In Which A Slight Breeze Starts To Blow In

When You Live Alone

by LUCY MORRIS

For many months, here in New York, we lived each day like it was the last week of summer. I trust you know the kind: the late August nights when you stay up until dawn, as though – all knowledge to the contrary – it is the last time you will ever do so, cradling a glass in your hand as though you will never hold a drink like it again, and confiding to your friends like it’s the last chance to get it all out before winter arrives. Only winter did not come. Yes, the days got shorter. I stood some lone, dark evenings in the flashing lights of First Avenue Indian restaurants, pretending they were the full-spectrum lamps used to treat seasonal depression, but it was by no means wool coat weather.

In late November, against all better judgment, I found myself steering someone home through Houston Street’s aisles of Christmas trees. But the branches were snowless, and I took this as a sign that I could act without consequence: even nature doesn’t know what’s happening tonight. Suspended as we were in perpetual autumn, no ice in sight, it all seemed slightly intangible, like some Hollywood director's vision of winter – delirious on beer and promise, I told myself we were touring a movie set, not my own neighborhood.

Our sense of summer had never quite ended. I wondered if maybe it never would.

+

I was in no rush for summer to end, because it had been a constructive one for me. The apartment I had moved into with my older brother was finally complete after months of renovations. The walls were a pristine white, for at least a few weeks before bikes and boxes and daily life scuffed them up. The floors were so shiny I felt actually, deceptively, rich in a way I had not thought possible––considering my account balance.

Fixtures and furniture started to arrive. A crew from P.C. Richard came to cart the thirty-year-old stove away and, a few hours later, another team arrived with the new one. I greeted a locksmith late one night when our front door surrendered to age and humidity and simply refused to open. If I had been in another kind of mental space, the kind I’d been in for much of the preceding year, this might have seemed like a metaphor. But, I was finding, something happens when you are genuinely content: you spend less time thinking in figurative language. The literal suffices.

By the end of May, I had an apartment where I was happy to wake up, a room where I was thankful to fall asleep. I wondered how just having my own bed might have altered the last few years. The majority of that time had been spent living in the homes of boyfriends. I phrase it that way because I mean that I moved into their lives with heaps of boxes and duffels. The homes were not mine to make, but ones to try to make my own. This was not a task I ever accomplished, perhaps because I was never quite confident that the payoff would be worth the inconvenience of packing it all up again. That I was right to be hesitant about digging in – to hang onto my dingy college-era sheets, to keep my books on separate shelves, to hold onto the boxes I came with – does not bring me the same satisfaction that intuition proven correct usually does. When I left – and I always did – I had no furniture to take with me.

The last delivery that arrived was a new bed. It was the first one that I could say belonged strictly to me. The first night I slept in it, I thought it was the most restful sleep I’d ever had.

+

At the same time as I settled into my new apartment, I returned to my office translation job after months of telecommuting from other cities. It took just a few weeks of long days ticked away in a windowless room while summer erupted outside to convince me I had to quit. Something had changed: it seemed that this was no longer what I wanted. It was still months before Zuccotti, when the sentiment appeared in op-eds and Times Square protests and tents in the park, but it had begun to dawn on me that there might be some alternative to spending the majority of my waking hours helping other people get rich.

Living especially frugally seemed like a reasonable tradeoff for being in control of my own time. I was acutely aware that this is a privilege of my age, a privilege of someone without real responsibility but with the reckless conviction that one day I will be able to make up for what I am deficient in now: for a lack of sleep and unbalanced diet and utter absence of savings.

But as it turned out, I picked up one freelance client, and then another, and still one more, until I could afford greens and happy hour drinks again. The sense of poise and control I felt perched at my living room desk with Cyrillic texts on my screen, even as early summer sweat dripped down the crevices of my back, was one I had never before experienced. No relationship I’d ever been in had brought me the same sense of command.

You see, I had for some time been using my youth and the presumed shortsightedness that accompanied it as an excuse for dubious relationship decisions: I’m twenty-two was the fundamental justification for everything I did in 2010 and then, even when I was no longer in fact twenty-two, for much of 2011. Although little of it was productive, the pursuit of romance above all else was, to my constant surprise, accepted by almost everyone around me. The common narrative is that doing anything for love is okay, provided that it works out, even if it doesn’t last forever.

I was realizing, in my own slow way, that if you are going to use age as a pretext at all, it might as well be for more interesting risks than dramatic, costly gestures and the kind of absurd late night declarations you make just to see if you can. To my surprise, waking up to a job I love is on the whole much more satisfying than waking up next to someone I loved once was. When you are young, it can be alarmingly easy and not even especially scarring to forget someone with whom you once spent every night. But I can say now with some minor authority that it is significantly more wrenching to forget, even just for a little while, what it is you want to do, and who it is you want to be.

+

Working from home changed everything, including my schedule. I awoke not to a succession of alarms that ensured I make the train, but to emails from courteous clients in Moscow whose faces I had never seen, whom I came to know only through pleasantries and requests and invoices. I adjusted to daily deadlines not of 5 PM but of 1 AM, the hour at which Russia starts waking up. I began to live eight hours ahead of myself. But rather than feeling rushed, as I had in my old, harried office life, time started to seem open and infinite. There was my entire New York day, and then there was my Russian day, too, if I wanted it. And I often did, because in the daytime it was too hot to do much of anything besides work.

Our apartment had one ancient air conditioning unit left behind by former tenants, but its very hum made me anxious, a constant reminder of an escalating ConEd bill, so I refused to turn it on. When it got too hot to think, I shut my eyes for a while. When it got too hot to sleep, I slipped on my shoes, stuck three $1 bills in the waistband of the boxers I slept in, and went to Ray’s on Avenue A for frozen yogurt. “I’m going to have to order more chocolate just for you,”  ancient Ray himself told me late one night, but his lopsided grin told me that he didn’t mind. During the day here, when the heat is pressing in from all sides, the actions of every fellow inhabitant feel like a personal affront. But at nighttime, when a slight breeze starts to blow in from the water around us, a kind of broad generosity returns: you remember that nobody really minds much of anything when it is night and it is summer and it is New York.

In those moments, weaving gingerly, cone in hand, between towers of trash bags and tipsy, tottering women, I could see how different things can be when you live alone. In the presence of someone else, a two am ice cream run might have seemed at best indulgent; at worst, embarrassing. But now I could come and go at any hour I pleased. I wasn’t obligated to text anyone my whereabouts. I no longer experienced that tug to leave the party early, to go home to whomever was waiting. No boyfriend had ever explicitly asked this of me — it was no fault of theirs — but like many people, and perhaps women in particular, I had for a long time been unable to distinguish between habit or expectation and actual desire. As is also common, I had not felt the weight of this unvoiced obligation until it was lifted.

+

Lying on my bed reading with the windows open to the roar of St. Marks Place, on winding late night walks home alone through Greenwich Village, on jogs along the East River and standing still in the rush of a cold shower afterward, my mind kept returning to a piece of a poem in Eileen Myles’ Inferno. I turned it over in my head and lobbed it in emails to friends scattered around the world, recited it aloud to an audience of just myself:

I don't think

I can afford the time to not sit right down &

write a poem

I don’t write poetry, but I was beginning to spend the hours I no longer wasted commuting writing instead. Something unexpected was happening: in the relative absence of men, who had staked out space in my brain for so long, there was new mental real estate opening up. It was as though when I had moved my belongings out, I had cleared way for the psychic space to think seriously about writing the poem––in my case, a metaphorical poem –to which Myles referred.

I hauled my laptop to Think Coffee on Fourth Avenue, where the conversation of the NYU summer school students around me proved sufficiently uninteresting as not to distract me. I couldn’t begrudge them their revelatory undergrad discoveries of Foucault and Marx: I, too, was undergoing internal transformations, and like them I wanted to espouse it to everyone I encountered. I wanted to tell the friends holed up at home with their boyfriends, the ones who still left the party early, to resist the impulse, to stay out just a little longer, to see what might be available if they did – a bevy of rooftops, new people, glimpses into other apartments and psyches and lives that, too, could be theirs, if only they allowed for it.

Aware that this would make me the most insufferable kind of friend, I said nothing, just as they had said nothing to me when I had been doing the same as them. I recalled that there was a hedonism to living with someone you loved: whiling away Saturdays in bed, goading each other into take-out, succumbing to the lazy pleasure of not even having to leave the house to see your favorite person. Meandering my own neighborhood paths on weekend afternoons, I spotted these couples: ice coffees in hand, limbs intertwined on the benches of Tompkins Square Park, adrift on planets of two. I readily recognized their happiness. But with a clarity that startled me, I recognized, too, that this was no longer – or at least for now – the kind of happiness I wanted.

+

Without a live-in companion, and after a day of working in the solitude of my apartment, I found that I was newly outgoing. I had my whole life identified as shy, perhaps even socially anxious in a clinical sense, but now I wondered if my sociability had simply been a gene late to come to fruition, much in the way my hair abruptly turned curly at age twelve.

When I met my daily deadlines, I closed my computer and went out. I walked to my budget gym, where East Village girls in harem pants and Converse sweated on treadmills. I came home and cooked collards in a partial state of undress, sweaty but aware that a chill was now in the air, that eating warm meals was again an option. I went out again after dinner for drinks, to readings, on walks around Alphabet City. “Headlines” and “I’m On One” were blaring on car stereos. I thought I might break into a sprint at any moment. It did not seem inconceivable that nobody would notice, and that in itself was comforting, a confirmation of the liberties of being alone.

What I felt for my friends, which had always been somewhat romantic in its profundity and complexity, was suddenly unconfined by the pressures of loving someone else.  I went for evening beers with new friends and afternoon coffee with ones I hadn’t seen in years. With the serious friends, the ones I thought of essentially as long-term partners, the mutual infatuation was limitless: when we went home for the night, we texted; from our desks the next day, we emailed. It was unambiguously pants weather now, and I kept expecting the real cold to come and hibernation season to set in. But it never quite happened. We kept venturing out.

Many evenings I would go to Brooklyn and hours later careen myself home on the L, barely conscious of my own itinerary. On these subway nights alone, my awareness of where I was extended just far enough to know that I was glad to be there alone. I had been feeling some appreciation for this late night solitude for a while, six or seven months now at least, the knowledge that I had for a long time been by far my favorite person to go home with and wake up to and cook breakfast for.

I recalled a time when I lived with a boyfriend, and the subway rides home to the life and house we shared felt excruciatingly long, an MTA-contrived plot to delay the pleasure of his company, our shared dinner, a movie on the couch. Now the ride itself was its own pleasure. Each time I got on the train, I wondered how far it could take me.

+

Eventually, in barely perceptible ways, independent of the weather and the spirit in the air––that summer commitment to no consequences, that sense of urban invincibility––a real seasonal change began to manifest. The tomatoes at the farmers market gave way to squash, to Brussels sprouts; the greens I’d hauled home in tote bags all summer began to dwindle, the potatoes appeared. One by one, I took fans out of windows. The temperatures were in the fifties on Thanksgiving Day, but there were sweet potatoes all the same. The seasons had changed in spite of themselves; no matter how late we stayed out sharing our secrets, there was nothing we could do to halt the cycle entirely.

The morning I awoke with the guy I’d led home through the Lower East Side, I was hit with a sense of something new: this was what it meant to bring someone home. It was not that I was new to the practice, exactly, it was just that I had never before had the sense of having a home, Tolstoy prints on the wall, all my shoes, all my books, all my thoughts in one place.

There were already emails on my phone from the Russians. I walked the guy to the train and then I continued on alone, no destination in mind. With a gratitude that originated deep in my chest and swelled upwards, out into a wide smile, I felt the limitless promise that I had begun to sense when I woke up every day in that bed of my own: the promise of Lower Manhattan streets stretched out around me and a pocket full of songs to guide the way, of croissants and morning conversation with a friend at a café on Avenue A, of hours of translating – that special retreat into the world of words that both pleased me immensely and paid the rent on the place that I liked so much. The sun was pulling up into the sky over the East River, which I had come to think of, selfishly but in a mental effort to distinguish it from the Hudson, as my river. I had my river. I had a new book to read.

Lucy Morris is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and translator living in Brooklyn. She last wrote in these pages about the truth in letters. She tumbls here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Simple Feeling" - Heartless Bastards (mp3)

"Only For You" - Heartless Bastards (mp3)

"Parted Ways" - Heartless Bastards (mp3)

In Which We Earn The Right To Hurt Someone Else

In Love With

by LUCY MORRIS

Dear C,

I am back in New York but without a bed. I sleep on the couch but I do have a cabinet that holds some clothes and offers a surface on which to stack the books I continue to buy wildly, compulsively, like words are the solution to every problem I have and an appropriate celebration for every small, daily achievement. With the books accumulating and a picture of you propped against the stacks, it is starting to feel like home here.

Can you tell from the photo I sent you how hot it is in my room? Of course you can’t. New York got hot and it’s the kind of hot that alternately makes you want to do nothing at all and do something terribly drastic. I spend all day while I work thinking of drastic things to do, but the good thing about work is that it keeps me from doing them for at least eight hours.

The events of past summers are coming back to me very vividly in a way that makes me want a strong drink, but it’s also comforting to have seasonal context restored: summer makes you do crazy things, of course. It makes you want to cheat on your boyfriend or else marry him. It makes you want to go macrobiotic or else order a personalized sheet cake just for fun. It makes the pursuit of immediate pleasure seem very important and everything else, like the niceness of having someone to say goodnight to every day or the security of putting part of your paycheck into savings or the long term health benefits of good posture while you work — it all starts to seem secondary to sleeping around and spending and slouching.

I think I’ll start taking my life advice from rap music again, or maybe I’ll eschew words entirely for classical. What do you think that would to do my mind, which spends all day processing words from one language into another, and all evening trying to quiet itself down enough to sleep? Meanwhile, when I open my window at night the air smells like bars, like nightlife, like people out on the prowl for pleasure, and I appreciate being able to take part in that without even leaving my apartment. The proximity alone is comforting; it squelches my eternal fear of missing out. Also, here in the construction zone that is my apartment, my comb is coated in dust daily, just like yours is in the perpetually transforming city of Beijing.

love,

L 

Dear C,

Just about a year ago, I went home to see a boy I had decided I was in love with. I wonder when I’ll be able to forget the coolness of the early summer cement in Wisconsin that weekend, or the scratchy dry grass I laid in while I tried to work up the courage to be real. A love that takes as long to blossom as that one did, even — or especially — if it’s fostered mostly in your imagination is crazy dangerous. 

A month later, he came to visit me in New York.  I bought new sunglasses on St. Marks Place for the occasion and took him to the Met because he considered himself something of an artist. He said the most impressive thing there was a velvet rope cordoning off some sculptures, which should have been a sign but was not. There were a lot of signs; there always are, with almost anyone, but in the variegated, cataclysmic history of good times, has anyone ever chosen not to ignore them?

A love like the one I had then is only possible in summer. You can spend late July nights saying insane things to each other, like that you’ll move to Bahrain and build a house together, and then you can end it before it’s cold enough that you have to sleep in clothes again. In some ways this is harder than you think it will be, and in some ways it’s not hard at all, because autumn changes everything. But when summer comes back around, the vestiges of that last love – an anthem from that season, a meal you ate together often – will return to you in a terrible, almost paralyzing way. It will make you cry to your new boyfriend, and you will know this is wrong but you feel that because someone else hurt you, you now have the right to hurt someone else.

Something I was just then starting to realize, not on late night small town barstools but in the clarity of the early morning bus rides that followed, is that sometimes you might think a person is crazy for you but really they are just crazy. Another thing is that maybe when you devote yourself to loving someone intensely, you are just trying to balance out a negative elsewhere in your life. You think having someone’s hand in yours makes you invincible and capable of ignoring your shitty job or decrepit apartment or the guidance counselor nightmare that is an utter lack of direction. It can, but only for a while.

It took me another year to learn that it is possible to be an okay person who loves someone who is not good. You can cope with that by doing destructive things to convince yourself you’re not that good either: you can drink a lot and resent other people when you are with them. Then, when you are alone, you can try to be good enough to compensate for your companion’s poison, perhaps by studying for the LSATS or running loops around your neighborhood, as though you can actually chase down the person you want to be, or the person you truly want to be with.

I got very in shape doing that, and it made me write more than I had been, but that’s about it.

love,

L 

Dear C, 

When I send you my frenzied late night e-mails, library computer terminal e-mails, typed-beneath-the-table restaurant e-mails, all begging you to come home, often what I am trying to convey is how much I miss having someone with whom to traverse all my troubled topographies: a bus stop where I cried out of job search despair or the first date restaurant of my last relationship. If you were here, at each stop on the landmark tour of my minor daily tragedies, you would say, “Don’t be ridiculous,” but the glimmer in your green eyes and the grin emerging at the corners of your mouth would tell me that you were sympathetic to the miles of difficult memories I’ve created here, that you, too, know that the past does not always stay where it should but can in fact sneak up behind and overwhelm you if you’re not careful. 

Joan Didion says that we keep notebooks in order to remember “what it was to be me.” These letters to you are records of a certain time, a sometimes self-conscious and sometimes totally uninhibited portrait of who I am – or at least that is how it will seem years from now. You know better than anyone that I am always on a dual quest to forget everything that happens to me and to record it all for eternity. I am furious when I cannot forget things fast enough, when memories stick to my ribcage and eventually gang up on my insides, flooding my lungs and making it hard to breathe. But I’m so afraid, too, of losing memories, of losing what I knew in a neighborhood, in a man, in a dress I once wore or a song I once heard.

Despite my best efforts to adopt a new model of experience, the past informs everything I say and do; who will I be next if I don’t know who I was before? I am forever hoping that recording things will make them easier to forget, that if I can file them away in a digital card catalogue, I’ll free my mind up for new acquisitions. I wonder if this process is what makes a person a writer more than any classes or strict writing routines do. I also wonder if this is the most efficient way of making yourself miserable on a day-to-day basis. 

Every day, I used to write my little urban experiences down in my phone, and a lot of times I sent them to this boy, but sometimes I didn’t, sometimes I kept them just for myself. When my phone was stolen last fall, I was disproportionately devastated for all those lost mementos, those fast-captured paragraphs recounting the moments when I was twenty-one and twenty-two and learning a lot about things, although not fast enough to suit either of us. I am sorry for all the things it took me so long to learn from you, and that I did such a terrible job of following the advice I so often doled out.

It took me a while to see that it is not a good idea to spend time with men who make you dislike other women, or make you forget your own plans, whether it’s the train you meant to catch or the career you want to have. I learned that sometimes being nervous around someone is thrilling but sometimes it keeps you from being your full, best self, the way you are in the company of friends. I also realized that break-ups are the kind of mistake it’s okay to cop to, that my dad was right when he told me that heartbreak is a disease 99.999 percent of people survive, except for in Tolstoy. 

Do you remember the time in Washington Square Park last spring when a man came up and asked us, “Are you looking for love tonight?” And we said, simultaneously, “I’m good.” It is my recollection that we were good – in the sense of satisfied but also morally – because we were together. But you would say there were so many more factors to that moment, the way there are to every one, that things don’t just hinge on a single person or event: that the temperature then was one of hopeful May and not oppressive August, that we had just seen two men somewhat absurdly, comically carrying a piano right through the park, that we had, as usual, eaten too much for dinner and gotten cookies and ice cream for desert anyway, and that you were going back uptown and I was going home to Brooklyn, and we each had so much then to look forward to. 

The walls in my apartment are all painted now, so I hung up some pictures of us. There’s one of us in a candy store in California a handful of summers ago. We appear accidentally identical: dark brown hair swooping in front of our faces, navy blue sweatshirts with DIY thumbholes on the sleeves, sunburnt cheeks wrought large as we bite into candy apples at the same moment, in the flash’s glare. We are nineteen years old but in our uninhibited delight and with our unselfconscious appetites, we look like we could be much younger. When I see this, I sometimes panic about time passed or wasted and think, “Will we ever be that young again?” On other days, though, I look at it with relief, because I know we never will be, and that is the proper order of things, forward moving, and for the best. Right?

love,

L 

Lucy Morris is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about the break-up. You can find an archive of her work on This Recording here.

"Some Other Time" - Jill Scott (mp3)

"Quick" - Jill Scott (mp3)

"Making You Wait" - Jill Scott (mp3)

The new album from Jill Scott, The Light of the Sun, was released on June 21th.

In Which Some Letters Are Failures But Few Are Lies

The Breakup

by LUCY MORRIS

1

I am home in the Midwestern city where I was born, and I am not entirely certain how I got here. I know that I have taken a lot of trips in the last year, to two continents and three countries, over and across the United States a handful of times by air and once by car. I know that my pockets are filled with bar coded baggage tags, and that I never have the clothes I need for the right seasons. I am rarely dressed for the occasion at the best of times, but lately I have been looking stranger than usual, hoping a smile and a pair of earrings can compensate for living out of a suitcase. 

I am not exactly sure why I am here, but like a lot of things I have done this year, I suspect it has something to do with a boy. Twelve months ago, the idea of uprooting myself for that reason seemed unfeminist and absurd to me. Back then I was working long hours and eating Goya beans every night for dinner with produce retrieved from dumpsters by a fregan acquaintance who was spending some months on my couch. Cutting the mold off a block of cheese, he would ask incredulously, "How can you eat something straight out of the can?" The Squatter, as I affectionately called him, also advocated following your heart. I had never before considered my heart to be a particularly reliable compass, and following it is not the marketable experiment that a year spent following Oprah or the Bible is, but nothing else was working for me so I decided to give it a try. 

I had lost my bearings and two consecutive Metrocards during a period when a lot of things in my life were turning over. I'd moved from a two-story house I shared with my boyfriend to a basement apartment with three roommates and a number of mice. I thought of the former house as the place where I had learned to cook soups and invest in quality tights. It was easier to eulogize it that way, rather than as the first place where I made someone important to me cry, and then learned to look away, in a way that seemed like self-preservation but was in lieu of having to change, a callous made thick from gardening instead of just buying gloves or learning to hold the spade right. 

Once settled in my new apartment, I began the process of something many people I know have done in reverse: New York was breaking for me and so I decided that I was in love with someone far away. The super of our building was ejected from his nearby home over marital issues, so he began converting the laundry room off our kitchen into an apartment for himself. Bugs crawled through the new incisions he made in the walls. It seemed like the city sanitation department never recovered from holiday weekends, the trash mounting in lolling piles around lampposts. I had developed a difficult relationship with the man at the laundromat, and when I walked to the bodega at night, a guy on the corner had started saying things like, "I would do anything to touch your legs." I loved my neighborhood anyway, the sudden jolt from the smell of dried fish in cardboard boxes at Nostrand Avenue produce stores, or Saturdays sprawled in Prospect Park's islands of shade. But sometime last summer I thought I might be able, for a while at least, to love this boy more than I loved the city. For a while I did.

2

His name was Jonah and it had begun as friendship five or six years prior, but the events that find me here now started late last winter, when I was visiting family in Milwaukee for a week. In a dark bar, illuminated by the torch I'd carried for Jonah for years, I made up my mind to try something – someone – new, even though I had a boyfriend back in New York. Our big house in Bay Ridge, with its old-lady-and-new-smoke smell that still clings to my sweaters, was not enough to contain whatever quarter-life crisis I was having. A week before, I had a cinematic panic attack in a dressing room over a jammed zipper on an expensive dress, which seemed, as these things do, prophetic only later. From the B train home from work the next day, I called and told Jonah what had happened. "I'd do anything to see you in a dress," he said, which I knew was both the wrong response and exactly the one I wanted to hear. I was both old enough to see that he knew this and too young to mind his transparency. 

Back in the Midwest, he drove me around his hometown, where the snow banks were pockmarked with grime and the storefronts were empty. The palette of winter in Wisconsin was lunar in a way I had forgotten, and the realities of the 2010 economy were visible in a way they weren't in my daily New York life. We talked unemployment rates, and then some hours later, Jonah reminded me in a decidedly different, slurring tone, "You have responsibilities," by which he meant a boyfriend, a good deal on a place in Brooklyn (and how New York a perspective! I thought through the gin – the real estate consideration). To silence this line of reasoning, I kissed him on the forehead and then the cheek and eventually the mouth. We went back to his freezing attic bedroom. I hadn't slept next to a different boy in years and because of that I was mostly struck by the ease with which we melded into each other, curled like cavatappi right down to our toes. At first I thought this was indicative of some greater compatibility, and then later I knew it wasn't, that once you spend enough time sleeping next to another person, it becomes natural to anyone who comes after, that your body – or is this just women's bodies? – is memory foam adaptable to whoever touches it.

3

Back in New York, it seemed to suddenly, aggressively become spring. My ventilation-less office in Brighton Beach acquired the inexplicable vomitous smell of an aquarium, and so I spent lunch breaks on the boardwalk listening to "Hounds of Love" in regular, repetitive doses, as though it was some kind of medicine. I broke up with my boyfriend and moved out. The walls of my new bedroom were Mexican restaurant-style orange sponge paint and the slats under my low bed never stayed in place, so my mattress sank to the floor under my weight. Rent was the only physical check I wrote each month so my checkbook was always piled under detritus on my desk: behind some bottles of beer, underneath mass mailings from politicians, in a tangle of computer and printer cords. "It is unclear why we are here and what we are doing," is how I described the life of my post-college peer group in a note I wrote to Jonah from the boardwalk one day. I asked him whether he thought it was normal to forget the spelling of your landlord's name every month, and if it was weird to eat breakfast on the train or drink coffee in lieu of lunch. I suppose I was hoping his distance, his Midwestern common sense, or the four years of life he had on me might afford him the authority to comfort me. But deep down I must have known those were not resources he had in him, because I never sent that letter.

I believed I was having a lot of fun – and in the absence of any other unambiguous passion, the blanket pursuit of fun seemed logical – by making meals for one, chatting with my roommates, and drinking more than was advisable and yet not enough to be of real concern. But I was growing impatient, and while I knew perfectly well that this was an internal shift, daily city life seemed to validate it. I felt that impatience in the insufferably slow lurches of the Q train I rode each day past station construction in Sheepshead Bay. It was in the slow lines at Key Foods, where customers rifled for coupons and food stamps while clerks tapped their nails on registers. It appeared among the crowds that gathered on the steps of Union Square as days stretched toward their summer limits, everyone lethargic but urgent, ready to meet their friends and start their nights. When I thought about it later, it was the tactile elements of these months that seemed especially if inexplicably poignant: the thick envelopes my pay stubs came in (LUSYA M, my Russian boss wrote in polite cursive), the slick of my Metrocard when I reached for it in my purse every morning at the Park Place stop, or the scrape of the brownstone under my legs when I sat on the stoop at night with a glass of cheap gin and sour juice, talking to faraway Jonah on my phone, the screen of which swirled with sweat when I was finished. 

4

Halfway through June, after months of long calls and coyness, I stood up straight and wrote Jonah a love letter, offering to come spend the rest of the summer with him. "Some Letters Are Failures, But Few Are Lies," is what I called it, a line from Amy Hempel's stories, which I'd been reading on late night subway rides. Although it did not seem strange at the time, I now have to wonder what kind of person titles a love letter, and what's more, why I was compelled to include in it these details of life in my neighborhood: "Gyptian is playing on car stereos on Franklin Avenue by my burger place and Bushwick boys with jeans pegged just above the ankle ride their fixed gears up Bedford. I told K. he was an asshole but I liked him anyway, and the Squatter, beard freshly washed, asked how my writing is going." I wrote: "These nights in the gardens of Brooklyn when around 4 AM I reach that moment of sobriety and all I can think of is Milwaukee, or nights in the bed of my friend where he says we probably shouldn't do this again because I am clearly in love with someone else – these are making me (crazy) restless, sending me pacing the aisles of the E train or up and down Eastern Parkway trying to Be Present with the farmers market boys I'm with or just by myself." Who were those farmers market boys? Where was I coming from on the E train? Why was I so concerned with being present, and what did that even mean? These are the questions I am compelled to ask when I read what I wrote then. And, finally: why did a love letter to a boy really read like a love letter – an ambivalent one, maybe a failure of one, but hardly a lie – to New York? 

Jonah called me a few days later to reciprocate my sentiments. I was flustered by the sudden fact of getting what I wanted. I wished to put him on hold and confer with the Squatter, whose Spanish guitar melodies were wafting down the hallway. "Let me call you back," I said, and when I did I demurred, telling him I had to give my boss a month's notice, although that wasn't true. "I just need some time to wrap things up," I said, although what was left? All my good friends seemed to have wisely evaporated to less humid climates for the summer. I booked a ticket to Wisconsin, and then I moved it up a useless four days. During the intervening lonely weekends, I took buses to visit friends across the Eastern Seaboard. I went to the MoMA, hoping the steep price of admission would at least force me to focus on my immediate surroundings, to provide the present-mindedness I thought I lacked. Half the time I was radiant and half the time I suspected I was making a terrible mistake, but my friends disagreed. "Nothing matters before we're 30," my writerly roommate reminded me by way of reassurance. "Nothing matters ever," the Squatter added from his perch on the couch. And what more authority did I have than any of them? How could I argue?

5

Soon I was in the Midwest again, camped in the attic of the house where I'd grown up. I never fully unpacked, but I spent a lot of my time out with Jonah, and plus I wasn't staying more than two months: why commit to placing dresses on hangers or shoes in neat pairs? In fact, I was afraid. I made the mistake of thinking it was still summer, although it was August now, and people around me were already registering for fall semester classes and anticipating autumn leaves. Undeterred, I bought a swimsuit and drank iced coffee at outdoor cafes where I typed away for my Brooklyn Russians, who'd asked me to work remotely. At night, Jonah and I walked all over town, drinking malt liquor and stumbling home on empty streets, past bar after bar and successions of blinking stoplights. Sometimes we built fires and slept in hammocks, which felt very rustic, although one night during a tedious bar argument I texted a boy I had barely and briefly been intimate with in Brooklyn to say, "I miss New York," and I meant that. I did not mean, "I miss you," but like most of that summer, I was tipsy and I was tired, and didn't know who to tell. 

I started to worry that my heart's directives had led me wildly astray. I wished the Squatter had a phone so I could call and ask him to remind me that nothing mattered. I was as desperate to believe there were no consequences as I was determined to believe I still had summer ahead of me. I knew things with Jonah were breaking, that I didn't want to be drunk all the time, and that it was getting too cold at night to sleep outside. One night I made cocktails out of my mom's last melons and I meant to leave a note of apology, but first we were out on the porch arguing and then we were in my bed pretending we could make things right again. But it wasn't like the cold night in his attic room. It was sticky now, we coiled in opposite directions, and I slept with my phone pressed to my cheek, a half-composed text to my best friend on the screen.

I went west for three weeks to see her, and there I cried in cars and at Catherine's kitchen table, because what was I doing, anyway? I sat on her lawn and had a long phone conversation with an old friend who had last called a few months earlier when I was at a party in Brooklyn. At some point I stopped listening to him and just mentally returned to that night in late May, when it had been disconcertingly, amazingly windy and on the walk over from my apartment, Catherine and I had stopped outside the Brooklyn Library to allow the wind to push us around, surrendering to the moment at hand, a custom I had come to think of as uniquely New York, although I had been enough places to know it was not. In the garden in Park Slope, people attacked a piñata filled with condoms and miniature bottles of liquor, and everyone there seemed set on a kind of self-destruction that alienated me in its deliberation, the agreed-upon premise that we might work good-for-the-world jobs during the week, but we'd still drink too much and go home with the wrong people and have to beg cab drivers to take us back to our out-of-the-way apartments in early morning hours. Months and miles removed, I now found I missed those strangers the way you miss exes in spite of their flaws. They did do good jobs, they made mistakes but endeavored to fix them, they even hired a mariachi band to make a spring night more festive for their friends. Where was that ingenuity, that ambition back in the Midwest? It was time to go, but I wasn't sure where.

6

Catherine moved to China, so I bought a one way-ticket there, and then I started seeing someone new in Milwaukee, someone even more ill-advised than the last, for reasons of age, acquaintance and temperament, and most of all my reasons for engaging: what were they, exactly? I couldn't remember – the heart I'd followed for thousands of miles was like a crazy cult leader full of bad ideas I couldn't escape – but I kept finding myself at his house, and I wasn't unhappy. He was from New York and we mostly talked about that, our vocabulary a glossary of street names. Like the last relationship, it had an expiration date – my departure for Beijing – but like the past-sell date yogurt from the dumpsters of Gristedes that had formed my breakfast diet all spring, sometimes that doesn't have real significance.

Fall came while I was in China, evident in boot displays in store windows and the slow fade of the sky around 5 PM every day. I thought frequently of falls past, which is to say I thought of New York, where I had spent the last five of them, seasons rich with foliage and laughter. Happy Chinese girls perched on the racks of their boyfriends' bikes couldn't distract me from the chasm of nostalgia and anxiety that always opens at that time of year – or is that just in us overly sensitive, us seasonally affected types? My excitement for my eventual return to New York made me lightheaded, but it was counteracted by the dread that swelled in the pit of my stomach when I thought of actually going back. Waiting there in the improbably clean metro stations, so untarnished you almost expected new-car smell, I thought of the early evenings I had spent staring down the train tracks in Brighton Beach, willing the B to arrive and whisk me from work back to non-Russian speaking Brooklyn. Listening to boilerplate subway recordings on the train in Beijing, I thought of the pleasant impatience I felt those nights, ready to get home and sink into my boyfriend, but also of the panic I felt transferring to the R to go home to him once things with us were breaking. I thought, as surely everybody has at some point, that I could get on the train and just keep going, right until the end of the line, and start over there. But our house was just three stops from the terminal one. Nowhere seemed like it could be far enough.

7

And with this fickle heart guiding me, maybe nowhere could be, which is why I'm calling off the experiment and heading back to New York. Recently I have been back in Milwaukee, spending time with someone and waiting for a place to open up for me out east. My old place in Crown Heights is now occupied by strangers. This year's exes have new girlfriends. Most days, I am less certain of my own growth, but as I'm packing, I keep finding old Metrocards – maybe the ones I thought I lost a year ago – at the bottoms of my bags, tucked inside yellow papered notes to Jonah. These objects are like relatives I haven't seen in years, familiar but foreign: I recognize my handwriting but not the sentiments I express in it, which is comforting and alienating all at once. Someone told me recently that your heart, that misguided compass of an organ, gets less resilient as you get older, not more. If most of us believed this, I am not sure that living or loving would be bearable rituals, but by some miracle of human nature they are. At least for me. At least for now.

Lucy Morris is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and translator living in New York. She last wrote in these pages about living in Beijing. She tumbls here.

"Everything Falls Into Place" - Young Knives (mp3)

"Human Again" - Young Knives (mp3)

"Running From A Standing Start" - Young Knives (mp3)