TAKING THE GIRL OUT OF NEW YORK

When you find yourself saying things like solitude is useless without a bathtub both in casual conversation and without a hint of irony, you begin to suspect it is time for you to leave New York. When you are awake at three a.m. and have to wake up at eight-thirty a.m. to sit inside beneath fluorescent lights on a summer’s day and look down at your legs to see a cluster of red spots but not the mosquito kind and are relieved to be confronted with the specter of bedbugs relieved to be confronted with the specter of bedbugs so that you absolutely must make a same-day dermatology appointment instead, you know it is time for you to leave New York.

The thing about leaving New York is that you will be treated without fail to the most spiteful swan song in its repertoire on your way out, and this time, the first time you have left it in over nine months, that sounds like an hour to get through security and a ten-dollar bag of beef jerky from Hudson News for dinner and the plane moseying around the tarmac for an hour after you have been loaded onto it and a baby crooning with zeal but without words for all of it as two men who are clearly related yet not sitting next to each other pass each other various items over you because you are sitting next to both of them and no one has thought to remedy this situation with an exchange of seating except for you but maybe you underestimated how novel an idea that would be so for that reason and the fear of violence or worse a palpable tension among yourself and two strangers flanking you for the rest of the flight you do not propose it-

And then you are in Puerto Rico and it is three a.m. again but in a different way or the same way but you are awake at it in a different way and you have to wait for your bag to arrive and then it is three-thirty a.m. and you still have to wait for your bag to arrive when you hear the sound of the coquis, the native frogs that scream across the island all night and every night in pursuit of a mate. Not that you’re not judging; it’s a nice sound, soothing, you actually marginally prefer it to the all-American cricket, but it does strike you as odd that they would be trying to get busy at baggage claim, and you realize that the sound is emanating not from the frogs themselves but from a fellow traveler’s phone, and he’s not only listening to it but looking at it with rapt intensity. You cannot imagine what visual could be accompanying the audio except for a static image of a coqui, but you suppose that might be nice to look at if you liked that sort of thing. Your bag arrives.

On the first day you do not leave the apartment and try to write, which you technically do (the physical act of writing), but effectively do not (words written but words BAD), and by the time you give up on words good the sun has gone down and you are seized with guilt about sleeping late and not going to the beach instead and not answering that damn email about cutting a chunk of your cervix out to be screened for abnormalities and ordering the Amazon gift card as a thank you for your neighbors who helped you break into your own sublet because the man you’re subletting it from did not tell you that your door locks automatically and you’re tired of explaining to people your sublet is just a sublet and you don’t really know how long it’s for and you’re not sure what you’ll do if you have to leave and you’ve moved three times in six months but really none of this has anything to do with the fact that it is five a.m. and objectively time to sleep and neither do the dozens of images of a friend’s dinner party missed that you are now clicking through on Instagram--

You wake up eight hours later at one-thirty p.m. which is much too late to be virtuous, but the only clouds in the sky are picturesque ones and the sun is out and you eat breakfast al fresco so the odds that you will do vacation net correct today or at least more correct than whatever yesterday’s poor showing yielded seem promising. You are en route to the beach when the clouds become less lovely and you feel the odds turning against you, so you point out that at least you don’t have to put on sunscreen because optimism and its propagandization count at least twice as much on vacation as in real life. You are at the beach for only an hour before the rain begins and so too does your shame about not having woken up at a more virtuous time. You do nothing but look at your phone and the texts you sent that haven’t been answered. You do everything but look at your phone and answer the texts you’ve been sent.

You suggest going to a beloved local restaurant to salvage the day and order a Diet Coke and upon your second sip are struck with a sense of impending doom, which is a documented medical symptom preceding a heart attack, seizure, or stroke. Your mother thinks it’s anxiety, but that’s obviously ludicrous because you’re on vacation with no obligations so WHY WOULD YOU BE ANXIOUS? You solemnly tell your dining companion to be ready to call 911. The mains arrive. Your dining companion tells the waiter to please put them in to-go boxes. You cram a bite of bread in your mouth before this happens, to stave off the seizure. You have flung mushrooms about the table in your urgency. You put them back on the plate with your hands, now slick with sauce. Your dining companion looks the adequate amount of worried.

So then you are back at the apartment with to-go boxes of manhandled mushrooms and your sense of impending doom which has liquefied into a sense of not much at all. You go to the kitchen and decide to make a chopped salad to accompany upcoming dinners which takes around thirty minutes and then you think you might as well make a tuna salad to last the week too, which takes another thirty minutes and then another ten of alternating additions of precise portions of Dijon mustard and pickle juice to get it to be the right amount of tangy and then you start on a batch of guacamole with diced tomatoes and onion ready for your mise-en-place but the second avocado isn’t ready yet; you’ve already cut it in half but you can’t scoop it out of its shell no matter how hard you try, and this is when you hear the coquis outside screaming for sex, and that is when you look up at the clock and see it’s been two hours since you went into the kitchen (because at some point you also created a mango salsa, for what purpose you’re not sure, you saw a mango and decided it had to be a part of a salsa and that’s as far as you got, you’ve never actually made a mango salsa before so you don’t know what you would like eating it with). You look at the clock and listen to the coquis in the throes of desire and remember that you have been sleeping, even if at unvirtuous hours, and you haven’t been drinking. You put the avocado in a bowl with the other one, cover it with plastic, and put it in the refrigerator. It could be ready tomorrow. You go to bed. The seizure has not come.