what's a life supposed to look like?

roman a clef

Ida Applebroog, Ephemera (2004)

I’m taking the Amtrak Crescent to Charlottesville for 48 hours in Warm Springs, Virginia to celebrate Maureen’s 30th birthday. While Maureen surely chews her nails to mulch about entering her third and defining decade, and the utter hell she feels about a) hosting and b) asking people to celebrate her, I’m gleefully typing at a window seat with a 7-hour journey ahead of me. I don’t have to write about Wayfair sales or field serrated Slack messages. I can stare with wandering interest at the New Jersey smoke stacks and listen to my Discover Weekly for the first time in months.

I’ve garnered a reputation for always doing something, probably from the dual effort of posting about it on Instagram and complaining about it on this very platform. My friend Henry, of drum circle and erotic harp concert fame (separate occasions), is perhaps the best at riffing on my social life, categorizing me as a person always doing something bizarre—things that, my friend Molly agrees, are always seemingly network-y, random, with strangers, and as she puts it: “no fun at all.” Isabel, when she comes into town, always remarks: What weird event are we going to tonight?

Of course to me there is nothing strange about my calendar until I speak about it aloud: no, I’m going into work late today because I have a showcase at the Soho Grand Hotel for a brand called “Coyuchi” and then I’m meeting Eleanor in the afternoon for the American launch of a Korean fashion brand at La Cabra in SoHo, and for some reason they’re going to gift me a sleeveless turtleneck and interview me for their Instagram even though I say things like “I’ve never heard of this brand.” Then I’m going into work but the vibes are bad because Nicki Minaj and a bunch of other celebrities are here today doing a panel for Vogue, so everyone’s frantic. I ran into my high school best friend’s little sister in the lobby wearing a headset. I went home after a caterer rolled a cart of finger sandwiches on silver trays over my foot without apologizing. After work I’m meeting up with this girl from

saloon

who DMed me. I think we’re going to a cigar lounge in Midtown, I don’t know, she picked it.

A week later, my high school best friend’s little sister (of aforementioned headset) invites me to an event DJed by Anderson Paak in the restaurant where me and my ex broke up a month earlier.

It’s like I’m delivering lines, it sometimes feels, when people ask me about my life, not because it’s inauthentic but because I’m tired on their behalf, hearing me speak. What happened to that guy you were seeing? Oh, he got norovirus and a staph infection in the same week he was supposed to come visit me, which ended up taking kind of a toll on our already-fraught relationship. Anyway, now he’s blocked me on everything. The oyster shucker I got him for Christmas is on the windowsill in my room next to the cigarettes he sent me before we ever met. The Chilean license plate he sent with it is under my bed with his Buddy’s t-shirt and a note I wrote him in October about how much I love him.

When we broke up the first time, I didn’t shower or eat much. I resigned myself to my room, and completely sincerely and repeatedly sang Taylor Swift’s “Last Kiss” to myself while culling Amazon Prime for work to assemble its “best gift deals.” After a few days of self-pity, I took a walk. I had not been outside in a week. Part of this was because of work, part of this was because I was not interested in going outside. I was interested in being asleep.

I set the scene I know usually lifts my spirits—an outside table at a cafe for white women and their not-paying 5’11” boyfriends. I’ve ordered a $6 latte and had a nice exchange with the barista. I put in noise-cancelling headphones.

Not wanting to open Intermezzo, which was making me feel like shit even before my breakup, I open Instagram. The algorithm, ignorant of another personal hell, immediately feeds me a carousel post from him—the first shot from what is clearly the handicap stall of airport toilet, and my Vinalhaven tote bag is hung on the door. In the caption, he calls our relationship an “affection bender,” a “foreign exchange trip to the East Coast,” and otherwise in the carousel posts a photo of a woman we’ve fought about who follows my Substack, he has confirmed, to criticize it. She just hates women, he says.

In the oncoming days I do things like: break four wine glasses, cut my thumb open deep enough I don’t feel it but see that there’s suddenly two ounces of blood on the jute runner, drop nearly every dish I own, including a wooden cutting board onto my foot, unfollow 30+ people on Instagram, delete seven phone notes about him, or to him, drink two to three glasses of wine a night, watch exclusively Westerns, buy new bras.

We got back together after that, and broke up again. I don’t know how other people can be so strong about love.

The last time I was on a train, not but two months ago, I was sitting next to my little brother on the Amtrak Northeast. He’s broad, brooding, reading an Elon autobiography and begrudgingly eating my peanut m&m’s which I bought less for myself—at 2 cups of coffee and 0 calories that morning—but more to bribe him to take an AirPod out and acknowledge anything to me. He won’t. It doesn’t matter. I sit next to him and remember how it feels to think someone is the cutest, sweetest person ever. Like your heart is up against your rib cage, which is a dramatic person’s way of saying your chest has the warm pressure that’s full of feeling. I have this feeling also when my sister lays her head on my shoulder, which she does maybe one and a half times a year, and never will again after reading this. I have it when she puts on mascara or whispers something to her boyfriend or I see her getting mad at the shape of her hair. I have it when Eddie plays the guitar, or when I see him across the room chatting and gesticulating and holding an $11 can of craft beer, or when he makes a little piece of toast.

I told Maureen once that I still pray every night and she responded by telling me I have OCD. She’s right in that I think it doesn’t count if I don’t cross myself three times before I start. The whole prayer is me thanking god for my family. I’m not religious, it’s more like my gratitude and the desperation I have for my family to be alive and healthy needs an output.

In the weeks following my breakup, I try to wean myself off my AirPods. I eavesdrop everywhere. At Smor, I open my book and listen to the two women next to me.

Do you miss him? One says.

Mhm, says the other. It is so weird—when I have a long day at work, I look at pictures of him on the way home.

I take the 2 home from Fulton because I forgot my wallet at the boys house, in my Super Bowl $50 queso frenzy. Two Hasidic Jews step in next to me and the train car is packed so we all touch hands intermittently, especially when the train nearly derails on its way to Hoyt Street. They talk about where they live and their points of geographic reference are: Oh, across from the temple? By Dr. Schlosser’s office, yeah.

An argument ensues between two children about the merit of Nerd ropes versus Nerd clusters. While they’re arguing, they fly about the car unphased, bumping into people three times their size with abandon and no apology as the train shakes. This is just the ride home from school.

Kate has her birthday dinner in the evening and I take no pictures because over a third of the attendees are influencers, and my iPhone camera no longer works in dim light. I cracked one of the lenses and the Apple store said it would be $600 to fix. She cooks us Ottolenghi and I talk to the Smith girls in a corner. Kate’s best friend Lucy runs the show, laying down plates and washing up in the kitchen intermittently, “to get ahead of it,” she says. She brought the cake also, turns off the lights and initiates singing Happy Birthday, all without the slightest need for attention or recognition. It takes such a long time to make a friend like that, and I think sometimes they never arrive.

The following day at the Fulton Street stop I see a petrified and torn rat carcass underneath the first step, but I’m caught in such a shuffle of people it would be impossible to stop and take a picture, though I’m dying to. Since I’ve stopped taking photos on my phone to discourage posting on Instagram, my camera roll is all sweatered dogs crossing the street, dry cleaning receipts, photos from my apartment building’s WhatsApp chat, dermatitis selfies, progress photos of my bruise from falling down the stairs at Noodle Village, and screenshots of Hinge profiles I send to Molly, who asks me if I have my preferences set to “twinks.” She encourages me to pursue what she calls “twunks.”

I don’t sit on the train anymore as an act of discipline. It helps absolutely nothing and makes my commute home way worse. I always confuse making things hard for making things better.

On Wednesday, I take a car back from a Macy’s event at the Ritz Carlton. I see my friend Isley and eat bruschetta. Macy’s comped me the ride back to Brooklyn, gifted me an embroidered robe, Estée Lauder, a Chanel hand cream. When I look up from emails on my phone, I catch sight of the Brooklyn bridge. The sentence comes to me like someone else said it: your worst days here were in service of your best.

I used to work 7 days a week to afford living here, when I was 19. I moved here on account of being slut-shamed out of my performatively feminist and 90% nose-ringed sorority for dating a man named Dylan who had an open relationship girlfriend studying abroad. It was her idea, he tells me. She is sleeping with a professor in Sweden. We worked at the coffee shop together and fell into dating soon after that, for a couple months before people started getting upset, with me, not him. As it happens. On a stone bench in front of the chapel he cried about being confused. I told him there was nothing to be confused about. We were in love and I wasn’t going to sit here and convince him to fuck his girlfriend. I walked home alone and he broke up with her.

When I sat down with the sorority president to drop she said “I think that’s a good idea.” I see on LinkedIn she describes herself as “A public servant and global citizen dedicated to supporting youth and community leaders in addressing poverty and systemic inequities.”

I got so sick and depressed, I left school and moved to New York. Dylan moved to Nashville.

I didn’t care about New York, but my brother Eddie was here and had a big closet he rented me for $450. I thought maybe I wanted to work in publishing. We lived in Park Slope, next to the highway on 18th Street with a Russian guy who was in his early 30’s and stank. He smoked with the windows closed and would stand in the kitchen waiting for me to come out of the bathroom after a shower. He gambled on weekends in Atlantic City and played in a children’s band. His pubes were all over the toilet all the time.

I worked 7 days a week then because I worked for free 2 days a week at a literary magazine headquartered in a carriage house in Boerum Hill. I made the editor-in-chief laugh in my interview when I responded to a question about how I engaged with the arts in New York by saying “Oh, I don’t, really, I’m too poor.” I also worked 3 days a week as a publicity assistant. I met the founder at a coffee shop and she hired me on the spot for $10/hour. I had no idea what a 1099 was. I got a job at a coffee shop on Flatbush Ave to work Saturdays and Sundays with a 5:30am start. It had the vibe of teal Chevron and they paid me $14/hour.

I regularly walked home in the cold and rain and felt sorry for myself. I didn’t have money for a real coat, so I wore this hideous midi-length camel one that had no buttons. I held my arms crossed to keep it closed. The walk was about 1.5 miles and such a route that the bus and the subway both did almost nothing to alleviate the journey. A bike never occurred to me.

When Dylan visited me in the summer, I knew I didn’t love him anymore. It was so hot in my room we didn’t have sex once. The thought of buying a $200 AC unit was preposterous to me. We used my comforter as a curtain to keep the sun out and cool off the room. I felt like he never had any idea what I was talking about. We broke up 8 months after that.

Sometimes Eddie and I sat on the roof of that apartment, and sometimes he played guitar. I read Nietzsche (no, I know) and Lorrie Moore up there, and drank a rosé I was obsessed with called Vrac. I had no friends in New York, and didn’t talk to mine from school. I watched Eddie live for a lot of that time. He had a beautiful room with so much art and a Victrola he found on the street. Sometimes he played this video game where a grim reaper collects stuff. He liked to watch me play it because that’s as far as my understanding ever went.

He knew everywhere and had a million friends and a broken heart and then a girlfriend. He made kimchi fried rice all the time and had already read everything. All the same t-shirts I used to steal from him were folded in his closet.

I didn’t have a mattress, I just laid pillows on the floor and blankets and slept on them. It was completely fine. When Maureen came to visit she couldn’t believe that, and we got a $50 mattress off Facebook marketplace from Crown Heights and dragged it through the subways. It was disgusting by the time we got it upstairs. I lived there for 9 months and never got a bed frame.

When I went back to school for junior year, it felt like everyone had forgotten what happened. I broke up with Dylan in the coffee shop where we met and we both wept for a long time before I walked him to his car. He hiked the PCT after that. I really never saw him again, but he sent me a text a few years later when I was on a layover in the Salt Lake City airport asking if I thought we shouldn’t have ended things.

I can’t stop thinking about what my life is supposed to look like—now, later. How often should I be watching TV? How often should that TV be what people are talking about? What should I be reading? How much of that should be from after 2010? Who should I be dating and how should I know better than to date who I’m dating? How should I be using the internet? How much should I be drinking every week? What and where should I be eating? Why doesn’t anyone go out anymore? Am I too old to be going out? How much longer before I stop pursuing the life I supposed existed for me? How long do we ignore our expectations in favor of optics? Why does the line between presentation and reality always feel like it’s getting smaller, and smaller?

In Philly, a man sits down next to me. He’s in an Eagles jersey. He smiles at me and asks me if I like the Birds. I say yes like I didn’t surrender my entire fantasy team within three weeks, persistently have IRs in play, and score an average of 30 points per game.

I pick up my book and the first thing I read is this: “Altogether too much of life is mood.”