“Fine.” I rolled my eyes and walked into the kitchen, thumbing through a stack of envelopes. “When exactly did you send them? The only thing I have is junk mail and bills from a while back.”

“Three weeks ago.” He sounded confused. “You should’ve received them by now. They weren’t in your mailbox?”

I stopped thumbing through my mail and sighed. I hadn’t returned to the mailroom since the time I ran into Gillian.

“You can’t possibly think it’s the mailman who goes through all that trouble...”

“I’ll take a look at them tomorrow, Jeff. Thank you.” I hung up.

I knew the cold sweats and the need to wake up and break things was intensifying by the week, but I didn’t need a therapist to tell me the obvious reason why they were getting worse. The diagnosis was quite clear: Lack of fucking.

I opened a Coke and poured it into a glass, waiting for the fizz to settle. But before I could take a sip, I spotted a row of death out the corner of my eye.

My perennials.

Jesus...

Forcing another thought of Gillian and her long rant out of my mind, I filled a tea kettle and watered all of them—making a mental note to hire someone to do this for me whenever I was away flying. Someone who wouldn’t illegally stay the night.

When I was finished, I grabbed my phone, determined to meet up with someone, anyone, this week to finally get her and her pussy off my mind. I swiped my finger across the screen and noticed a slew of unread text messages that were more than two or three days old.

Atlanta—Nina: You flying my way at all this month?

Memphis—Penelope: You never showed up Friday...You okay?

Los Angeles—Sarah: Did you stand me up on purpose? I thought we agreed to meet here six weeks ago...

Dallas-Nicole: Hey, it’s been awhile. You still flying?

I started to respond to all of their texts with new dates and locations, estimated times I would be in their respective cities, but I couldn’t do it. At least, not right now, anyway.

I gave in and dialed Jeff.

“Hello again, Mr. Weston. What do you need now?”

“I need your help.”

“That’s a given, sir. You are a sad, sad soul. I take it you opened some of my brochures.”

“Fuck your brochures.” I heard him laughing. “I need you to help me find someone who used to work here as a housekeeper, but I don’t want to go through the manager. I need to know where she currently works.”

“Should I assume that this person is a woman?”

“Since I said the word ‘she’, I think that would be a pretty accurate assumption.”

“Should I also assume that this woman’s name is Gillian?”

“No.”

“I thought so.” He laughed. “I’ll tell you exactly where she’s working now. I think I can do that.”

“Right now is a good time to start.”

He laughed harder. “There’s a catch.”

“Do tell.”

“You’ll have to agree to go to at least one consult with a professional therapist, and then I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

I hung up.

I’ll figure this shit out myself...

GILLIAN

~BLOG POST~

One year ago...

If you ever want to know how to crush someone’s spirit, the recipe is fairly simple: One-part unemployment, two (part-time) jobs that won’t officially begin for thirty days, and three parts moving into a rundown Brooklyn apartment with a random girl you met off Craigslist.

Stir well. Serve cold.

I never thought I’d say this, but New York City has officially lost its luster for me. That blinding brightness I once admired is now tainted with the darker shades of hopelessness everyone tried to warn me about.

I can’t walk down Fifth Avenue without feeling like a failure, and those dazzling dreams I used to dream don’t feel like possibilities anymore. They’re all daunting delusions of grandeur.

For a split second, I considered returning home to Boston—telling my family that they were right. I thought I could sit in my old room and figure out another direction for my life, all while ignoring their incessant put downs and relentless repeats of ‘I told you so’. But yesterday, when my older sister called me and said, “I just bet Dad another thousand that you’ll be back by this Christmas.”—I decided I’d rather deal with my new hand in life instead of folding.

All of that said, I’m deactivating this blog today. There’s no point in blogging for an audience of trolls, or posting things that will only be seen in the far, unvisited corners of the internet.

I probably won’t have time to blog anyway. Between being a “domestic engineer” (a nice word for housekeeper) and a floating reserve flight attendant (a nice word for “flying waitress”), I’ll be laughing at the irony in all this.

And since my college degree is now practically worthless, and I’m blacklisted from most of the places I’d actually want to work, I leave this blog with this:

FUCK YOU.

Fuck you, New York City.

Fuck you, New York Times.

Fuck you, you know who you are.

And fuck you, Kennedy.

Fuck. You.

Write later

Write never,

**Taylor G.**

1 comment posted:

KayTROLL: Who is this audience of “trolls” (plural) that you speak of? I’m still your only fucking follower...

GATE B8

GILLIAN

Portland (PDX )—> Dallas (DAL)—> London (LHR)

The alarm clock in my hotel room sounded at exactly 6:00 a.m., and it took everything in me not to cry and wish that this was some type of joke. With every muscle in my body still aching, and my feet so numb and sore that I could barely feel them anymore, I would’ve killed for a few more hours of rest. Or at least another assignment...

Being assigned to work the first class cabin at Elite was the ultimate prison sentence, and unless there was some type of divine intervention soon, I was certain I wasn’t going to last too much longer.

For four weeks, I’d completed all the over the top wine and cheese services, the five course meals, and the ‘check on the first class passengers every twenty minutes’ rule as I flew from Portland to Ft. Lauderdale, Seattle to Los Angeles, Atlanta to Beijing, Beijing to New York. Not to mention the numerous stopover and layover cities in between.

I’d rushed through the terminals in the newest set of mandated heels—a full inch higher than before, and forced myself to smile as I encountered the rudest of passengers. Adjusting to the constant time zone changes, I was shocked that I’d managed to keep my frustration under wraps, especially since I’d been paired to work with the one supervisor everyone told me was the worst.

“The Hawk.” Miss Connors.

Obsessed with perfection, she scrutinized my every move, monitored my every breath. According to her, the bobby pins in my hair were always “too aligned to the left,” my beverage pouring skills “resembled those of a blind waitress,” and I was not “worthy” of sharing her line that featured so many “trips of luxury.”

She was always around. Always. And no matter how many times I tried to do things “The Elite Way,” she would insist that I was doing things “the wrong way.”