Cosmic Irony

She has authored several books, including Women, Culture & Politics.

Women, Race, & Class

Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday

This isn’t deja vu anymore.

Today, again, I have these weird, third-person perspective situations. I thought today had already happened on the day I was already there. But the events are all out of order.

They’re bleeding into reality, these false memories. How can I work in a place where I think I did something that embarrassing. How could I have gotten there? Why did that have to happen?

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I knew I was on company time but the bathroom is the only place you can get a piece of solitude. Of course, there’s a woman in the stall next to me already, taking her sweet time. I’ll play this game. I’ll wait. 

This is what women do. We never speak to each other in the bathroom, we just wait the other out. Silently. 

How long does the time go by. I’m torn. To leave now, I sacrifice the only chance I have to breathe my own air for a second. I need this second. Obnoxiously now, the clock ticks and she finally leaves. Final-ly. I go to wash my hands and I catch my own eyes. Now’s my big chance. I don’t have to look at myself long before I’m weeping.

I even sob a little bit. How thick are these walls anyway? How long before someone walks in and maybe turns around to alert HR there is some girl having a breakdown in Bathroom A and needs (God forbid) assisstance. Someone should check on her. I look at the door, challenging the next blind fool to cross the threshold. 

They don’t come. On the door is a lock. Peculiar. What is this, the sex bathroom? Who leaves a lock on a multi-stall bathroom door?

Don’t ask questions.

I lock it and dance back to the mirror. Such beautiful, thick tears. Mascera streaks. The grooves in my skin as I frown, (somewhat) silently wailling. The redness. The red. So red. Clearly, I’m allergic to crying. Or self-pity. Or indulgence.

No one has bothered me, or tried, and by this point I’ve squeezed all the emotion out of my tube of tooth-paste self. I unlock the door and let the water run as I wash my face, wipe the tears, and pretend it didn’t just happen.

Compartmentalized. No problem. Let’s get back to work.

I swing the door open and there she is. Shit. Oh yeah. I’m composed-looking, right? Damn, she follows closely, and look at that, she’s brought new company. Cute company, even. (I’m kinda pretty, right?) Wonderful.

And then I got to meet my new boss.

First impressions…

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This isn’t how I met my boss. I met him in the lab, not the hallway just outside the bathroom. In fact, I don’t think I even met him until my second day, on a Tuesday. Maybe. Either way, it was in August 2014.

The only other time it could be that this actually happened was May 2013. When I was a fuckin wreck.

Welcome to the catch-22, ladies and gentlemen. Where neither outcome is ideal. Let’s review why:

Outcome one (Not real): If they’re not real, then no damage has been done. I wasn’t the asshole who spent like, 20 min, in the bathroom, got caught, and then looked like a pile of wet paper towels after mopping up spilled fruit punch as I met my boss. Good. We can just pretend it never happened.

So I never worked there before. Right? So… Why is it that someone at work asked me if it was true that I had worked there before because she had heard that from a whole other person? I met both people and nothing triggered. Why did it come to me only immediately after I saw the quizzical yet advantageous lock from the inside? 

What the fuck is going on? I never dream about people I know. I never remember such details of my dreams. The level of detail this “memory” has is parallel to actual memories. What’s more, is the people in it are real, and accurate. I feel the same way towards each person as I do in real life. This is the same in dreams and real situations, but this story has all the same sensory data too.  The details… I just don’t dream like that.

Maybe they’re visions? Maybe that’s just what false memories are? For four days last year I blacked out. I don’t know for certain where I was. I have all these crazy stories building up and this one falls on the same timeline. There’s no way to prove it but my own account, and I’m pretty easy to discredit- 50 words or less even.

Outcome two (Real): Then I did something super embarrassing. And yet, they hired me again anyway? Some people remember and some don’t? My boss is really nice, meaning, he doesn’t treat me like I’m crazy…. That woman kinda did though. Again, just pretend like it never happened I guess, right?

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Two things, seemingly unrelated, meet.

Why? And why are there multiple ones at this new job? I had them at my last job too. In fact, so many came to me at once, I had to take time off and was promptly “let go” because it “wasn’t working out”.  Things got really weird… I don’t want that shit happening again. I’m trying to conform and be normal and work like a normal adult and function, but these memories come creeping back and they haunt me and I dont understand what i can do about it.

This is not deja vu. This is not some crazy dream.

I want to know what’s happening and what’s happened.

I want proof.

“It’s okay” I said to the waitress. This word choice caused me to fret- things weren’t okay. It was not okay. To say it’s okay was a lie, but not to the waitress, to the eavesdropper. The woman sitting to my left also waiting for a table, party of 2. It was not okay what happened. The lies and deceit, manipulation on all parties’ ends. The thick of it all.

We are to know it’s not okay.

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But it wasn’t I who really said “it’s okay”in the end. It was her.

And I to hear it.

How is it that I dream of saying it, and when I wake it is said to me? How is it that I acquire these experiences just to forget them just to relive them just to be haunted?

Does she believe it is not okay as vehemently? Did she fret the same way when those words trespassed her lips? Are our experiences the same or have two now occurred? Why be there difference at all?

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Which predicament bothers me more, I do not know: seeking closure or sanity