So I know I teased a jaunty little piece entitled ‘Forever Alone’ for this week, but this is actually the first week in a while where I haven’t woken up and been like *sigh, I didn’t die in my sleep*, so I don’t feel like voluntarily descending the staircase back into the hole I’ve been living in for the last month. Fear not, though. My grasp on happiness has always been fairly tenuous, so I’m sure I’ll end up writing it soon enough.
I was actually struggling to think of something to write this week. Normally I write it on Monday and then stare at it lovingly for the next five days, arbitrarily moving around words and counting the minutes until I can send it out and then sit on the Dashboard page of Substack, refreshing the view count. I don’t caaaaaaare how this behaviour makes me sound.
So anyway, this is what I came up with.
I was in Bay Ridge this afternoon, which, in case you’re not familiar with New York, is possibly the most faraway place from any other point in the city, at a hospital appointment. My T-shirt was sticking to my chest because the radiologist had rubbed gel all over me and then given me a single tissue with which to wipe it all off again, which I managed, and then put on the robe, only to find she had got gel all over that too, so I gave up. I have enough trauma surrounding that place as it is. The last time I was there to get a biopsy, the friendly nurse was asking me questions about my family history with cancer, so I told her about my Mum and she mm-hmmed and wrote it down and then said: And how’s your Mum now? And I was like: she’s dead. She died of the thing you are currently checking me for. Idiot.
So I left the hospital and was about to embark on the hour-long subway ride back home when I spotted an Artichoke Basille’s pizza storefront across the road. It is my personal belief that Artichoke Basille’s is the best pizza in New York, which is usually what people say when they’re trying to sound cool and like they eat a lot of pizza in New York, but I just think it’s really good. Its presence there opposite the hospital was so unexpected, in a neighbourhood comprised mostly of car dealerships and eyebrow waxing shops, that I immediately ran across the road and bought myself a slice. I took it outside into those weird little animal-pen things that all food spots have now, basically a shoddily built wooden enclosure that pokes out into the main road, and stood at the railing and ate it looking out across the four lanes of traffic like I was on some terrace in Italy. And I was like: how did we get here.
I don’t know what it was about the situation that made me think that; maybe it was nothing at all to do with what I was doing and everything to do with the fact that most of my waking hours at the moment are dominated by this idea of I can’t believe this is how my life has turned out. I keep quipping things like ‘I’m gonna file this under things I never thought I would be doing!’ just so people don’t think I’m actually losing my mind and that I think this is all some amusing cosmic gambol, but in actual fact I don’t think it’s that funny that I cried all over a City of New York employee this week while she carefully filed my divorce papers for me. I just think: how did we get here.
I am presumably no different to anyone else in saying that I always have an idea of how I think my life is going to turn out, or at least a cognizant dream version of it, and then have to rapidly readjust as my self-imposed deadlines come screaming towards me before I’m ready for them. For example: my ‘scary marriage age’ (whatever that means) used to be 27. 27, I reasoned, was grown up enough to have made enough money to have a decent wedding, to have dated someone for long enough that it wasn’t totally insane to get married, and young enough to still look super hot in all the pictures. I can’t remember exactly when I stopped going around and telling everyone about this, but I imagine it was around the age of 25 when I was like LOL IMAGINE BEING MARRIED RIGHT NOW. There was this girl at a bar last night who was reading her friend’s tarot cards and I was salivating with desire to have her read mine as well. I’m just dying to know what’s going to happen next. I don’t want to get attached to yet another stupid fantasy that doesn’t happen. Unfortunately I was too drunk to ask her to read my cards and got distracted by talking about New York’s Halloween dog parade (and the girl at the next table informing me that there is one in the park right down the street from us).
I thought I’d be published by the time I was 28. I thought I’d never smoke. I was anti-marriage, I thought I wanted to live in China, I thought a buzzcut would look all cute and gamine on me. Just a selection of idiotic beliefs I’ve collated and discarded over the years when faced with bracing reality. I remember one time my friend and I were on vacation in Seattle in our early twenties, and we were sitting in the window of this pizza place, staring at the apartment complex opposite. The apartments had covered balconies and were all made of dark wood, and there was one near the top where what looked like an extremely sophisticated party was going on – sophistication meaning to me at the time that there were fairy lights strung around the balcony railing and there were people up there wearing long dresses and drinking glasses of wine. My friend and I were both completely hung up on our ex-boyfriends, and we were staring at this party and saying things to the effect of ‘When we come back here next year, you’ll be back together with XX and I’ll be back together with YY [names omitted for reasons of dignity] and we’ll live in that building in adjoining apartments and life will be so so great’.
This memory makes me laugh hysterically now, for so many reasons – that we thought a year was enough time to completely overhaul every aspect of your life, rekindle two relationships that were very much dead, move to America and somehow get jobs that would allow us to have apartments in that building. That the building would have two apartments available at the same time. It was so dumb, all of it. But it felt so attainable at the time, like all we had to do was speak it into the universe and it would happen.
My friend now lives happily with her gorgeous and kind boyfriend (not the aforementioned ex), not in Seattle, but somewhere else. And I… well, I’m filing for divorce, but from a different ex-boyfriend at least. Progress?
It’s not all bad. I never thought I’d be living in New York at 29, and even if I’m not going to be for much longer it’s still something cool I can say I did and earned for myself. When I was a kid I thought I’d never have any friends and would just write novels in a rat-filled garret in Paris, wizened and alone. Not every subverted expectation is a negative one. But they aren’t all funny, either. I don’t think I’m ever going to look back at this time in my life and laugh about it. I don’t think I want to.
One good thing:
When I was in Bay Ridge I saw this storefront that was entirely made up of shining white Christmas dolls. It’s truly a crazy place.
One bad thing:
The exterminator made his weekly pilgrimage to our apartment to deal with whatever is coming crawling out of the walls at the moment, and the three of us were all talking at him at once, trying to be cute and funny so he would actually do something instead of just flinging poison around like a flower girl at a wedding, and he looked at us and then pointed to my roommate and said: I can tell you’re the one who gets things DONE. And then he pointed to me and said: And you’re the one who will flip out on people if you don’t like something.
Feels bad to be seen.