Things Picked up
Written spring 2022, edited spring 2024
Jasper won’t ride the subway without her chapstick in her pocket. She never uses it. Putting something near her mouth in that grimy car is out of the question. But she keeps it in her pocket all the same - sometimes in her purse, or in her backpack, or her fist, but always available. She picked it up from her Mom, halfway across the globe. She doesn’t know why she does it, she just does.
When she first found herself in New York Jasper refused to travel underground. Having taken the uptown down, and the downtown up, having smelt urine in hot gusts of wind off the tracks and bared witness to innumerable displays of public nudity, she vowed she’d walk. She was a walking girl. But the rats lured her down into their maze, enticing her with pizza and a half-smoked cigarette, and she understood it wasn’t quite as vile as she first thought.
The pizza she did pick up from the rats- its big juicy slices dripping hot, viscous oil like the gulf of Mexico in 2010. Cheap, fast, and emblematic of everything New York pretends to offer– shiny, dense, and tantalizing on the tongue. The pizza lost its novelty after the initial orgasmic bites. She picked the cigarettes up from a friend late one night. He taught her that now and then, smoke burns more than chili flakes in the throat after a night out. Her mom hates it, but she has a few loose in her backpack too now, bouncing around next to her chapstick on the subway car.
Every time Jasper crosses the street, she counts the number of stripes in the crosswalk. 11 is pretty standard, she’s learned, but sometimes you get an 8 or a 9; and every once in a while there’s a whopping 14, like down on Houston street before the 2nd ave station. She doesn’t know why she does this either - she picked it up from a girl she doesn’t talk to anymore. After stumbling through the streets at night, getting home late and reviving themselves with bad coffee and dry hash browns, they counted crosswalk stripes until she wandered right back out again. Jasper carries that girl's lip gloss in her old purse, and paces across the streets in numbers, long after their friendship moved across town.
Crosswalks aren’t the only things Jasper counts. She looks for angel numbers on license plates and buildings and subway advertisements too. Not because she knows her own, or because she believes in their power, or really even knows what they mean. But Jasper’s best friend told her once that they looked for their angel number walking through the city. And because she doesn’t see a reason to do any differently, Jasper looks out for all of them… just to be safe. She keeps receipts with totals of 222, 555, and 777 tucked away in the recesses of her bag, shoved deep in her pockets, and hidden under the dust below her bed. They fall out when she grabs her chapstick, or when she digs for loose pizza cash, and they float back into the void from whence they came. But she always finds a new one, tucks it away somewhere, and forgets. She thinks a little bit of luck, a charm, if that's what they might be, won’t hurt to carry around too.
Jasper isn’t a collector, she’s just picking things up along the way. Her silk black shirt she got from a friend, who got it from her mother, who got it from her mother, who found it in someone else’s goodwill pile. Who’s mom doesn’t have a goodwill pile, what a waste it would be not to take what’s offered, and sometimes it’s just not for you. But Jasper will take it, what’s one more little piece to tuck away?
Jasper likes the subway now, because it moves as quickly as she does. It's full of other people's things. It’s the best place to feel the weight of her bag. She’s carried it around all day, and when the doors whoosh closed and nobody else seems to care, in the most invigorating and independent kind of way, she takes stock.
She’s not really her own person yet, but she’s got the building blocks. She took her idioms from the girl in her class who always looks just a little more put together, always more figured out. Jasper borrowed the way she talked. Whenever she sees those purple Cadbury chocolates in a deli, she puts them on the counter with the rest of her things because a boy loves them, and she loved him, and so loves them, and why not wrap that little thing into herself too?
Jasper thinks one day her bag will have such a unique smorgasbord of little things, that it’ll be her own. And she can assemble her building blocks and sit on the train and the rats will look up from their reverie and think that, THAT, right there, is her own woman.
