I Am Sweating

A co-worker said to me the other day: Wow, Molly. You are sweaty.

How observant, I thought.

I’m always sweating. I get on the subway—I’m sweating. I clock in at work—I’m sweating. I’m asking the server where the bathroom is—and woohoo, I’m sweating.

I live on a fourth floor walk up and everyday when I tap my very fancy, very New-Brooklyn contactless keycard at the front door, I dread the climb. I don’t mind the first set of stairs. I don’t mind that at all. Getting to the second set, is almost bearable. The third set is when the the temperature rises and the air thickens and my hairline moistens. I’m breathing in the hot smell of apartment building, thinking about how stupid it is that I have to go to bed and wake up again and again and again and by the time I get to the top floor, my thighs ache, my armpits reek, and I’m wondering what horrific news story will be on my timeline by the time I get upstairs.

Maybe there was a time where I could climb four flights of stairs without sweating. Or maybe, it still hurt, but what was at the top was so lovely I didn’t care. 

Sometimes things are good. Sometimes I stay up all night reading, and sometimes I come home and my roommates are cooking with garlic and onion, and sometimes I get a cute text from a cute boy which means he’s been thinking about me.

But sometimes I log onto facebook to see that more children are in cages, and that another kid from my town has taken fentanyl and died, or another one of my friends has had an interaction with a man, that wasn’t quite rape, but very well could have been.

A co-worker said to me the other day:  Wow, Molly. You really don’t like being bored. 

How observant, I thought.

I hate it. I hate the millisecond second between songs on my subway playlist. I hate the days between finishing a book and starting a new one. I hate the 13 seconds it takes for another episode on Netflix to load. 

I don’t like Friday nights where there’s no party. I don’t like Tuesday nights where there’s no party. I don’t like being bored.

I pretend to be emotionally stunted so I don’t have to talk about the hard things. I pretend to be bored by how miserable and awful this city, country, continent is in order to avoid my own misery and awfulness. 

But it’s there. It’s festering. It’s seeping out my pores, through the corners of my closed-mouth smile, dripping from my hairline over my forehead and the groove between my eye and nose. It’s gathering between my thighs and under my armpits, and on the fuzzy parts on the back of my neck. I’m drenched. I’m leaving squeaky wet footprints behind me.

So I shower. I turn the water down to freezing, and I rinse off. Sometimes I rinse off with a shot of tequila and a slice of lime. Sometimes with a one time use plastic bottle of water that I throw in the black bin, not the blue one. Sometimes with the puff of a cigarette I bum off the Korean man who works in my office building. Sometimes with a tinder date, or a thumbnail pressing deep into my thigh.

But what I know is this: 

As long as its hot, which it always is in this burning orange, chauvinistic, capitalistic, Brett Kavanaughvanistic, bloody inferno, there will be sweat. I am sweating. 

-Molly Greville

Molly Greville is a playwright and nonfiction writer based in New York City.