The Sadness in the Greene Street Apple Store

Sarah was Sixteen in 2003 when the Sadness began. Why did her parents move her from New York City to New York State? School had been hers. She was an influencer before social media had a death grip on the world. Other girls asked her what to wear. Life had been beautiful like they told her she was. She didn't believe that or much of anything.

The Sadness was rooted in displacement. The Palisades Mall never had the luster of SoHo. It wasn't even fool's gold by comparison, more like aluminum. She had lived in SoHo once, just around the corner from the Apple Store on Greene, in one of those movie set lofts where painters and reality shows made magic. She used to check her email in the converted post office with earbuds in while tourists gaped at gadgets like cave dwellers just out of a time machine. Now she felt the reverse of what those gawkers had, trapped in a past moving slower than time, falling further and further behind.

When Sarah felt the Sadness, she would wonder about the truth of it. Happiness might be the delusion. Walking up Prince Street between the bustle of street artists on a tourist-clogged Saturday morning, wondering when she would pass David Bowie on the sidewalk again, wasn't closer to reality than staring into a weeded Westchester pond trying to skip rocks that only sank. At least she had her iPod. Her earbuds felt the same as they had in SoHo, so when she turned them up and closed her eyes, she didn't hear birds anymore. She just heard "Space Oddity" and the Sadness.

William understood the Sadness. They had the same black-brown mop, inches apart in length, and the same taste in music zines and blogs. William even had a blog, Live Journal though it was. The content was strong, as were the cultural references. He felt like a fellow time traveler, and he knew how to bite her lower lip just so. Though he had been to the City only sixteen times, he said it was where they belonged: together in a one-bedroom second-floor walk-up where they didn't have to apologize to guests for the roaches because the rest was so perfect. Their building would brick like the street, like the houses of their young bodies.

The Sadness hadn't started with the War on Terror, but it made the Iraq War make sense to her. There was no way to fight anxiety head-on. Better to be crushed and then record demo anthems to it in Garage Band. Those 60s covers were timely. Barry McGuire and Skeeter Davis were right. The end was near or here. That's how it ends, not with a 9-11 but with a 9 to 5 where her dad shuffled off to sell the same financial magic beans he had traded, except in Northern Westchester rather than Lower Manhattan. It takes a certain kind of girl to feel forgotten while pacing in front of the Mount Kisco Borders and listening to her boyfriend bellow about her and the Apocalypse into his PowerBook. Clearly, one person hadn't forgotten her.

In October, when the Sadness brought her to a hospital on a hill, she wished she were in rehab. There was nothing she could get out of her system that would connect her with reality, only adulterations administered by doctors. They let her bring her PowerBook in with her, though she had to check it at the desk and give it to a nurse when she was done with it. The cord was a suicide risk, of course. She thought about blogging but only filled up files with her rants and then emailed them as attachments to William. She couldn't trust her thoughts to the body of an email. Too easy to betray herself.

Soon after release, Sarah beat back the Sadness, skipped a day, and took the MetroNorth and then the Six back to the Spring Street stop with William. It was just after Christmas, and the Apple Store was packed full of tourists with gift cards looking to change lifestyles with technology. They stopped there to check email, and she got the news that way. She had a reason to be sad. Her grandfather had died.

Grandpa Alister always told Sarah that the Sadness was a badge of honor and separated the enlightened from those moronic enough to be happy. He had also been convinced of Steve Jobs's genius since in the early 80s, bought an Apple IIgs in 1988 and Apple Stock eight years later when Gil Amelio and John Scully had made way for Jobs' return. Grandpa Alister looked like an elephant told Reagan could run a third time the day the iMac came out. Sarah felt the opposite as she stared into her PowerBook, squinting to re-read the email. William asked what was wrong, but she didn't tell him. She never told him much again.

That December, the Sadness covered Sarah in snow. Somehow Grandpa Alister had gotten a spot in Greenwood Cemetery and insisted on being buried in Brooklyn even though he hadn't lived there since sixteen. As she stood on a white hill looking into towers and bays and feeling the North Atlantic wind, William two hours away, she wondered what it would be like if it were possible to check her email at a funeral and get great news, like that she had gotten into Smith College or was getting backstage passes to the Flaming Lips on New Years. Would it feel like it had on that happy afternoon in the Greene Street Apple Store when sadness had shattered what was left of the sun?

The Sadness only lifted late the following summer when she watched Katonah shrink in the rearview of her Volvo as it hummed north toward I84 and Amherst. That Apple Stock was paying for school. College would be different, she was certain, and she was right. Surrounded by other device-clad women turning technology into hope, she would feel something like feathers in her heart and began to laugh loudly for the first time since she had dumped William at the Chappaqua station the day her grandfather had died. Still, she listened to William on a burned CD as she drove, emo welp and Garage Band beats, playing from a past that sounded like the future.

"The Sadness in the Greene Street Apple Store" is a sample of brand fiction, where imaginative writing helps evoke brands through literature aligned with content strategy. This piece was not financed and is not endorsed by Apple but does attempt to evoke the story of that brand.

For more samples or to discuss this novel revenue model for literary fiction, connect with Dylan James Brock.