I was twenty-four with no real friends and not enough to do. I’d come to New York to be a writer, but all I did was fill Moleskines with the bureaucratic themes of my dreams and character sketches of subway passengers, emphasis on footwear. I subsisted on shumai and Tasti D-Lite. I evaluated my ass in the reflections of shop windows, and again, to see if impressions aligned, in a mirror I trusted, back at my apartment, a 550-square-foot one-bedroom cantilevered over the on-ramp to the Queensboro Bridge, that I shared with Gemma, a girl I’d found on Craigslist, who had pitted teeth and was studying interior design at the New School. I worried about bedbugs and kidney stones with no evidence I was afflicted by either. When Gemma chastened me about dirty dishes or the loud TV, I retreated to weep behind the temporary wall, which, against building rules, we had erected to section off my bedroom. I always felt as if I was sleeping in the living room, even with the wall. The fear our breach would be discovered was a constant and often became inflamed at night, with the drywall radiating an eerie glow or during pleasantries I exchanged with the doormen, their personalities as modest as our rent.
Gianni, one of the doormen, I was sure knew, and because of this, I felt obligated to flirt with him. “Late night?” he’d say as I sauntered in at 9 p.m. after accruing a light sheen of sweat from flitting between machines at the Vanderbilt Y. As I headed back to the apartment, it pained me to remember I would need a comeback for him, and sometimes I didn’t even try, smiling and laughing, bypassing the elevator, bolting up the stairs as soon as the fire door swung closed behind me. Because of some previous traumas, my homesickness had no home as a referent and chased after its own tail. Still, I had graduated from Yale and most days could conjure up a sense of entitlement.
