I had a UTI. A real one this time. My telehealth doctor was not getting back to me and I was sick of lightly sobbing on the toilet, thinking about how predominantly female ailments must be the root of puritanical thinking. Why were our bodies designed so poorly? Why would any god create something so as to punish it? I needed to delete my Twitter account. 
It was two o’clock in the morning. There was a 24/7 pharmacy two blocks away and if I just made it there, I could buy a packet of the special urinary painkillers I’d read about online. I fantasised about the bright pink packaging out on the barren, sludge-lined street. 
I knew something was wrong as soon as I saw red crates stacked in the fluorescent-lit entrance and a single employee counting out expired Easter eggs by the counter.
“It’s closed,” Brian said. Brian was the homeless man who sat in front of the pharmacy all day and night, hitting the automatic door button for customers in the hope that they would pay him for the service. He called it a tip. A tip on top of what, I’d asked him once. Tip of the fucking iceberg, he’d said, laughing. I’d laughed as well, even though I had no idea what he meant by it. 
This time I voiced my confusion.
      “What do you mean?” 
     “Closed. For good, the girl said,”
    I squeezed my eyes shut and let my forehead drop against the cool steel of the streetlight. My organs continued their whelping. 
“I’d love another one of those sandwiches you bought me last time, Hun.” I threw my arms up at the sexist gods, 
“I bought that sandwich in there, Brian!” Now he was confused.
“My name isn’t Brian? It’s Leviticus,”
“Then why do the cops call you Brian?”
He looked like a toddler who’d been told he couldn’t have another serving of dessert.
“Sorry,” I said, “Sorry, Leviticus.” I lit his outstretched cigarette, “Closed for good, you say?”
“Yup, ‘too much demand’,” Leviticus said, waving in the air quotes. 
“Too much demand?” I asked, as though I were talking to someone who worked at the pharmacy franchise’s help desk.
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Hmm.”
The nearest alternative to this former pharmacy was a half hour walk away. I wouldn’t be able to bear it. I walked back home, alone except for a brief moment when a tall, androgynous figure jogged past in a pair of flared jeans.
I called in sick to work and, unable to sleep, played an off-brand version of Candy Crush until my randomly assigned Telehealth doctor messaged.
I’m sorry to hear you’re not feeling well. R u worried it could be an STI?
No, I messaged back, but then rewound the tape on my recent sexual encounters, wondering if I should be.
I couldn’t have overstated my enthusiasm for condoms more on the details field next to the “new or multiple sexual partners?” box of the intake form. Perhaps the doctor had to ask. Surely they wouldn’t just leave the issue up to me.
It sounds like an infection, then.
A generic statement about my antibiotic prescription came through and I raided my mostly expired medicine drawer for something that would put me to sleep for a few hours. Until Village Health Plus opened at the hopeless hour of ten o’clock.
I had a dream about the fifty-something year-old lead actress from a cable dramedy series I’d binge-watched three months ago. In the dream I understood us to be friends first, colleagues second. We were napping together when she tearfully asked me if I would give her some of my eggs. She told me she wanted children but had run out of time. I agreed immediately and initially felt existential relief that I would soon have some part of myself replicated without any of the responsibilities and fears that accompanied parenthood.
But later in the dream I was alone in the film set kitchen. I was making a cup of tea, wondering if the process of egg retrieval would inhibit my ability to become pregnant when Iwas ready. And whether it would upset me to have a biological child who I couldn’t call my own. Why hadn’t I asked any of these questions before I’d agreed?
Three days of antibiotics had taken me halfway through the bottle and mercifully, all the way through the UTI. With the symptoms vanished, I began scheming my way back into the bed of the new, already disinterested sexual partner I’d declared on the telehealth app like it was a customs form.
This was usually when my relationships ended, when I was doing desperate things like taking a train to Bay Ridge. The three-week mark. I rode from Grand to 45th wedged against one of the poles, my arm stretched out at an odd angle to grasp the metal between two strangers’ dirt-caked suits. The weather today was somehow just mud, as though that’s what was falling from the sky. AC water dripped on my head.
A pregnant woman on one of the coveted seats pulled a stroller closer towards her and glanced briefly, warily, at a couple of seemingly harmless inebriates occupying the bench just ahead of my unsavory maypole. The little girl inside the pram seemed too old to be pushed around like that. Though, what did I know? She wore her mother’s expression. If I gave my eggs to a friend and colleague, maybe the child would wear her face, and not look like me at all. Would that be a relief?
The dirty suits around me shuffled and I took one of my headphones out, wondering if the train had been delayed/diverted/was planning to skip stations/was planning to run backwards/was planning to run over a colony of rats so large we’d be sent careening through a wall and into the ocean.
There was no announcement. One of the giggling drunks had started monologuing with the intonation of a fire-and-brimstone minister,
“They’re checking our history! Our internet history! Internet. Internet. Interweb? INTERCONNECTED. Women. The women are checking. They’re checking up on us. Just like that bitch. She looks like my ex-wife.”
What bitch? I looked behind me, then turned back just in time to see his fist swinging towards me. He missed, his hand slamming into the pole. I took the opportunity to push my way backwards through the packed cart, my rain boots squelching and slipping in the black pools on the train floor.
I got out at the next station, running up the stairs into the storm. Water slapped me in the face as soon as I joined the thoroughfare on the sidewalk, sludge ricocheting between bodies as it met with the deluge and the pavement and our shoes.
When I arrived at the tepid man’s apartment I couldn’t believe I was ringing his doorbell like this. I couldn’t imagine his lukewarm attraction to me heated by the street puddles I was now wearing. I needn’t have worried. After five minutes of intermittent ringing, waiting, and shivering under the scant shelter of the doorway, I realised he had forgotten I was coming.
I couldn’t make myself get back on the subway straight away and I couldn’t afford a ride. I bought an umbrella from a bodega that was guaranteed to fall apart in a few minutes’ time and looked in on a bookstore I felt too grimy to enter.
Without really deciding to, I began walking home. Too many times along the strips of highway, an enormous cargo truck would teeter as it sped past me, almost brushing the edge of my coat. Death was too close today, I thought. I felt my back was pressed up against it.

Omgggggg im so sorryjfjrbrh lol got hammered with Jackson

I made a small detour to stop outside the pharmacy franchise. It was boarded up, just like Leviticus said it would be. He was nowhere to be seen. There was an officer watching the protest against him on the nearby pedestrian island that sufficed as a park. “Where’s Brian?” I asked, 
“Who?” I sneezed and pulled out my phone. Telehealth time.

october 11th, 2022