Bella is moving to New York City. Among my parting words, I told her that New York makes a lot of sense for her. I meant this as a compliment, I think. I said it with only a touch of jealousy. I don’t want to move to New York. I just want to feel that I belong someplace the way people feel they belong there.
I last visited New York in November 2023. I had no real reason to go, other than the indulgent urge to see how I found it. I had friends living there, I could excuse myself to drop in on them. I timed my trip right up against Thanksgiving; after a few days in New York, I’d zip over to Minneapolis to spend a day or two visiting Gwyn at art school, then we’d both take the train back home to Milwaukee for the big family feast. I felt that I needed the practicality of the national holiday to justify my own impromptu, precursory one.
I was to stay at the apartment of a friend I’d made in my first college acting class. I always was surprised that Sophia had wanted to be my friend. She was a purebred L.A. girl, her father a well-known actor. She’d grown up with access to celebrities, vacations in Hawaii, and a host of other little and large luxuries that were unthinkable in my modest, sad-sack upbringing. And still, we hit it off. When we were first paired to work on a scene, we met up for coffee, ostensibly to discuss the assignment. After that, we just kept meeting up for coffee. The Den, the student-run café on campus, became our living room. We spent our meal plan dollars on iced lattes and moved the conversation out to the patio when the hangout lasted beyond operating hours.
Our last hurrah had been Leap Day 2020. We’d plodded around Santa Monica, bumping into her other friend, Sarah, on the Third Street Promenade by happenstance. Sarah drove the three of us to a lookout point in the Palisades, where we wrapped up the night playing songs for each other on a cliff above a lone streetlight and the suggestion of a black and vast ocean that we couldn’t really see. A week or so later, a pesky little virus shut the school down in the middle of spring break, and I didn’t see Sophia again for years. She left our university in the advent of online learning and made the move to New York. I missed her. But life moved on.
I was nervous about spending time with Sophia again after so much other life had transpired. I no longer felt as true and open as I had on the day we first met. My cool factor had been chipped away, eroded by so much time in the Midwest. I was working as a telemarketer and an usher — my day-to-day life wasn’t much to discuss. I was rusty at carrying on conversations with people my age, or friendly conversations, in general. I remember crying quietly to myself on the plane ride to LaGuardia, but I can’t remember exactly why.
In person again, Sophia was bright and steady and just like I remembered. I felt especially like a sorrier shadow of who I’d last been beside her. She seemed to have all of her goodness still intact, and I found myself intimidated by this. I tried my hardest to seem better than I was.
We went to dinner with Lucie, a Hawaii friend of Sophia’s with the kind of reputation that precedes an introduction. Lucie was Instagram-verified with tens of thousands of followers — the attention stemming, as far as I could tell, just from her being hot. She worked in some nebulous business job and dealt with money in terms that I couldn’t imagine. Our meeting point was a restaurant drowning in baubles, premature Christmas decorations. I ordered a beer, because I was on a Chicago drinking stomach. They ordered cocktails, because this was New York.
Lucie had problems with the waitstaff, the restaurant closed earlier than we’d anticipated, and we were unceremoniously hurried out, so we went to another bar. At this bar, we were offered a round of green tea shots by a middle-aged lone wolf that Lucie had taken upon herself to charm. I forget what else I drank after that, but I remember that the combination was enough to render me the bedridden kind of hungover for the entirety of the following day.
Across the table, I was offered my first zyn. As further proof of my provinciality, I hadn’t heard of them before.
Do you feel something? Sophia asked. I had never understood the appeal of vaping, plugging in a cloud of nothing, but I felt the rush of a zyn immediately. Ice-cold, light and clear, an opening, a buzz of breath. The other girls sung the praises of these wicked little tabs.
Zyns are the one vice I’ll never give up, Lucie declared. I’ll be 40, poolside with two kids, and I’ll still be popping zyns. Later, in the bathroom, Lucie told me that her undercover dream was to write romance novels. I told her I was a writer, too.
I didn’t expect I’d have so much in common with you! she beamed. Despite myself, I felt lifted by any proximity to her moneyed glow, false as it might be.
Not much of what I drank that night stayed down. I spent the wee hours of the morning lurching back to the bathroom. God, I hate vomiting.
I wasted my first stretch of New York daylight on a self-induced sickbed. Charlotte would be leaving for Egypt the following day, so I had to rally if I wanted to pay her a visit. After the sun had gone down, I finally felt like enough nausea had subsided for me to brave the outdoors. Getting dressed was as much of a chicken-soup ritual as I could muster. Then, I was out the door, slouching towards the East Village.
Out in the fresh air, I began to feel human again. The first person who passed me on the street turned out to be Kaia Gerber, marching through Soho in a full-body trench and an aura of purpose accustomed to attention. Oh, I felt human, all right.
I beat Charlotte home by a slight margin, so I stopped in a nearby Target for a bottle of Gatorade. It tasted like light pink, but I told myself it was good for me. I meandered around for a few moments, until I finally clapped eyes on my cousin, a beacon in a white puffy jacket, wrapping up a phone call through her wired earbuds. She smiled, gave me a hug, then asked me to follow her inside the bottle shop neighboring her apartment. She had to pick up some wine. I felt like a little kid, wide-eyed at the pretty bottles glowing in the warm light while Charlotte conversed with the shopkeeper, exhibiting a refinement of taste wholly foreign to my sensibilities; I’m contented with $5 options from Trader Joe’s, as far as wine goes.
Upstairs, Charlotte’s apartment was stylish and comfortable, in harmony with her demeanor. It had an air of newly accessed openness, explainable by the recent departure of a sour roommate: a paranoid burnout against whom Charlotte had lately taken the precaution of changing the locks. We chatted, mostly about family, until Charlotte suggested we take the conversation out to a local haunt of hers. She led us on a short walk to a local bar, which she introduced with reports of having seen the likes of Robert Pattinson and that couple from Stranger Things in past attendance. No known starlings were in the building that evening, but I was still charmed. I ate a grilled cheese while Charlotte had an adult beverage, and we chatted some more, the conversation now gravitating to other traits and experiences we might have in common besides family.
I’ve always looked up to Charlotte. She’s always been two years older than me, and I’ll never catch up to her. She’s the only girl cousin I have. As a child, I would get shipped boxes of her hand-me-down clothes, which were always leagues more stylish than anything I was able to handpick from my local Kohl’s. I wore them with reverence. We’ve never lived in the same place, but I’ve long pedestaled her as the icon of what I could be, if only I were a more evolved version. When she started a Substack in 2022 at the age of 24, I was wonderstruck. In 2024, when I turned 24, I started mine, trying on her hand-me-downs again. The sincerest form of flattery.
I was capable of using my mind again the next day, and Central Park was a meditation center. I entered it on a crisp autumn evening, the holidays not yet encroaching enough to box its romance into a trite container. My yellow plastic bag from the Strand brushed up against my calves as I began to navigate the browning green spaces. Inside were two books that I’d picked out that morning, alongside a few postcards I would later tape up on my walls.
I’d found the Strand to be a wedding cake of a bookstore, which I could only bite off in morsels. I’d marched directly to the back with a false bearing of knowing what I was looking for; in New York, I get obsessed with not looking like a tourist. I found myself in an alphabetized aisle for G-surnamed authors. This is where I discovered Lauren Groff, sitting pretty on a shelf at perfect hand-eye level. All her books intrigued me, but I adhered myself to Fates and Furies, which would soon metabolize into a permanent fixture in my understanding of what is good in modern fiction. The other book was Courtney Bush’s I Love Information, which I picked up in the easier-to-navigate poetry section (smaller and off to the side, by the novelty gifts). When I tried to read it in 2023, I regretted the purchase — I found it too impenetrable, too facetious. I didn’t understand poetry anymore. I’ve picked the collection back up in recent days, and I’m glad I bought it after all. In the intervening months, apparently, I’ve learned to speak in tongues. I’m relieved to be pretentious enough again.
I’d arrived in Central Park having lately seen off a childhood friend in Midtown after getting coffee together. I hadn’t spent time with Caroline in a couple years, and we hadn’t been particularly close in all the twelve years we’d gone to the same school. But she was a genuinely warm and kind sort, impeccably intelligent, good-natured, graceful, and grounded. I remarked to her that I found the NYC subway harder to navigate, because of all the numbers; in Chicago, the stops are named with words. Caroline is a woman in STEM, though — she likes the numbers.
After I’d wished her well, pleased that we still could enjoy one another’s company, I began walking without a goal. As I’d done in New Orleans a month prior, I monologued a voice note while I walked, taking stock of the moment as I maneuvered the park’s comparably quiet, winding paths.
I’m nervous that all of my friendships aren’t close anymore, I said to myself then. Even if they’re nice.
I’m nervous that I’m too comfortable on my own, and too uncomfortable in the presence of others. And that, one day, people will wake up and realize that I’m not a good person to be around.
I feel like a stranger who’s probably fairly good at fitting in.
I ramble for fifteen minutes, pondering the implications of my location. I debate the ethics of choosing work over fun. I call my trip “unemployed behavior,” and this is derogatory. I say that it “feels illegal” to be spending money instead of making it. I describe in great detail the mental prison I’d wrought for myself, without entertaining the possibility that I could free myself from it at will.
I feel, like, a phantom limb sort of worry that something is wrong, something must be wrong.
I don’t know why.
I spent that night with Sophia and her friends again, in Soho. At the Irish pub where her friend Katie worked, at the downstairs Italian place across the street, back at the apartment, her roommate chain-smoking out the window. I felt distant, but comfortably aware of where I was. I stood out against the other three — their cruel slang and clothes too tiny for the weather, nicotine as the chief drug of choice. I felt inappropriately business casual.
I got out early the next morning and painted my nails brown on a bench in Washington Square Park. The sky was deceptively cloudy, and would break into patchy sunshine by the time I said goodbye to Caitlin and another Sophia. Like Caroline, these two had known me for most of my life — we’d come up together through the rigors and peculiarities of a Catholic education. I’d lately had an easier time renewing my friendship with the Sophia from my hometown, as we were both living in Chicago. We remarked on the odds of encountering each other on overlapping New York trips, strolling a bit after Caitlin had scurried off at the conclusion of our brunch. I asked Sophia how she found the city, scrambling for sunglasses I hadn’t expected to need. She said, everything she liked about it, she knew she could find in Chicago. A couple weeks later, on Sophia’s invitation, I found myself at a tiny music show hosted in a small, leaky venue (black and metal, like a garage or a storage unit) in an obscure Chicago parking lot. Hell yeah.
That afternoon, I took myself out to a matinee of Jen Silverman’s new Off-Broadway play, Spain. I greatly admire Silverman’s playwriting — their blend of quirk and humanity, their tendency towards staging historical periods that I personally find intriguing and romantic. At the time, I had only read some of their scripts; I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to watch one live. Spain, then, was a real treat: a noir-ish story about a duo of KGB spies commissioned to maneuver communist propaganda into motion pictures. I found it sleek and engaging.
Silverman plays tend to have monologues like arias, moments when the whole production halts around one character at a tipping point. In Spain, Silverman gives their best aria to the character of Ernest Hemingway. It comes at the point in the show when your instincts sense that things must start wrapping up soon, but you’re not yet thinking about how you’re getting home or whether you’ll grab a bite to eat or a sip to drink somewhere first. The tension is still rising for just a little bit longer before it drops — this is the moment to put a certifiable showstopper. And this speech delivered. At least for me. The combination of the actor, the writing, the timing, the space — it all clicked into high-grade storytelling. I felt electrified.
When the lights came up around me after the curtain fell, I saw that the only other people to have witnessed it alongside me were all old, old. More interested in candlelight than electricity. I wondered again if the things I cared about most were worth anything outside of me.
Audrey took the train in from Connecticut to see me on my final day in town. We jaunted over to the Bryant Park Christmas market. The pungency of the raclette stall punctuated our initial conversation, as we caught up for the first time since saying goodbye in Germany at the end of our study abroad program. Over bowls of clam chowder, we acknowledged that things had not turned out as we’d expected. We sat in that reality for a moment. Then, Audrey did what Audrey does better than anyone else I’ve met: she spun the flat air into cotton candy. She brought us over to the carousel, had us snap Polaroids of each other on the ride. We traipsed around the city’s blossoming Christmas decorations, never veering too far from the train station, keeping her eventual departure in mind. We got beers in a tacky bar, since we couldn’t get into one of the little huts overlooking the Rockefeller Center ice rink, and she had us perform ridiculous little Chat GPT skits at the table. Then, I took her back to Union Station for good, and, when I waved my farewell, I met with a little more wind resistance than I’d expected.
I had a few hours to kill until my schedule would line up with Alayna’s, so I got myself as far as Union Square, then followed my whim to a chain cinema and bought a ticket for the new Hunger Games movie, the prequel. Against my better judgment, I loved it. It dragged out a little long, and I could feel Alayna’s irritated texts buzzing in my purse throughout the third act — but, God, I hadn’t realized what appetite I’d had for a good, old-fashioned blockbuster. Looking up at that big screen, I felt twelve years old again. It renewed a secret wish in my heart to want the impossible, to want to be a movie star, beautiful and luminous and indomitable. I was drugged so strongly by the spectacle that, for once in recent memory, each thought wasn’t closely tailed by a cynical afterthought.
Alayna greeted me with a grin when I was finally set free from the dark room.
Hello, my tall friend! she cheered, apparently not as bitter about my Hunger Games-induced tardiness as I’d feared.
Alayna had been spending her time bouncing around the Eastern Seaboard, relying on the generosity of her friends and mentors, as well as her own ingenuity. She wasn’t a school friend of mine; we’d met two summers earlier, at a summer Shakespeare theatre in the boondocks. Alayna was serious about theatre in a singular way. At a random sports bar, over a self-reflective pair of gin-and-olive-juices (the bar in the boondocks wouldn’t serve a proper martini), she told me that she was applying to grad schools. The way she saw it then, it was Yale or nothing. (The report from 2025 states that she’s enrolled in a clown school in France, her hair cut to a close-crop like she’s starring in The Passion of Joan of Arc everyday.) I envied her freedom to a pathetic degree that evening, and did my best to conceal this under tones of admiration and curiosity.
After we’d said goodbye, I wandered the blocks around Sophia’s apartment, feeling numb, feeling dumb, feeling stuck again. My phantom limb had returned to haunt me, which made me crazy, because I still believed that I hadn’t lost one in the first place.
I got on a flight to Minneapolis the next day, where I would be able to shrug off these weighty suspicions that I was living the wrong life. Because, of course, there wasn’t even a slight chance that my dream life was in Minneapolis.
love your writing every time gaby