"Only I Can Prevent the Collapse of Society" by Sheena Daree Romero
Mini-portrait of Society
Only I Can Prevent the Collapse of Society
The morning is a whizz of cardamom grinding with espresso. Whiffs of extravagance. I begin the day sipping an oat milk latte with rose water. Journal, scroll, discover I have read both of my free Harper’s articles for the month. Sit in my armchair, legs atop a heating pad atop a pillow atop an ottoman. The inbox warns there is not much time for me to prevent the collapse of society and save every nonprofit or media organization I’ve ever encountered. Support the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s commitment to building international understanding, ensure dear Kenyon Review’s pages continue to represent a wide range of perspectives (though not my perspective) (which they’ve rejected) (...four times) (!), join Lambda Literary in preventing LGBTQ+ lives from being erased from public life entirely. I check, yup, these emails were indeed intended for me. I don’t click to learn more. What in this world can be done with knowledge alone?
My moment of indulgence ends, I have to go. I pocket a crumpled five-dollar bill, my keys. Bop down two flights of stairs. It’s too early for noise, yet my left knee yells. A teach yourself SQL in 24-hours manual sits in the landing. Does it contain secrets that could steer me towards treasure, stability, purpose? Yesterday the university invited a good percent of staff and faculty to separate. Voluntarily. Years back, for a class project, my nephew interviewed my mom about our ancestors. She told him they were slaves. Huh. He stared. Like volunteers who never signed up to volunteer—volunteers separated from their family. Oohh. He’s never about our ancestors again. A colleague calls the voluntary separation offer ‘consensual decoupling.’ We’re on reality TV. We could, perhaps should, take our silly prizes, head our silly ways. But optimism, delusion, sunk cost fallacy, and an awareness we are unlikely to ever be cast elsewhere convince most of us to continue competing for opportunities to continue competing for opportunities, despite knowing the producers might boot us off at any moment. Leave us involuntary penniless.
This might be the last season.
Someone huffs the train ain’t running because some fool jumped in front of it and didn’t even fucking die. Through dog dump, empty potato chip bags, and the contents of many garbage cans, I hopscotch to another station, where, down more stairs, it rains on the platform. Broken caution tap drowns in pools of brown water. One day the 1-train will no longer run. A woman sings ‘Killing Me Softly’ with her whole body. The Lauryn Hill version. I love New York City. That five-dollar bill passes from my black hand to her black hand, leaving me nothing to offer the next three people who, like the institutions who email me all day and myself and my colleagues, urgently need individual support. I regret not grabbing that SQL manual. We could have passed it back and forth. We could have arrived at our destinations with confidence, demonstrated skillsets, and fluency in whatever SQL is.
Sheena Daree Romero is a humorist and doodler based in New York City. Her words have received a Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellowship, won the Miriam Chaikin Prose Award, made the Longreads Best of: Reader Favorites list, and been published in outlets such as Taco Bell Quarterly, Autostraddle, and Passages North. Sheena’s visual art has been exhibited at the Massillon Museum and is forthcoming at the Urban Arts Space. She’s currently [pretending to be] writing her first novel.