Are you here on purpose?

Gem’s niece had a fantasy where she would beg on her knees for help to the lady behind the counter at the Optum Health clinic. His brain appointment wasn’t until December, and his niece, a prodigious crier, had just finished crying on account of that. Lying faceup in bed, temples sticky with tears, she imagined that if only she were in the lobby at Optum her performance would count greatly towards something concrete and real.
    It didn’t seem so out of touch to think of her body as an instrument for performance. There were tons of Men’s Health articles and boomer MSNBC ads that described “a man’s performance” or “failure to perform,” which she was pretty sure constituted a cultural context for doing the sacred dances of life on cue; maybe crying was the same, just less gross, a thing she could exploit.
    She wondered if it would work if it had to, if she could pull it off. Did that make her cynical, or was it the triumph of survivalism in her noble soul in a moment of trial for her uncle and family, and was she destined for the laurels of heroism? She had never been called practical before. She was dismissed from a part-time job behind the jewelry cases for slouching and twitching.