no more parties in new york
You wake up and walk along the L train route because trains are no more and you go to Scent Bar even though no one can smell anything anymore because the coke is so dirty that it might as well be dirt and you intern at PERF which is like if Condé Nast was armed and militarized by the US government and you read old books and learn about monogamy and cigarettes and cry yourself to sleep because you were born in the wrong generation and you go to Metrograph even though it's been converted into a urinal museum and then you grab a drink at Clandestino which is same as it ever was and you gouge out your left eye to justify buying a pretty pink eyepatch and you put a dainty little bow on it and you're really into self harm right now so you frequent the Midtown clubs and bleed all over the finance bros who are upstanding citizens and you ponder whether you're a cyborg because you have a metal womb and your government mandated Supermirror tells you you're beautiful every morning until it malfunctions and starts calling you fat instead and you try to explain monogamy to your boyfriend and he says you’re a puritan and you’ve never heard that word before but it hurts you still and you can’t break up with him because you weren’t dating in the first place and you gouge out your right eye to evade the draft and they give you robot eyes and you see the world in black and white as punishment because you did this to yourself and you give up on the clubs but end up befriending the finance bros and don’t understand why you keep hurting yourself and you start meditating and get an Equinox membership and spend too much money on aura photography and go into debt and realize you love the city and then think of the implications of that and get banned from Equinox because you were free bleeding in the steam room but it was actually machine oil and you accidentally kill someone when PERF headquarters get attacked by angels and you start getting nightmares about being shoved into a giant robot and getting assfucked by the strange creatures and you get a brainworm infection and they tickle your pineal gland so you’re sleepy all the time and you generally don’t mind the absence of color except you really miss pastel pink and you remember you killed someone and you join the LES chapter of the DSA but you don’t know what either of those acronyms stand for and you start frequenting virtual coffee shops where laptops aren’t allowed and you decide to turn your life around and apply to Columbia University but they reject you because you’re legally cyborg and this is an institution for humans and you buy a cigarette flavored vape off Silk Road and brood over the fact that you’re not a person anymore and you start enjoying the company of your brainworms and wonder if they can worm kiss and have worm sex and get worm married and have worm babies and sometimes you agonize over the fact that your only friends are finance bros and parasites and you think about God for the first time in your life and you decide not to kill yourself and you want to leave this city and move to Berlin but you can't do that because the angels have devoured all the airplanes and you clipped your wings in protest.
Yasemin Kopmaz is a writer and ex-filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. You can find her work on Hobart.