Wake up at 6 am for your job downtown. You can commute or drive but at the cost of $6 per day for a light rail ticket you usually drive. And then you pay parking downtown – at the rate of $6 per day.

Walk to work. If it is wintertime, you will not see the sunshine. It will be cold and then it will be warm for an hour right before lunch and then it will be cold again. It will blizzard every weekend. You don’t like to ski, even though everyone else does, and when you Uber after work, every boomer and Gen Z you pick up will be shocked that you don’t ski or snowboard. When they ask why, you tell them, “Skiing is for fucking tourists.”

(Work is fine. You have been working in the same position for at least a year and a half, which means in exactly six months you will find another job with a slightly higher pay grade if you are lucky. Or you will be laid off. Hard to say. Your boss, the VP, tries to hug you every other day. You heard from Linda he once got caught taking upskirt photos at the local mall, ten years ago. He comes into the break room and leers at you, but you think he’s actually trying to smile.)

Spend four hours a day browsing Facebook in your cubicle.

After work, put your phone on your dash and sign in to Uber: it’s time for your second job. An overdue credit card bill sits on the seat, but you have student loans to pay. With an interest rate at 18.9 percent, you’re better off not paying it at all. Just let the thing max itself out. Let the debt collectors call until it slides off your credit in seven years. (It’s not like you’ll ever buy a house. Or have children.)

Your first client wants to go to the number one destination in Denver: the dispensary. You don’t smoke weed anymore because you’re neurotic and drinking gives you more of a false sense of control. Once you bought a CBD pen thinking it would just help you relax, but then you toked on it so hard it gave you an anxiety attack for thirty minutes.

Denver was named the worst city in the nation for dating in 2017 and let’s be frank, that situation hasn’t improved.”

When you’re done with driving, ditch the car and hit up an appropriately on-trend whiskey bar in what used to be Five Points but has been called RiNo since the young urban professionals moved in. The whiskey bar is named Whiskey Bar. Do bumps of cocaine in the bathroom with two of your best girls. Kyler works for herself, makes almost six figures, and can hardly afford an apartment downtown. The other friend, Jayce, lives off Broadway renting a house from her dad, working in her dad’s office answering the phone. Her personality is comprised mostly of posting political articles on Facebook.

Get blitzed. Browse Tinder while your girls chat but what’s the use? Denver was named the worst city in the nation for dating in 2017 and let’s be frank, that situation hasn’t improved. Jayce tells you to start going on Tinder dates in Colorado Springs, the town an hour south of Denver, because most of the men are military, never stay in one place for too long, and she has wild romantic visions of becoming a military wife one day.

Uber to another appropriately on-trend bar in the heart of North Broadway – which has been affectionately renamed NoBro by developers. The bar is an open room with a single couch in the middle. EDM is piped into the room via bluetooth speakers. They serve kava, CBD-infused cocktails and White Claw on tap.

Order gourmet American hot dogs from a menu with no prices listed.

Do another bump of cocaine in the bathroom.

It’s one in the morning and you end up at Illegal Pete’s, a taco joint open as late as the bars near the university. Lose your phone while flirting with a Scorpio in line to order your food. Spend the next three hours dumpster-diving with said Scorpio looking for it. Give up, fuck in dumpster, fall in love. He’ll never text you back.

Denver is the worst city for dating in 2017 and forever.

Crash at Kyler’s apartment, which you’re pretty sure used to be an asbestos-filled warehouse that has been redeveloped into a ‘loft’. Every new apartment building in the city is built so cheaply, with that same, government-regulation look. They’ll all resemble Soviet-era project-style housing in 20 years. You stop in the lobby to use the restroom, and end up peeing in a marble-tiled bathroom while two belligerent Tri-Delta sorority girls get into a fist fight.

Wake up the next morning on Kyler’s couch. The inside of your mouth tastes like a strip club. Your neck feels like hamburger meat.

Find your phone, which has been in your bag the whole time.

Check your bank account.

Cry a little.

Text a nude to that Scorpio along with an invite to brunch on the weekend. Order a $7 latte to go from Crema on your mobile app.

Get ready and head to work.

 

Elle Nash is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine and a fiction editor at Hobart Pulp. Her work has been featured in Guernica, New York Tyrant, Volume 1 Brooklyn, The Fanzine, Cosmopolitan, Elle, The Offing, Enclave and elsewhere. She lives in the Ozarks with her husband, daughter and their dog. Occasionally she reads tarot in exchange for money. Her debut novel Animals Eat Each Other is out now in paperback from 404 Ink.
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