BANANAFISHBONES

Lili Tanghe || Spring 2025

I’m in this exquisite kind of dilemma where I only really feel alive from midnight to three in the morning. I know the art of evoking happy moments, Baudelaire says, and yet the only time I can make myself feel truly alive is that three hour window.

Take right now, for example. It’s midnight and I’m crammed in an elevator the size of a shoebox with a group of twenty-something finance guys fresh from Wall Street. We’re all trying very hard to not acknowledge each other more than we strictly have to- this is how you survive New York. I digress. Anyways I’m in this elevator and I’m trying to find a karaoke bar that will take two people without any form of identification between them. Mostly I’m killing time. No one tells you how much of your university life is just spent in the constant murder of hour after hour, waiting for the next interesting thing, the next outing, the next three hours on and on and on.

Not the point. I keep forgetting the point. I’m in the elevator at midnight trying to find a place that will take me and my friends in for a few hours and I’m on the phone with my uptown friend trying to get her downtown but it’s hard to hear because some tinny K-pop song is playing over the elevator speakers and it’s so loud. I just can’t make the connection.

I stagger out of the elevator and it’s this long, narrow hallway. The Wall Street guys are gone and I can’t remember if they came out of the elevator too or if they’re still going up. The music playing is softer now; it sounds like one of those slow songs they used to play in the 1960s. I walk for what feels like forever. There’s a door at the end of the hallway and I open it because what else is there to do.

It’s someone’s dorm room- I can’t remember whose but it’s not mine. I check the time- one a.m. My friend isn’t answering her calls so I lie down on the floor. There’s a giant television in the corner playing some pretentious silent film, and it takes me an embarrassingly long time to realize that the subtitles are in German. There’s a woman screaming on the screen, and there’s something uncanny about the unhinged jaw and the lack of sound. It’s impossible to guess what it’s supposed to be about and I’m too tired to try. I’m waiting for my friend to arrive and after some time of being on the floor like that I realize she’s never going to. I try not to feel anything about this revelation but the silence in the room makes it very difficult. I finally, reluctantly get up and force myself out. You have to do this sometimes when no one can do it for you, and they often won’t.

I check my phone and it’s one in the morning. I also have a missed call from my friend and the link to an address. I take the stairs running, only stumbling once, until I’m finally out and back into the night air where anything can happen and the last hour was only a dream. I’m running down the street and I pass a man sitting on the sidewalk. His head was missing a large flap of skin, and you could see the red gaping from the distance. I thought he was dead at first, because there was no way someone could still be alive with a head injury like that, but he was sitting there, slowly blinking. It was a stupid thought, but my knee-jerk reaction was that it must be cold like that, since it was a freezing cold day and his insides were just exposed like that. But no one else was paying him any mind so I kept running. I had an engagement to keep.

“Rapture” by Blondie is playing on the jukebox. It’s two in the morning and I’m sitting in a seedy diner. My friend is there, sitting across the booth with a milkshake. She tells me to tell her something interesting, so I tell her The Colette Story.

THE COLETTE STORY

ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A GIRL NAMED COLETTE AND SHE LIVED IN A LITTLE HOUSE WITH HER LITTLE DOG WHO SHE LOVED VERY MUCH, THE LITTLE HOUSE HAD LOTS OF CHINTZ AND AN OTTOMAN AND BRIGHT SILK CURTAINS AND THEY WERE ALL OF THEM VERY HAPPY. THEN ONE DAY COLETTE GOT SICK AND SHE COULDN’T STOP VOMITING. SHE VOMITED ALL OVER THE CHINTZ AND THE OTTOMAN AND THE BRIGHT SILK CURTAINS UNTIL EVERYTHING WAS FILTHY. THE LITTLE DOG WOULD COME OVER AND LICK HER FACE CLEAN AS SHE LAID ON THE FLOOR UNABLE TO MOVE. THEN SHE DIED. THE END.

“That’s a terrible story,” my friend says, and I’m about to agree with her and make some excuse for my own mediocrity but it’s three in the morning and I’m walking through Times Square now, trying to find my way home.

You can only hear “Empire State of Mind” from a distance and there’s nobody around except for a couple intertwined by the Levi’s flagship store. They’re kissing furiously and I’m embarrassed on their behalf except it’s just me and them and who am I to judge, really. I keep walking and I’m alone again with all the neon advertising and all of a sudden I feel so fucking sad I want to burst into tears. There’s just something about this city, with millions of people rushing anywhere and twice that many eyes looking down that makes me so melancholic I can’t stand it.

Then (like clockwork), the couple is gone, and the music is gone, and the flashing lights are gone too. There’s nothing but me and the dark. I can’t resist it- I fall back into sleep.