07.14.23

I’ve been thinking a lot about the way the shape of your life can change. Not its fundamentals so much, but the exterior. The scaffolding. Not its bones, its skin. The last time I was here I was on a date with X. That feels like a hundred lifetimes ago. I was still working at Y. I was on the phone with Z, who I no longer speak to for this reason or that. I got in a massive fight with this guy I was dating here, I tried to patch things up with that guy I was dating there. Different specific locations feel like different periods of my life, but the shape of my life has changed. I’m sort of waiting for it to change again.

I went to midtown today to run a couple of errands. I took the train from Dyckman to Columbus Circle, and walked out of an exit I used to find myself in all the time when I was an intern my senior year of college. I was once here, 21 and eager, four times a week.

I walked east, the opposite direction of the BMW building where I used to work (between 10th and 11th, nearly in the Hudson River, I used to say). I walk past countless places on 56th Street that are decidedly for corporate lunches and after-work drinks. I wish I had a job that forced me to go into the office. This outing is the first time I’ve left my neighborhood in a few days.

I return some clothes I ordered from Abercrombie & Fitch. The girl in front of me in line is making a big deal about something to one of the clerks. The poor girl behind the counter looks very annoyed. We share a knowing glance. The last time I was here, I was desperately looking for new pairs of jeans before a work trip (to no avail, despite my several trips to the fitting room). This time I’m just returning some stuff I ordered but didn’t need.

I walk further east, then south on Lexington. I need to buy a couple of candles. The last time I was at this Bath & Body Works was years ago. I was probably stocking up on perfume then. An ex-boyfriend of mine knew I wore a scent from there called “Beautiful Day” at the time, which he thought was very funny. He’d say, “Huh, it smells like a beautiful day in here,” when I would put it on in front of him. And we’d laugh. Then get in a big fight about something, probably.

The clerk at Bath & Body Works is a very charming girl with her scripts down pat. She’s warm and funny. I check out with two candles and decline to get a third, despite the deal I am missing out on. Because it always seems like a deal, and it is, but then you’ve spent more money than you planned to, and you have more candles than you actually need right now.

I need the restroom. My usual midtown hack is to go to my office, but I can’t do that today because I heard there are picketers outside (as there ought to be!), and I don’t want to cross the line. But I’m on the east side, so I can go to one of the city’s only public restrooms: at Grand Central Terminal.

The last time I was going to Grand Central just to use the bathroom, I ran into another ex-boyfriend’s best friend who knew that I didn’t like him (and, in my defense, it’s not even so much that I didn’t like him so much as I was having trouble getting a read on him, which makes me wary of people. He’s a very complicated figure), as he was heading out from his job at a restaurant nearby. He invited me out for drinks with restaurant people, a very insular community that is interesting to observe from a close distance. I am the David Attenborough of restaurant people. He wasn’t my boyfriend then, not at that moment, but I started to make fun of the guy I was seeing for the way all of his impressions sound like one specific character, and he laughed and playfully told me to shut up before I embarrassed him in front of his friends. “Don’t you start,” he said, grinning. It made me feel like I knew him.

I consider walking across town to my train, but the humidity is starting to get to me. I get on the train that I would ride four days a week if I got the job I interviewed for six weeks ago that I am supposedly still “in the running” for (though it does seem like a lost cause to me now). I have been wanting to work in person for a while now, as I am alone too often, but I know that commuting consistently for the first time in three and a half years is going to exhaust me beyond words. It will be worth it, though, when that day inevitably comes. I need some structure in my life. I walk through the tunnel at Times Square between Seventh and Eighth Avenue where I once saw John Mulaney and get on the A Train home.

I ride all the way up to the top of the line, past my stop, so I can stop at C-Town further north of where I live, because they have the chocolate I like to use to make chocolate chip cookies, and my nearest grocery store doesn’t carry it. I buy Dutch-process cocoa powder, too. I don’t need it in the immediate but they don’t have that at my store either.

I walk the ten minutes home and start to feel overwhelmed by how sweaty I am. I opt to take a bath when I get home, because it’s the closest I can get to jumping in a pool. But I like a day bath or shower. I let the daylight be the only light source in the bathroom. My clear green shower curtain looks nice in the light of the mid-afternoon. I get more compliments from visitors on this shower curtain than literally anything else in my apartment, and you know what? I get it.