next ten years. They’re delivering to women in tech who don’t leave the house, because women only leave the house to meet men, and everyone tells them not to do that anymore. Aesop wants to create an air of mystery, but companies need to be transparent now. Soon people won’t want to smell like wood anymore and we’ll have to go back to Pink’s Vanilla Bean Body Mist. I’m told not to use the word “tracking” in our training when we pull up customer accounts because it can be triggering. We’re supposed to wear work-appropriate pants to promote productivity.

No one in my family has ever had a 9 to 5. My mom got me addicted to TheRealReal and we sit on Buyee for hours waiting for an appropriate time to go to work so that when we get back, there’s not much of the day left. I’ve learned the best way to make money is pretend you already are and spend a lot of it. I still have my Mom’s resume from when she first moved to New York plastered on my wall: “Art Restorer at the Louvre (3 years).”

My favorite baristas at Think Coffee can see me googling how to unblock my ex’s mom on LinkedIn. She does a weekly check-up on my profile, and I’ve had enough, but blocking a mother feels sacrilegious.

My friend tells me every company is disorganized because the CEO is just the person who was best at lying in their interview. Grown-ups don’t do anything at work but coordinate the concept of doing it later on.

My Muay Thai teacher wears orange silk shorts. I need to ask him how to slim down my arms. Gwyneth Paltrow doesn’t lift more than three pounds for this exact reason. Short girls need to be extra skinny to look good in photos, but then they don’t look good in real life. It’s still unclear which one I should prioritize.

My college professor, while discussing Rousseau’s Emile, explained that both men and women are fragmented, but only women are aware of it. Men discover their fragmentation when they fall in love. I think women realize men aren’t whole at that same moment, which is why no one has sex in long-term relationships. I’m a people pleaser, but I’m not good at retail.