Upper East Side Pain Museum

When the whole city becomes my psychological counseling room

After 1,600 days of changing seven masks on Fifth Avenue, I gradually understood the essence of this profession - what we sell is not time, but the desperate desire of human beings to be "seen". Behind each appointment code, there is an emotional ulcer measured in dollars.

Fairy tale corrector of Wall Street

The fund manager who asked to dress up as Mr. White Rabbit in "Alice in Wonderland" always twitched his right eye on time at 3 pm. It was not until he caught me secretly turning off the stock market screen that he confessed that the graffiti before his daughter's suicide was sewn in the third button of his suit. Now our tea party has a code: when he says "late will be beheaded", it means that today he has received another blank postcard from his wife from the rehabilitation center.

Brooklyn's sensory puzzle

The experience of being a "human recipe" for a blind chef shocked me the most. He asked me to stir-fry the taste in my memory with words: "the smell of wet tofu after the heavy rain in Chinatown in 1997" and "the bitter taste of ink on the immigration documents". When describing a lime, he suddenly interrupted: "Your throat is shaking... Are you thinking of someone?" It turned out that I unconsciously imitated my mother's humming when cutting fruit, and his cane was pointing precisely at the location of my tear glands.

Upper East Side Pain Museum

The "perfect date" script of the heir required me to recite all the cover stories of "Vogue" from 1975 to 2023. Until she collapsed at the MET Gala imitation makeup party - when I used lipstick to repair the glue marks of her false eyelashes, she whispered: "You know? Your movements just now are exactly the same as my childhood nanny..." At this moment, the red light of the cloakroom monitor flashed, just like the divorce diamond rings on her mother's necklace that she never took off.

The boat of lies on the Hudson River

The most unforgettable is the programmer who rented a yacht to see the Statue of Liberty. He paid three times the hourly wage just to practice how to describe New York to his hometown fiancée. When we were rehearsing the "Central Park Picnic" plot for the tenth time, he suddenly said to the camera of his mobile phone: "The pigeons here...are much thinner than those in my hometown, right?" When the waves wet his trouser legs, I quietly photoshopped myself into the group photo he sent to his relatives, in the corners that were destined to be deleted.

Postscript: All encounters are unfinished confessions

These medical records decorated with champagne and credit cards taught me that loneliness is the real currency of New York. When dawn falls, we, the temporary emotional workers, will eventually return to the sea of ​​people, and those temporarily mended soul cracks will continue to grow new cracks on the glass curtain wall of Manhattan.