magnet theory

i got stuck on the subway for an hour today :,)

There was a woman in my neighborhood who walked around carrying a magnet in her coat pocket.

An actual magnet. A thick industrial one wrapped in red tape so it wouldn’t crack against her keys. She kept it beside loose receipts and cough drops and little scraps of paper with phone numbers she never called. Sometimes, while waiting for the train, she would take it out and place it quietly against the metal pole beside her just to feel the pull. The certainty of attraction. The obedience of matter.

She told me once, over jasmine tea in a Chinatown bakery, that people misunderstand magnets. They think magnets are desperate. They think attraction is forceful. But magnets never chase. They simply become impossible to ignore.

At the time I was still auditioning for capitalism.

You know the posture. The permanent incline of the body toward usefulness.

Every conversation secretly converted into networking. Every hobby reworded into productivity. Even grief became material. Especially grief actually. I knew how to turn heartbreak into a clean paragraph with a strong closing sentence. I knew how to make exhaustion sound poetic enough that people mistook it for wisdom (and me a poet). I was becoming highly employable to the machine while disappearing almost entirely from myself.

Back then, I treated my life like a waiting room for the future version of me who would finally deserve rest.

The woman with the magnet noticed immediately.

You move like someone asking permission, she told me.

I laughed because I thought she was flirting. She looked devastated for me.

After that we began meeting every Thursday. Sometimes in parks. Sometimes at diners open too late. Once inside a church neither of us belonged to because she said abandoned sanctuaries have the best acoustics for honesty. She spoke in the strange language of people who have suffered enough to stop worshipping achievement and pray at the altar of ghosts.

She said things like: Your body knows before your mind does.

And: Most loneliness comes from performing a self you cannot metabolize.

And once, while peeling a blood orange with her thumbnail:

Healing is when your life stops feeling like a pitch.

That one lodged itself inside me for weeks.

Because suddenly I could see it everywhere. The desperate brightness in everyone’s eyes. The curated suffering. The optimization of the soul. We had all become tiny corporations of ourselves. Branding our tenderness. Monetizing our interiority. Turning desire into content before it even had the chance to become experience. Ignoring the fact that life is an energy gradient (yes, this is a piece of fiction, but I must give credit where credit is due because my thoughts are nowhere near original (duh) - shoutout to the wonderful human who introduced me to energy gradients and who has been helping me relearn the house of my pain and the shape of my being).

One night I asked her what happened to her.

Meaning: why aren’t you sick like the rest of us?

She smiled into her tea. Oh, I was worse, she replied.

Then she told me that years ago she had a nervous breakdown so complete that she forgot her own laugh. She physically stopped recognizing the sound when it came out of her body. She said she spent an entire winter lying on the floor of her apartment watching dust move through sunlight until one morning she realized something terrifying: The dust was freer than she was.

Because the dust did not need to justify its existence before entering the light.

After that, she started recovering in unusual ways. She stopped reading self-help books and started staring at trees. She quit jobs that made her dissociate. She began cooking meals that took hours. Then days. Then weeks. She learned the names of birds. She touched the walls of her apartment every morning and thanked them for holding her life up. She stopped forcing conversations with people who made her feel confused in her own spirit.

And slowly, mysteriously, her life reorganized itself around what she genuinely loved.

Not strategically loved. Not aspirationally loved. Just loved. There’s a difference.

One afternoon she handed me the magnet.

It was heavier than I expected.

Feel that? she asked after it snapped against a nearby railing.

I nodded.

That’s what happens when something stops negotiating its nature.

For a long time after we met, my life got quieter. Then stranger. Then better. I stopped trying to become legible to people who benefited from my confusion. I stopped sanding myself down into professionalism. I started writing things that frightened me a little. I started leaving parties early without telling a soul. I stopped showing up entirely when I didn’t feel like it. I started praying, though I refused to call it prayer. Mostly I walked. Mostly I listened. Mostly I let my life arrive instead of hunting it (whatever “it” is) down.

This isn’t manifestation - although I do love that shit.

I suppose life is resonance. A tuning fork struck cleanly enough that the world around it begins humming back.

this beautiful little thing was paralyzed on the sidewalk and she let me pick her up and put her in a bed of tulips and it was a most glorious moment :,)