While the city sank we drank coronas on empty stomachs and listened to Lana del Ray. My soaked socks and jacket and hat spun in the dryer. We went to the bistro downstairs and ordered cocktails and a bowl of mussels to split and listened to the collegiate tennis players behind us like it was a football game at a bar. We left to get whiteclaw surges like we were football players. I bummed a lighter off a guy because I didn’t want to keep digging in my bag. With a cigarette in my mouth I finger gunned him in thank you like a football player. We got blasted by way of white claw surges in w’s west village apartment. I insisted we go to bed once I realized the time. I had to get up in the morning. Anyway we had been drinking since 5pm. We passed out in our girls and boy beds.
While it rained I was anxious to pack up and go. I started planning a trip with a friend to Vienna, and still have half a mind to just stay there once I arrive. I want to quit everything I’m a part of. Get away from everything and be alone in a foreign place just to see how I fare. That sounds very nice to me. Time races on and I feel trapped in its sweeping momentum. I imagine time stops in faraway places with no familiar faces around to check in.
Today I woke up and laid paralyzed in bed.
Yesterday I went to a grocery store in the east village, my favorite one, and walked through the aisles slow like usual because I find it so beautiful. I imagine I’m new to the city again and perhaps the country and astounded by American opulence and free trade and gorgeous packaging. I buy so many sardines and a black cherry spread and bread and cheese. This will be my dinner forever. This is what I always buy. On credit.
a met me at bryant park. We watched the polish parade and wandered through the new york public library, expecting to find books. Instead: a big study room with pictures of George Washington and “a blind Milton dictating Paradise Lost to his daughters” that was quite gorgeous and an exhibit on the Subway, which was a whole bunch of photos taken in the 70s of Subway riders and a video. The video discussed the social value of the Subway back then as a common place to recollect, to sit face to face with people you would never normally be so close to. I thought this was nice, wondered about the intentionality of the design and how it forces a certain camaraderie that is necessary in such a crazy city that cannot exist successfully without empathy. Of course, it couldn't account for phones and tablets and airpods. The video discussed, too, how people see or try not to see the people in front of them, how they may or may not leave their bodies in effort of the latter.
Then we sat outside and washed a man brush his teeth in the fountain, then his hands, then his head. We watched him very closely. He took off his shirt and extracted a clorox wipe from his tote bag with which he cleaned his face and torso. I squirmed at the idea of a clorox wipe touching my face. But I sympathized with his mission. I, too, seek relief in the streets. Maybe I'll do the same once I get to Vienna.
