Page 14 of Below the Shadow of the City

I try to downplay any emotion, my heart is pounding. I can pretend this is only a spam call and not someone who occupies far too much of my brain space. Less than a second in and I’m already regretting this decision. My anxiety is on overdrive.

“Sigrid,” I can hear him smiling as he says my name. “What’s up?” He speaks as if this is a normal thing between us, like every Sunday afternoon he gives me a call to catch up.

I’m taken aback by his nonchalance, “You called me?” My confusion comes across as callousness.

“Sorry.” He pauses. “Should I not have?” He has a goofy, awkward, boyish way about him. It’s cute.

“Uh, no, no it’s cool.” I’m as uneasy as he is, if not more so. I put him on speaker and pace back and forth in the living room. “Just a little surprising, I guess?” Surprising is an understatement, he’s thrown me off my rhythm so much I think I’ll need to take a walk after this to process it.

“I can only deal with you existing as text on my phone for so long,” he laughs a bit. “It’s a quiet Sunday, I have nothing but time. But, if you don’t want to talk⁠—”

“I do,” I say before I can stop myself. My chest squeezes tight. What have I become?

“Good,” he replies. “Because I really do love getting to hear your voice, Sigrid.” His voice is the one that’s deliciously craveable. It’s like hot coffee, smooth, and dark. It wraps itself around my throat and fills me with warmth. I want to beg him to say my name over and over, honestly, I want to hear him moan it.

“I really don’t know what I’m supposed to do here.” I giggle nervously. What do we talk about? We text throughout the day, we’ve covered the basics with one another, but he’s still a stranger to me. I can’t bring up random thoughts that pop into my head, or trauma dump on the poor guy.

“Have you never talked on the phone before? Is it the Eighteenth Century?” He laughs at himself.

“I mean, I don’t know what to talk to you about,” I answer.

“What’s your favorite color?” He asks innocently. “We haven’t covered that basic yet.”

“My…favorite…color?” I repeat the question back to him, mostly because I’m not sure how to best answer it. If we’re going by wardrobe standards, it would be black. But he’s not asking about that. And now I’m completely overthinking something as simple as my favorite color because I’m convinced there’s a ‘wrong’ answer to this question.

“It says a lot about someone,” I can hear his smile through the words again, a genuine one.

“Orange,” I answer.

“Why?”

“Because I like it?”

“No,” he clicks his tongue, “there’s more to it. I’m going to ask you again, what is it about orange that you adore so much?”

I inhale and sit with the question. I do have an answer, a pathetic, cheesy, emotional one. The small sensitive part of my heart is clawing itself free from my chest, ready to bare its entire self to this stranger on the phone. “Do you know the Manhattanhenge phenomena? How a few times a year the sunrise or sunset aligns perfectly with the Manhattan street grid?”

“Yes,” he says it quickly, anxiously waiting for me to continue.

“When I moved to New York I was eighteen and that first year was tough. I was living on next to nothing, I had horrible roommates, and I was really, really miserable. But on a whim, I was walking on 34th Street on a Manhattanhenge day after a particularly shitty shift at my waitressing job. I had no clue, but I looked up and the entire city was bathed in amber. It was one of the most beautiful things I’d seen, I swear, I cried. Because I loved the city so much and was convinced it was going to chew me up and spit me out. But seeing the way the orange glowed around the buildings reminded me that I was meant to be here, and I’d work my ass off to stay here. Ever since then it’s been my favorite.” My heart races as I finish the sentence, all that word vomit makes me feel like gagging.

“Well, shit, Sigrid,” he laughs on his end. “That’s a much deeper answer than I was even digging for.”

“I can’t say all that sappy shit and have you give me nothing,” I laugh.

“I was going to say blue because it makes me think of the lake my dad took me to when I was a kid, but you make a good argument to get someone to be an orange convert.” He says it earnestly. I think of the two of us, opposing colors on the wheel, maybe never meant to converge.

“Welcome to the cult, please sign over your life savings and soul,” I laugh off the rest of my emotions. My face is red from embarrassment. I’ve never told anyone about that experience in the nine years since.

We talk about work and school, life experiences, and learned lessons like two old friends. He’s incredibly vague about details, but he does IT remotely for a tech company. He majored in English, much to his dad’s disappointment, and was in a fraternity.

On the surface, he sounds like yet another one of those frat bro Brooklyn transplants, and under any other circumstance I would have passed judgment on him almost immediately. I grew up comfortable, but had next to nothing when I moved out, opting to pursue big city dreams instead of a college degree. Everything I had I worked hard to get, and a decade later I was finally a little comfortable myself. If I’d met him at a bar I would’ve written him off as someone I would never be able to relate to.

“Do you ever feel like you’re sitting on the sidelines and watching everyone else know exactly what they’re supposed to be doing?” He pulls the conversation into something sincere again. Like we got too close to shore and he needs to drag me back out into wilder and deeper waters.

“Absolutely, yes,” I reply enthusiastically. “It’s like I somehow missed the one day in school where they taught us how we’re supposed to be functioning adults.”

“Yes,” he laughs a bit, “most days I feel the exact same way. I forget that I’m the age my parents were when they had me, and they seemed to have their lives together. Sometimes I think we’re all just imposters, trying our best to figure shit out along the way.”