“The words of the prophets / Are written on the subway walls. . . And whispered in the sounds of silence.”

It is 7 am on a dank Thursday morning and Simon and Garfunkel are waxing poetic through my stuffy headphones. I’m on the Q and a prophetic poet’s heavy question hangs sordidly over the head of a sleeping woman in scrubs. The poem is Ada Limón’s poem, A Name Poem, part of the MTA’s noble attempt to incorporate art into an otherwise wearing commute. I’m hit by it kind of the way a hammer hits a nail that first hit. Squarely, with conscious intention:

“I wonder if she ever wanted

them to speak back, looked into

their wide wonderful eyes and

whispered, Name me, name me.”

Maybe the woman in scrubs is coming home from a long shift, the kind of work which stretches expansively into the interminable hours of the night. Maybe she spent hours tending to sick women in the psych ward, burping from booze and bipolar, assuring her that they don’t really belong here, they used to make six figures, they used to have a mortgage and they used to put their kids on the bus, and they don’t know how they got here anyhow. Maybe she is a nurse but she just wants to be a musician. Maybe she grows squash and tomatoes in a tiny corner of her Brooklyn plot, a modestly decorated yard in a neighborhood teeming with yuppies and college kids and a few of the people she went to high school with.

Can we just stop with the pretense that Eve eating the apple was some kind of anomaly? Can we all just mutually admit for one fucking second that we’ve all been there? That all she really did was make the difficult decision no one else wanted to make?  We’re all a little Eve, aren’t we? Don’t we all reach for the apple when it looks so juicy and red, so succulent and lurid?

Well, let me tell you, I’ve been apple picking and every apple looks like the best apple until you get right up next to it, until your hands are on it and you’re just about to pluck it from its delicate stem, wrench it from its mother and claim it yours. It is at that precise moment that you look across the orchard and you see an apple that is better – no, actually, you see a whole tree whose limbs are tearing at the very crevices from which they burst from the weight of all the perfect apples on them.

In kindergarten they made us watch a movie about Johnny Appleseed. He wore a pot on his head. His seeds were magic. I was enchanted. My feet swung lazily from my hard plastic chair, my legs too short for them to reach the ground, to plant themselves on the cold linoleum tiles. My sneakers must have had Velcro.

By the time you get to the tree, though, that perfect tree with the heavy limbs, the apples are bruised and discolored, stained prosaically with lesions which serve as reminders of what you could almost touch but could never grab. What you can never grab.

I run into my kindergarten best friend at a bar. She is a waitress there. I drunkenly ask how she’s been, I tell her she looks great. I wonder to myself if she thinks about kindergarten. She always called me cute, and I hated it. We were best friends, though.

On the first day of kindergarten, my mom came to school with me. The next day, I got lost walking to class. The principal asked me where I was supposed to be. “I’m not sure,” I said, my voice like a dozen broken egg shells in the empty hallway.

I don’t think I believe in God, but I can still believe in Eve, right? Right?

-NG