I pick up my suitcase carefully and make my way towards the A train station, blinking to make sure I hit that sweet spot after Thoreau, where I felt satisfaction but not like I was gonna pass out on the subway. The second my eyelids meet each other, I find myself caught in a beam of light and I hear my father’s, my advisor’s, my grandpa’s, my high school guidance counselor’s, my cousin’s, my college roommate’s voice whispering in my ear: “So, what- you wanna be a teacher?”
I shake my head around, cracking my neck and slapping my face loudly enough to snap away from the bright path of light and drown out any unwanted voices. I check over each shoulder and hop over the subway turnstile while the only woman clad in uniform eyes a lonesome Jansport near a MetroCard machine. I blink again, eyes opening in sync with the train doors before them. I gravitate inside, hearing the women yell from behind me, “How do you expect to start a family?”
The smell of chewing tobacco and grass thrusts every hair on my body upwards. I let my eyes hover above closed, reciting the sleep spell of Prospero over Miranda. The scent gets stronger, being fanned up to my nostrils by a copy of Hunter’s Digest belonging to the man standing next to me, his filthy left hand gripping the metal pole in front of me just above my own. He leans downwards, taking in a deep breath of my hair, breathing out a “Print is a dying field.”
I open my eyes, being pushed up the subway steps by dozens of commuters, strollers, schoolchildren, up onto a broken sidewalk square. A loud ringing noise repeats in my ears like an ignored alarm clock; I pick up the payphone with eyes closed, already wincing. “Collect call from Sallie Mae.”
I look up across the street to the steps of the museum, dropping the handset and completely missing the cradle. Children run and laugh, few sit doing homework, even fewer read, indicating the potential for a complete monopoly on my part. I make my way towards them, take a seat, open my anthology and start blindly flipping through the pages with a finger jutted out ready to fall at random as I feel a sudden blow to my ribcage. A red-lipped woman with a crucifix hanging from her neck crouches down to face my ear, I feel the plastic buttons of her beige jacket against my side as she whispers, “Have you thought about law school?”
I kick my suitcase open and scatter approximately three dollars onto the stained lining. I start the discombobulated and sporadic reading of a string of E.E Cummings focusing my eyes downwards onto the page, my every pause emphasized by a jump by one of the children towards my face, screaming “YOU’RE… NOT… BAD… BUT…” I pick up my pace in accordance to the lines; the children rapidly bounce “YOU… COULD… BE… THE… BEST… AND…” I slam the pages shut before finishing and bury my face between my knees. I take a large enough peek to see two dollars being thrown into my suitcase. I look up to meet the eyes of a smartly dressed woman, with the same features as myself but much tamer hair. She grins, “It’s still unlikely.”
She spins around slowly, and I don’t watch her as I gather together the five dollars in my case, shut it, and make towards the park. The distant call of the ice cream truck can be heard, I open my eyes widely as I look for towards the last lines of the poem still in my hand, in front of the day’s profits. I scream them out as my fingers wrap around the five bills and a grin of my own makes its way across my face; just enough for a milkshake.