On Decor

Obviously this is never going to be a design blog. It's only barely clinging to life as a text blog, and I'm not feeling brave enough to ford any uncharted waters today. That being said, the commitment to maintaining one's space is important, as a city like New York can only be stomached when one's private palace awaits a mere subway stop away. What I'm trying to say is, I spent all last weekend painting my kitchen, and I'm going to make you look at it.

My apartment is not the easiest to renovate. The building I live in predates Columbus and was apparently designed freehand, so your standard measuring tape is somewhat useless. I am not kidding when I say that I think the kitchen and bathroom used to be the same room. The two are divided by a warped wall that props up a sinking ceiling, leaving the kitchen side so narrow that the refrigerator doesn't fit--it sits in my living room. The kitchen was clearly built before the invention of the frigidaire; there are two small doors in the walls that have been sealed shut with a thousand years' worth of paint, and I believe at least one of them once served as an icebox.

There is also the issue of the window. The surrealist architect who threw together this building did the windows last, and as a result there are several of them jammed into corners at odd angles and held in place with expansion foam. The kitchen window leads out onto a fire escape, and it's blocked by the dirtiest safety grate in New York. The grate is too ugly for polite company, so I covered it with a curtain. To compensate for the lack of natural light, I painted the room in Toasted Hazelnut. This was the result:



Horrible, right? I mean, the orange was problematic, but then I went and accessorized with a stiff, shiny brown curtain, and I completely ruined everything. That kitchen was the bane of my existence, the humpbacked uncle at every house party that made all my friends smile awkwardly and avert their eyes.

So I finally decided to fix it. I was in the middle of a kitchen deep clean anyhow, since the cockroach population was getting wildly out of hand and the dishes were dirty (this was due to a leak in the ceiling that soaks only the underside of the bottom shelf of my cabinets. The physics of this are complicated but I can do my best to explain if you really want to know). So I did a bit of googling for stencils and I found this pattern for Moroccan painted wallpaper from Jones Design Company.

Simple! Tedious! Time-consuming! My favorite things. I downloaded the stencil and got to getting.



You can see from the photo that my lines are somewhat janky. A bit of jankiness, I learned, is totally manageable when one is tracing pencil lines across the edge of a carved-up shoebox lid. But the fine line between a bit and a lot is easily broached by the preemptive celebratory bottle of wine, and that level of jankiness can lead to hours of erasing. Not advised.

Once I'd traced the shape a hundred billion times, I got set up to paint. For my detailing I chose Sunset Nude, because it sounded sexy. Painting took less time than stenciling, and it was a lot more rewarding. My ceilings are high and I come from a long line of carnie dwarfs, so I spent the bulk of my time teetering at the top of a stepladder padded with dictionaries. Being up that high gave me an interesting vantage point, and I saw a couple things about my kitchen that I'd never noticed before. Here is one of them.



OH HEY DO YOU THINK THAT MIGHT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH MY COCKROACH PROBLEM? Are you kidding me, Surrealist Architect? How lazy can you get? Here I am dealing with bugs on a squash-by-squash basis, and it turns out I'm a safe house on the cockroach underground railroad because some jagoff was too lazy to nail a board to the wall. This hole was on top of my cabinet and it was TWO FEET LONG. And there were two of them.

I boarded up both holes with plywood and expansion-foamed them until the space above my cabinets looked like a marshmallow wonderland. Then I went back to my Moroccan wallpaper. And nine hundred years later, I was finished.





All told, I'm really happy with the way it came out. The room looks a lot cleaner and brighter, and burning that brown curtain was well worth the court summons. It was certainly not a difficult project, but it was impressively time-consuming. My kitchen is the size of a bus shelter and it still took me the full weekend to complete (and I skipped a wall). The price tag, though, was unbeatable. The stencil was free and the cashier at Lowe's forgot to charge me for the paint, so all I really paid for were brushes and a curtain. And the expansion foam, which was worth every last penny. I can hear the little bugs skritching against my walls and weeping in despair in the darkness, and I just raise my cup of mint tea in my Moroccan palace and I laugh and laugh and laugh.

A Lady's Romantic Endeavors Take a Tragic Turn, Act 140

On Friday I went on a date, which I like saying because it sounds cool. In reality it was not that hot. For one thing, me and this guy went on our first date right around Thanksgiving and we went on our second date Friday night. That doesn't offer a lot of hope for the potential for progress, which by this point is pretty okay with me, although in the long, cold nights that followed date #1 it was decidedly not okay. Date #1 went well in all possible ways, and then my phone remained eerily silent for a week, and I reacted by employing the anticipated behavior of the lead actress in every horrible romantic comedy set in New York, namely lamenting to all my friends individually, at spin classes and over skim mocha lattes, about how we'd had SUCH A GREAT TIME WHY DIDN'T HE CALL.

In honesty I don't go to spin classes. I talk a lot on gchat, which is less frequently featured in romantic comedies because it's not interesting to watch, unless the other person says something really funny right before my boss comes up to my desk.

Eventually, out of exasperation more than anything else, I texted the guy in question, and he responded, and we had a couple aimless conversations over text message that employed liberal use of the letters "lol" even though nothing particularly funny was said, and then finally I bumped into him at a party. And if you think that I did not make an effort in the arenas of exfoliation and hair removal at the prospect of bumping into this guy at some party, you are totally unappreciative of the level at which I'm operating. I also loosened myself up for our reunion by imbibing enough champagne to feel it was appropriate/relevant/interesting to point out that I'd worn shoes that matched my bag but that I secretly wished I'd worn heels. He told me he'd have liked me better if I wore heels and I told him I'd like him better if he were taller and we both had a good, boozy laugh.

The heels comment notwithstanding (because I think it was supposed to be a joke), he seemed thrilled to see me. He seemed, in fact, annoyingly thrilled to see me. He kept telling me how thrilled he was to see me, until finally I said, a bit snappily, "You know, if you'd wanted to see me, you could have called me." And then it got kind of awkward until we started making out.

So a few rounds of text-tag later, we were off on our second date. I did a LOT of exfoliation and hair removal beforehand, and I wore this sick yellow leather miniskirt I bought secondhand, with a a turquoise necklace I got in Morocco, and I met him at a Lower East Side bar and the whole thing was kind of awful. He didn't even mention the skirt. The conversation was stunted, and I am pretty good at making conversation with almost anybody (for reference you can ask any openly insane person riding the Q train) but I felt as though he had once been taught how to have a conversation and had been using that formula with some success for the ensuing thirty years. We talked about travel and he mentioned a recent trip he'd taken to Vegas with his buddies, because they went to Vegas together once a year, and he was getting a bit bored of Vegas. I asked where he would like to go on his next vacation and he said he'd probably go back to Vegas. That is the type of logic I sincerely cannot wrap my head around.

"I think he's maybe just totally flat and boring," I said to Phil the next day. We were on the phone discussing Phil's latest book, which I am copyediting and you should buy.

"He sounds like he has no imagination whatsoever," Phil said.

"I think that maybe he doesn't," I said. "Like, I do stuff. Interesting things happen to me. I have stories and anecdotes and opinions. But I don't get that he has any of those things." You might wonder how I missed this notion while I spent the past two months pining away over this dude, and all I can say is that he is also despicably handsome, which may have colored my initial impressions.

"Well, what did you guys talk about?"

"Nothing, really. He talks about work, and his commute, and bars and stuff... I guess that's it."

"Vegas is a vacation spot for people who have no imagination," Phil opined. "You don't have to think up anything on your own, because everything is laid right out for you. Someone who vacations there year after year, without going anywhere else, is not capable of dreaming up an idea on their own."

"You may be right," I said. "All of our conversations really went nowhere, no matter how hard I tried."

"Do you think he could have Asperger's?"

"It wouldn't really surprise me," I said. "But I diagnose just about every guy I date with Asperger's, which means that either I'm over-diagnosing it, or that is my Type."

"Well," said Phil, "at least you know what you're looking for." I started humming Another One Bites the Dust by Queen, until Phil turned the conversation back to more pressing matters, namely, his underuse of semicolons in Chapter Three. That was a conversation in which both parties contributed, ideas were shared and built upon, and my opinion was encouraged and respected even though I was secretly wearing flats. So at least I have literature to keep me warm.

Dorothy Lives in a Dirty Movie

Dorothy, like me, has a fondness for solitude. We are social people, but when we are finished socializing we want to shut the door and click the deadbolt. Dorothy lived alone for a few years, and then she decided to go back to school. From scratch. She's currently Billy Madison-ing her way through an undergrad degree in public health, working two jobs and taking six classes at once. She's aiming to complete her studies as quickly and painfully as possible.

On a student budget, one cuts corners where one can. She had to acquire some roommates. For a while she lived in a shared house in Williamsburg, but then she got a lead on a South Brooklyn bedroom. It came with its own bathroom, so she jumped at the offer and moved right in. Rob and I helped her take the old stuff out of her new bedroom; the bare mattress that sagged with the weight of a dead hooker, some book shelves with gum on them and a janky yellow pillow. Then I found a shelving unit on the street and Rob carried it twelve blocks to the subway and I put it in my kitchen. Not that that detail propels the story at all, but Rob is a really nice guy.

Anyway. Dorothy's new apartment is shared with two twenty-one-year-old college girls. They're both petite Polish blondes and they're both named Eva (Is this a law in Poland? I've never been). They are both hot. There is no other way to describe them. You could try pretty or beautiful or sexy or cute but the only legitimate depiction of these girls is pure, sizzling, smoking hot. The Evas are in New York on athletic scholarships (one for tennis, one for swimming) and they do everything together. They share the master bedroom, sleeping side by side in twin beds with matching pink comforters.

Upon meeting the Evas ("Hi, I'm Eva!" "Hi, I'm Eva!") and seeing their sleeping arrangements, one is inclined to believe that this is a ridiculous and contrived backdrop. Some lusty, poorly-acted turn of events is imminent. Somebody's estranged stepbrother is going to saunter into the kitchen and spill oil all over everybody, and then the Evas are going to have a tickle fight. (I could elaborate here but already I've disappointed every Googler who found this page by searching for "hot twin Polish blondes" and I don't want to be a total buzzkill.) Dorothy (who, it bears mentioning, is generally accepted to be something of a stunner) smirks as she describes Friday evening interludes between herself and the Evas, who pad around the apartment clad only in miniskirts and strapless bras as they search for their eyeliner. Dorothy sits at the kitchen table and drinks a beer while they get ready, and she knows that deep in her heart she is a dirty old man.

The Evas spent their summer vacations at home in Poland, and Dorothy looked forward to the emptiness on the blonde side of the apartment. While the rest of the undergraduate universe used the long, hot days to unwind, Dorothy opted to suffer through an intensive accelerated chemistry course. After six-hour stints in the lab, she needed a place where she could retreat, could remove her plastic goggles and sit at her kitchen table and drink her beer without all those boobies in the way. Now when she came home there were no giggling schoolgirls in the kitchen, no fishnet stockings on the floor. There was nothing but zen-like silence. It lasted three days. On the fourth day came a subletter, a friend of the Evas, a brunette American who worked as a Hollister model, standing in front of the Soho store wearing a bathing suit and a big smile. She had no bank account and paid for her share of the rent in small bills, sometimes quarters. And she was (of course she was) a lesbian. Her lady friend came to the apartment bearing a declaration of red roses. Strings of other acquaintances came to stay over the course of the summer, drinking and dancing in the kitchen while Dorothy studied the periodic table.

Finally summer faded. Dorothy passed chemistry and the bikini model put on some pants and moved out. The Evas came back to New York and normalcy returned to their little two-bedroom apartment. They continued to operate as a unit, once calling Dorothy at 4am because they had lost their shared set of keys and couldn't get inside. Life rolled along for the three of them, and for me also, because I'm a part of this story too, if for no other reason than to check my phone. Dorothy texted me today:

This dude has been staying with the Evas for a week and a half. Every time I come home he is shirtless.



And it took my breath away. That is an Adonis of a man, shirtless and wearing Batman underwear AND HIS SOCKS, mopping up the floor after two hot blonde Polish girls. This is a suspension of all disbelief; this is a plot twist of utter unfathomability; this is proof that Dorothy and Eva and Eva and Batman and Hollister and all the other lesbians live not in Brooklyn, but rather in the soft-focus, underwear-optional fantasy land of Dimension XXX. It is a place that many of us did not believe existed. But it is real. It is happening. It is now.

And there is oil all over everyone.

How To Seduce a Genius

I brought my fancy new phone to the Apple Store Genius Bar and the place was crawling with disappointed fancy phone owners. The wait, I was told, would be twenty minutes. To kill time I messed around with my phone. I was texting with Danny about some abstract inside joke that we'd been expanding on for way longer than normal people would, and finally my genius arrived. His name tag said Devin. I told Devin that my phone was making occasional claims about a lack of SIM card and that sometimes it failed to jingle when I got a text. Devin gave me some technical theories behind the problem and told me he'd have to wipe it clean to start anew. The process would take about seven minutes, he said, and would for some reason be conducted in a back room. I tossed out a few last-minute text messages before handing over my connection to the entire world. I sat there feeling naked for the obligatory seven minutes, hoping that Devin would reconnect me soon.

When Devin returned, my phone was empty. My wallpaper was a stock photo of some water droplets. Devin re-installed my contacts and calendars from iCloud and told me that the SIM would register now. I asked about the text messages. "I was texting before you got here," I said, "and the text came through but the phone didn't make a sound."

"Let's test it," he said. "Can you get somebody to text you?"

I asked Danny. Can you text me please?

The two of us hovered over my clean new phone. The air was heavy with anticipation and satellite frequencies. "What were you doing before, when you were texting and it didn't ring?" he asked.

"I was in an app."

"What app were you in?"

"Um, OKCupid."

"OK, well let's go back into OKCupid and see what happens now."

Great. This was exactly how I pictured my trip to the Apple Store would go, flipping through my online dating profile with the Genius Bar guy and trying to pretend it wasn't weird. By the way I have like three apps on my phone in total; one is that snake game and another is OKCupid. I am seriously committed to my singleness.

So Devin and I were kicking back, you know, cruising for online love interests, when Danny's text came through. You are so sexy. "See!" I said. "It didn't ring."

"Hmm," said Devin. He took the phone and made a couple adjustments. "Try it now. Can you have him text again?"

Can you text again, please? I wrote. We're doing a test at the Apple Store.

I closed the text box and we waited. The response came. You are the most beautiful woman in the world.

"No ring," Devin said. "OK, can I see the contact information for your friend? I want to check something." Dutifully I pulled up Danny's contact information and Devin poked around a bit. "I think I might have fixed it," he said. "Want to have him text you again?"

Can you text again? I asked. Devin and I waited again, but nothing happened. Looking at the blank screen of my phone was about as awkward as checking out my OKCupid matches together. "OK," said Devin. "I'm going to text you from my phone. What's your number; I'll delete it as soon as we're done."

I didn't care about that; my phone number is not information I protect or disseminate with any sort of restraint. I kiss a lot of frogs, as it were. Devin texted me, Test, and my phone jingled. "It worked," he said. He texted again. Test. Jingle. Test. Jingle. Test. Jingle. "So it's not all your contacts. It only happens with some of them."

"Yeah, it's sporadic," I said.

Devin had my phone in his hand at this point, so he opened Danny's text box back up. Text again pls, he wrote. He started explaining that some of my contacts were probably corrupt and might need to be replaced manually. He said it as a sort of apology, as if this wasn't the type of mindless tedium I live for. The phone jingled again and in unison we registered Danny's reply. By the way, you left something pink and lacy at my house when you ran out this morning in such a rush.

I could see Devin choke deeply on a snort. He believed that he was starting to understand the demographic I fell into: single white women in their extremely late twenties who use their phones primarily for ho'ing. I felt the need to clarify. "OK," I said. "He's joking. I wasn't at his house this morning. He's my friend. He's gay." On cue, Danny followed up. It fits me though, so I'm not sure if it's yours or mine.

Devin was a professional. "He's very funny," he said.

"Yes, he is."

Devin went back into my messages and erased his text history, deleting my record of his contact information and protecting himself from my clearly insatiable libido. As he did, he explained again about the storing of contacts and the transfer of corruption. It was broken down fairly simply, but he repeated himself a couple times. Then he handed me back my phone. That should have been the end of our interaction, but we'd been through a lot together in the past thirty minutes. Devin kept explaining the problem with my contacts and I nodded and smiled and thanked him a lot. The goodbye was dragging. He kept talking. I kept nodding. I put on my coat and scarf and then we stood there in silence, shifting from foot to foot.

"Well, have a good night," I said. Unsure of how to end things, Devin stuck out his hand. We shook and I headed out into the evening with my new phone jingling in my pocket.

Um?

So I babysat tonight and missed a work function in the process but the function was a dinner and I'm not hungry. I got paid to knit in the living room while the little girl slept, and afterward, on my way to the train, I bought a bottle of wine. I was so tired and distracted that I thanked the man when he gave me my change and then I arranged it all nicely in my wallet and hoisted up my tote full of knitting (I am like four hundred years old) and headed on my way. I was halfway to the train before I realized I'd left the wine in the liquor store, and then I had to go back and that took up a ton of time.

When I got home there were two men I didn't recognize sitting on the stairs, but I tried to pretend that it wasn't weird. I opened my mailbox and my Time Out New York was all wrinkled because there was a package jammed in beside it and the mailbox is small.

This surprised me. I order a fair amount of stuff online but I never ship it to my apartment. For one thing, I do not trust the security of my building. Any item too big to fit in my sliver of a mailbox might get left beside my door, or, God forbid, in the lobby, where strange men sometimes congregate to sit on the stairs. For another thing my mailman is wretchedly unforgiving when it comes to erroneous addresses. Every i must be dotted or else the package gets returned to sender, a process which takes weeks longer than one would need to deliver the item on foot. I have missed out on presents this way, and last year at Christmas card time, I was certain I had no friends (turns out, I have two). I always ship to work, and one time I even sent a couch there and that was super funny for the receptionist.

Finding a package was unexpected. To see that it was from Target.com was moreso. That meant that I had ordered something and shipped it to myself at the wrong address and I still had no idea what it was. The holes in my memory were getting more serious. I was leaving wine in rundown liquor stores all over Chelsea, and I was sending myself mystery packages. I opened it as I ascended the stairs, but it was difficult to balance, what with the knitting.

I pulled the last of the shipping tape off as I got indoors. A book. Room, by Emma Donoghue, which I super ohmigosh have wanted to read for a long time, but which I most definitely did not buy. A packing slip fell to the ground, which I grabbed. One item. Sold to: Carrie K. in suburban Ohio. Shipped to: Carrie K. in suburban Ohio. But NOT. Shipped secretly to me.

So this is weird. This is super weird. I don't know Carrie K. (although I looked her up on Facebook and she seems like a nice person; I kind of want to message her unless it turns out she stole my identity and used it to buy a paperback) and she definitely didn't send me a present; she sent herself a present, although why she's buying books from Target is between her and Jesus. And I could be like, OK sure, Target.com just mixed up the shipping labels and somebody's computer grabbed the wrong address on file. Except. I don't have a Target.com account. This is not even like an I-remembered-to-take-the-wine claim; it's legitimate. I swear to you, I swear, that I have never given my address to their website. They won't even send me a sign-in password.

So anybody's theories on this would be appropriate now.

On Halloween Parties, Because I Don't Want to Work on the Peru Thing

I don't mind being snowed in, but I would prefer it happen on a day when a) it was not October and b) I had any foodstuffs in my house besides basmati rice and peanut butter. I tried to make myself a lunch out of the last item in the freezer (besides ice cubes and that chicken breast I bought in April), a Trader Joe's-brand chimichurri mix that promised to bring "the taste of Peru to your table -- in five minutes or less!" Joe was right about the timeframe, but ultimately I threw the whole mess away after two bites. In retrospect I'm not sure what I was thinking. For one thing, I really don't miss the taste of Peru (or any other aspect of Peru, for that matter--in fact I have, on my coffee table, a 140-page first-draft ode to everything I hated about Peru, waiting patiently for me to edit it like a Victorian-era damsel waits for her lover's return from battle. Okay that metaphor got weird) and for another thing, the packaging clearly dictated the existence of at least two types of onions in the mix, which is an immediate deal-breaker. So I tossed it and tried to smother my hunger with a cup of tea, watching the gray sky through my living room window and dreading the prospect of grocery shopping.

I have to go out anyway, because I need new false eyelashes for tonight's Halloween party. Every year my friends Chris and Paul throw the world's sickest Halloween party and this year's is scheduled for tonight. I'd been planning my costume since roughly last November, but it turned out that my concept for a Chrysler Building getup was a little beyond my crafting abilities. I was elbows-deep in a pile of silver cardboard when I had this realization. A seven-tiered, round-edged pyramid mounted on a bowler hat would be a tall order even for an MFA student, let alone my fine-motor-skill-challenged self. For a reference of the level of crafting skills I am working with, please see the scarf I am currently knitting my niece.

You can see part of my costume in the background. And my lamp, which is less relevant.

Thwarted by the intricacies of art deco, but nevertheless determined to wear aluminum foil on my head, I decided instead to dress as a snowflake. This turned out to be a delightfully timely costume choice and it's significantly simpler to execute. I get to re-imagine the white mannequin dress I wore for New Years Eve and I get to pile on silver accessories, of which I have no shortage. Danny scavenged some pipe cleaners for me from his job at an elementary school, and we met last week for happy hour to collaborate on constructing a snowflake crown. The result was a masterpiece and it required no measuring tape or krazy glue or endless supply runs, which made it instantly and automatically superior to my Chrysler hat concept.

I wore the crown for the first time last night, braving the chill in my first purple winter-coat excursion of the season, with gobs of white and silver eye makeup slopped in circles on my face, making me look like a somewhat deranged sugar plum fairy. Not to mention the fact that nobody else in the world had decided to dress up last night and I had a lot of silver stuff coming off my head. New York is a city that allows for grown-up repurposing of the joys of childhood, i.e. it's OK to wear a costume if you're using it as an excuse to drink. But when you're the only one in costume because the holiday is still three full days away, it's a tall order to call upon your inner strength and pretend not to hear the giggles of your fellow Q train passengers. It's an even taller one to be the first one to the party and have to walk through an entire bar full of men playing poker, pretending you're not wearing silver eyelashes and pipecleaners in your hair. But these are the things we do in the name of festivity.

But after my initial awkward entrance last night, other be-costumed revelers began to trickle in and eventually there were a slew of us dressed as oversized children, barbecuing in the back garden of a Brooklyn Bar and pissing off the neighbors. Tonight I'll do it all over again in my pipe cleaner crown, and as the snowflake spokesperson I'll spend the evening apologizing to partygoers for crashing in a full two months before I'm expected. But Chris just texted me to say she's making hot pomegranate cider, so it already sounds like the best night ever.

Have Your Friends Collect Your Records and Then Change Your Number

I have mentioned in the past that there was a time when I maintained an extended emotional involvement with a person who made me feel very bad about myself. The relationship was such that at first I was enamored by the highs and lows of our interactions, but then very slowly the highs began to sink and sag until there was nothing but lows. It was a constant stream of lows, but I refused to accept this reality, focusing instead on the increasingly delayed return of the highs. The people who cared about me were exhausted of hearing me complain about the situation and would quietly tap out of the conversation when I tried to bring it up. I was frankly sick of it myself, so toward the end I kept our interactions a secret. Most people thought I had shut things down entirely. Nobody necessarily congratulated me on this decision. I should have made it years earlier.

After the rollercoaster had been closed down and the ticket booth shuttered, my counterpart proved that I was never very important to him at all, by sending me perfunctory instant messages that pretended not to recognize any sort of mutual torrid past. These came about once a week, always during business hours. I refused to respond. He had my email, cell phone, work and home addresses. If he'd cared about me he would have been ringing my doorbell with a bouquet of flowers, but he couldn't muster more energy than it took to type "How's it hanging" when he was bored at work. I ignored his attempts at half-assery. Eventually the messages stopped too.

Yesterday was a slow, rainy Thursday and I decided to use my lunch break to stomp around outdoors for a bit. I needed new socks. Taking off my shoes had become something of an embarrassment, even when I was at home alone. So I was trudging up Broadway with my head halfway inside my umbrella because I am wary of splashback, and I was listening to this song. If you want a more authentic reenactment of my experience, you should play this song while you read this entry. And stand in the shower with the cold water on full blast.

So I was out in the rain with music in my ears and my head in an umbrella and I was thinking about him, actually. I told myself to stop thinking about him because I appear to have the ability to conjure his presence if I give him too much space in my consciousness, but I was thinking about the song, which is a remix, and it takes a little while to build into itself, so that at first listen one might be confronted by a couple echoing drum-bangs and think for a moment that this track is not the masterpiece it actually is. An impatient man sitting in the dark of my living room might say, "Kaitlyn, what the fuck are we listening to? Can I put on my music instead?" That is literally exactly what he would say. I know because he said it the last time he was at my house, listening to a different song, about forty-five minutes before I started screaming and swearing and kicked him out. It was his birthday.

I was reminiscing on this little drama, lost in the building drum beats and the wails of Gotye and the wretched feeling I'd had when I woke up that next morning and tried to remember why he wasn't there. I was wading through lower Manhattan and my instincts picked it up before my senses did. Through the splash of footsteps on concrete there came from the sea of anonymous galoshes a gait imprinted in my mental file, one that I didn't even know I could recognize but that nevertheless remains permanently accessible, the way when I was younger in my second-story bedroom I could tell if it was my brother or sister coming up the stairs based on the creak of the wood. I pulled my head out of the umbrella and met his eyes.

He said, "Hi." I think he did, anyway; I had my headphones in but his mouth moved in a monosyllabic motion and it looked like a greeting. I said, "Hi." I did not smile. I did not break stride. I kept going with a sudden twisting fire in my belly and I swear to God that as I passed him Gotye started bellowing out the chorus like a soundtrack to my lunch break:

But you didn't have to cut me out
Make out like it never happened and that we were nothing
And I don't even need your love
But you treat me like a stranger and that feels so rough

I didn't turn around. I couldn't risk becoming a pillar of salt while it was raining so hard. I was relieved, at least, that I for once looked presentable and didn't fall on my face in front of him like I almost always do. But as I continued up Broadway the belly fire got hotter and even the downpour couldn't quench it; as we parted ways ever further there was no sudden tug on the sleeve of my pink trench, no short-of-breath greeting, no attempt at pursuing a stunted catch-up conversation. He had passed me and he had seen me and he had not cared.

I could think of one person who'd marry me tomorrow and another who's at work building an altar of squirrel bones upon which to sacrifice my still-beating heart. But the one who stood out as the definitive relationship of my adult life could only afford me a cursory nod. This was of course the one I held onto, the one whose total dearth of respect for my being weighed heavily in the balancing act of my personal self-worth.

The choice to cut ties was mine. I could have responded to the instant messages; I could have reached out with a friendly text. I could have acquiesced to spending the occasional lunch break at his apartment sharing sandwiches and talking about his new girlfriend, the one who probably keeps a toothbrush at his house and gets invited to parties and introduced to his friends, rather than just squirreled away like some kind of top-secret side project. I'd told him that if I couldn't be everything then I wouldn't be anything. And after I'd insisted it two hundred times, I finally made good on my promise.

So if I was nobody, if we were not lovers and not friends and not even acquaintances, there was no reason for more than a muted "Hi" between raindrops. After all, I only had an hour for lunch. So I followed through with my sock-shopping plans and allowed myself to retail-therapute with a few bras as well, although in my lingering sense of disquiet I bought the wrong size. And that was it. There was no thundering two-world collision, no epiphanic ray of light shining between the parting clouds. It was just a passing interaction of the shallowest type. I was out at lunchtime and I saw somebody that I used to know.