In Which We Admire The Yellow Tower

Bunker or Vault

by RAPHAEL POPE-SUSSMAN

I stared at my laptop screen and a crouching, naked baby with hollow eyes and a pig’s nose stared back at me. I blinked. The baby continued staring. I closed my computer, then reopened it. The baby was still there, floating in white space, looking straight ahead.

I gave up staring at the baby and turned my eyes to the text beneath it: Idant, a division of Scientific Medical Systems, was established in 1971 as a public corporation and is a subsidiary of DAXOR Corporation. It is one of the oldest and largest semen banks in the United States. My eyes passed over the phrase “semen bank” and circled back, reading and rereading it, over and over. I had never seen that phrase before. In a sitcom, “sperm bank” would be a throwaway line, but “semen bank” is too clinical to be funny.

The doctor who had recommended Idant hadn’t used the words “semen bank.” It was a “fertility clinic,” a place to “store your sperm.” You know, just in case.

It was the winter of 2010, and I was reading the words “semen bank” in the living room of my mother’s house. If my mom had stepped away from the potato wedges on the stove, she would have seen a familiar scene: her youngest son, wearing pajamas, curled up on the same threadbare gray sofa he’d crawled on as a baby.

But she also would have seen my bald head and known that this scene wasn't familiar at all. Three weeks earlier, I’d been diagnosed with testicular cancer.

I had visited the oncologist that morning, and he’d given me two instructions to prepare for treatment. I should shave my head immediately, he said — better to do it now than to wait for chemo, when it comes out in clumps. I’d sat on a chair in the bathroom, shirtless and shivering, while my brother ran a pair of clippers along my scalp. I had dreaded that haircut, but when I had finally rallied the courage to look at myself in the mirror, I wasn’t shocked by what I saw. There was the same thin, pale face with high, jagged cheekbones; it looked harsher and quite worn, but it was still mine.

The oncologist had saved his second instruction for the final minutes of my visit. “After chemo, you’ll have a retroperitoneal lymph node dissection,” he’d said. “It’s a major surgery, but it knocks the rate of recurrence below five percent. The biggest risk is infertility—for you, the chances are ten to twenty percent. You’ll want to bank your sperm.”

I had only half-grasped what he was saying. I’d been sitting in his office for more than seven hours, during which I’d been relentlessly barraged with statistics, drug names, dietary restrictions and requirements. I would need four different drugs to control the vomiting, two to regulate my bowel movements, and others for acid reflux, dry skin, anxiety, and depression. I could look  forward to constant nausea, dizziness, cognitive impairment, ringing in the ears, numbness in the fingers and toes, kidney failure—only death went unmentioned.

At home that night, I had opened my computer and Googled “Idant.” That’s how I came to be staring at a picture of a naked baby with the nose of a pig and an eerie, unblinking gaze.

Idant pioneered semen banking in the U.S. and developed the technology that made it possible to ship frozen semen all over the world. Today, Idant maintains one of the largest human semen banks in the U.S. and provides services to the medical community throughout the world.

I liked the idea of my sperm being a part of “one of the largest human sperm banks in the world.” It would be like having my monograph in the Library of Congress.

I picked up the phone and dialed the number for Idant. No one answered, so I left a message. “Hi, my name is Raphael Pope-Sussman. I need to make an appointment immediately,” I said. I paused, then added: “I have testicular cancer — I was referred by Dr. George Bosl.” I had to make sure the person checking the messages at Idant understood I wasn’t just some guy who frequently goes to sperm banks to jerk off. It’s like explaining to the cable guy that your apartment is a mess because you’ve been really busy at work. You feel like you have to do it. But the cable guy doesn’t care. He’s just there to fix the TV.

The next morning, a woman from Idant called. She offered me a late-afternoon appointment for the coming Saturday. “That’s perfect,” I said. “Do I need to bring anything?”

“Just your insurance card. And don’t have sex or masturbate before you come in.”

I had imagined Idant as a sleek storefront with glittering glass windows and polished white walls. I would walk in, as one walks into an eyeglass shop, and an attractive female attendant in a lab coat would lead me into a waiting room in the back. This scene was entirely an invention — the only sperm banks I’d ever seen were in movies, which always show the waiting room, but never the exterior. I’d never actually heard of someone going to a sperm bank.

Idant’s website listed an address on Fifth Avenue, just a block from Herald Square. I got off the train at 34th Street and walked east, scanning the street for the lab. The sidewalk was bustling with tourists and shoppers loaded down with overflowing bags. I weaved my way through the maze of puffy coats, past a dusty, rundown clothing store I’d never heard of, several cell phone dealers, Old Navy, Foot Locker, a Payless outlet. Nothing resembled a medical facility or a lab.

In front of Macy’s Herald Square, I stopped and scanned the area. Traffic clogged the street and cabbies honked furiously, playing the perpetual, dissonant tune of Midtown at rush hour. The whole neighborhood looked wrong. These streets were all commercial. Every storefront was for a chain store. The buildings were old and squalid, not right for an ultramodern sperm bank.

I started to sweat. This was the last appointment of the day. If I missed it, I couldn’t reschedule. It was Saturday, and I was starting chemo Monday. There was no flexibility on the date.

My heart jerked into gear and I broke into a run, darting between stopped cars and dodging pedestrians. At the next corner, I stopped again. There was no point in running if I had no idea where I was headed.

I crouched and cradled my head in my hands. Why was my mind failing me? I hadn’t even begun chemotherapy yet, and already a fog had descended. I couldn’t do something as basic as find an office building on a gridded street in the city in which I’d lived my whole life. How could I endure these months of treatment, which my oncologist had made clear would be the most agonizing, exhausting, miserable months of my life, if I couldn’t manage what amounted to a simple errand?

I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked up and saw a tall, thin man with wavy brown hair and horned-rim glasses. “You all right there?”

I got to my feet. “Yeah,” I said, swallowing hard to hold back tears. “I was supposed to go to a doctor’s appointment at 350 Fifth Avenue, but I’m completely lost.”

The man laughed and pointed at a building across the street. “You can’t miss it,” he said. “That’s the Empire State Building.”

The first time I visited the Twin Towers, at the age of five, I felt smaller than I ever felt before or since. Staring at the soaring edifices, I wondered how many millions of me it would take to fill the buildings’ vast lobbies, and how many houses I’d have to stack to reach the top. Set back from the cityscape in a cavernous plaza, the buildings seemed to rise out of nothing and extend beyond the sky. To view the Twin Towers from their bases was to be lost in dizzying infinity.

The Empire State Building, viewed from its base, is considerably less impressive. For a building of its stature — physical, architectural, or historical — it’s quite easy to miss. The deep setbacks, which give the building its distinctive appearance on the skyline, conceal much of the tower from street level. If you’re standing in its shadow, you might mistake it for an anonymous office building of twenty-five stories. You can walk right past the Empire State Building, or even wander into one of the shops on the ground floor, and never have an inkling of the structure that rises above you.

In the lobby of the building, I approached a maroon-clad attendant. “Uh, is this 350 Fifth Avenue?” I asked hesitantly. The attendant raised his eyebrows: “Yes, that’s the address. You’re in the Empire State Building.” So the man had been right. But there had to be a mistake. The Idant website had said nothing about the Empire State Building. Isn’t that something you’d want to mention? And why would you put a sperm bank in the Empire State Building? That’s an obvious terrorist target. The sperm bank that serves my sperm should be somewhere safe, like a bunker in Montana or a locked vault. You wouldn’t store the Hope Diamond in the window at Tiffany’s. That’s just not safe.

“I’m looking for Idant Laboratories,” I said.

“What’s that? I’ve never heard of that,” the attendant said. He called out to another attendant, a woman, also in a maroon uniform: “Hey Maria—you heard of any ‘Idant’?”

The woman shook her head.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “Idant — it’s a, uh, sperm bank.”

“Oh, the sperm bank. Of course! Maria, he means the sperm bank!” A group of tourists had been milling about the lobby and they turned and stared at me. “Yes, just step down to the elevators, sir,” he said. “You’ll want the seventy-first floor.”

I’d expected the inside of the Empire State Building to be palatial — wide corridors, marble floors, and ornate fixtures. But the seventy-first floor was cramped and dirty, like a back hallway in a run-down apartment building. The door to Idant Laboratories was windowless and painted in a blinding shade of insane-asylum white. I rang the bell and stood back, nervously tapping my toes on the cheap grey tiles. The door clicked, and I pulled the handle, straining to move the heavy steel. Whatever was inside, it was certainly well secured.

What I saw on the other side of the door bore no resemblance to the sperm banks I’d seen in movies. No waiting room, no attractive nurses, no guys sitting nervously. It was just me and a rotund balding man in a stained lab coat.

The man was perched on a high chair inside a room full of filing cabinets and racks of lab equipment — test tubes and flasks and beakers. He eyed me from behind a square glass window, like the agent at a ticket booth. I said I had an appointment. “You’re late,” he said, sliding a pile of papers through a gap at the bottom of the window. I nodded apologetically.

“When was the last time you masturbated or had sex? Was it more than a week ago?” he asked accusatorily. I told him that yes, it had been more than a week. He looked unimpressed.

When I’d finished filling out the forms, the man pulled out a small white cup, which he placed in the palm of my hand. “There you go. You’re just around the corner: Room 2.”

Room 2 resembled the examination room at my pediatrician’s office. There was the same exam table with the green vinyl upholstery, the same fluorescent lighting, the same grime-covered white walls. There was the same magazine rack, built of flimsy grey particle board and stuffed with beat-up magazine back issues—now Hustler instead of Highlights. An old TV-VCR unit was mounted on the wall, and below it stood a plain wooden bookshelf that held a small collection of pornographic films.

How many guys had masturbated in that room? Thousands, maybe tens of thousands? Every surface was a potential resting place for millions of slaughtered sperm. I shuddered at the thought  and scurried to the center of the room.

Moving hesitantly, I unbuckled my belt, fumbled with a few buttons, and pushed down my pants. My penis was shrunken and flaccid. I kneaded it with my hand, trying to get the blood flowing, but it just hung there, exhausted and ambivalent. It’s not easy to become aroused when you’re filled with revulsion and it’s cold and you’re alone and terrified. There’s nothing erotic about masturbating into a cup.

Masturbation is the quintessential juvenile activity. When we masturbate, we arouse ourselves with fantasies, with imagined scenes that are unreal and impossible. In these fantasies, as in the pornography that both imitates and drives them, we think only of ourselves and act only for ourselves. To masturbate is to be again a child, perfectly solipsistic, unaware and unburdened.

But there was nothing childlike about that moment. Standing in the middle of a room full of pornography, my pants at my ankles, preparing to masturbate into a cup: this was the first glimpse I had of adulthood.

Below me was the semen-covered floor and seventy more like it, though likely not semen- covered, and the city where I was born and raised, and where I went to college. My family and friends were down there, old teachers, my classmates. And on seventy-one, in that foul room, was me, and inside me a tempest of cells dividing, and in my hand a little white cup.

I was twenty-two. At twenty-two, most people plan a few months in advance, if they plan at all. With the white cup in my hand, I was planning years in advance, perhaps decades. Ahead of me lay months of being much sicker. I would vomit bile and blood. I would be raced to the urgent care ward at 3 a.m., so dehydrated I could barely stand. I would be sliced open like a fish. I would be denied drink for days and food for weeks.

Every night I would find myself slumped on the bathroom floor, my cheek pressed against the tile. That tile at the base of the toilet smells of dirt and urine and human hair, but it’s solid and smooth and cool. I would learn to love that tile.

I could never have imagined what those months would be like. But the white cup meant something would come after; that after this ordeal was over there would still be the rest of a life, the rest of a life for which I was freezing my sperm. I would have to pass those months of illness, and afterwards, I’d be responsible for determining the contents of that something,

With the white cup, I found myself staring far into the distance. Like the five-year-old boy first setting eyes on two endless towers, I was lost, for a moment, in dizzying infinity. I was sick and I was alone. My mom might hold my hand as I lay in a hospital bed, platinum dripping into my veins and wreaking havoc on my stomach. But she could not vomit for me, endure my blinding migraines or lie in my place on the operating table. I would have to suffer for myself.

In the coming months, though I would have dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people around me, I would be absolutely alone, as alone as a guy with no pants on, in a windowless chamber in a tower in the sky.

When I was first diagnosed, I had marked the date of my final surgery on my calendar. I’d imagined that date as an ending. My scar would heal, my hair would come back, and life would return to normal. I would be free to walk the streets, healthy and strong and relieved from the myriad anxieties and neuroses that have plagued me for as long as I can remember.

But there would be no discrete ending. I would suffer the brutality of chemotherapy and surgery and the crueler fate of a slow recovery. Many nights after surgery, I would lie in bed unable to sleep, my stomach aching with gas pains, my scar aflame. Sometimes, I would hear the sound of mice scuttling in the ceiling, and I would feel them on my back and face. I would become convinced I was losing my mind. I’d tear at my hair and moan that I was dying.

I had experienced panic attacks before. The summer after surgery, as I was slowly regaining my strength, the panic attacks would arrive daily. I was training myself to breathe and eat and walk fully upright again. I knew I should be overjoyed to once again have access to these essential ingredients of life. But I was tired. A long illness runs like a river, slowly grinding down everything in its path.

For a year after my surgery, I had monthly checkups at the hospital. Now, I go every three months. During my most recent visit, I stopped in at the clinic where I got my treatment. All the nurses gathered around, chattering about how different I look with a full head of hair and color in my cheeks and a little meat on my bones. It felt a bit like ten Jewish mothers had descended upon me at once.

“You’re still the worst patient we’ve ever had with the vomiting,” they reminded me. “When the guys in here get sick, we tell them about you, how we had this one patient who could not stop vomiting, just like a fire hose.”

I grinned and shrugged. “Excellent vomiter” doesn’t quite fit on a résumé, but it's nice to be the best at something.

After my checkup, I stepped out onto First Avenue, and headed south. Moving briskly, I walked through the growing crowds, until the sidewalk was thick with bodies and I found myself pushing through the horde.

At 34th Street, I turned west, and as I walked, I lifted my gaze up toward the buildings above, scanning the sky for a familiar sight. When it came into view, I stopped for a moment on the street corner. I craned my neck and stared, admiring the yellow tower, bathed in the receding glow of the evening sun.

I looked back at the bustling street in front of me — the throngs of shoppers and businessmen, the sea of honking cabs — and I continued on my way, passing right beneath the Empire State Building, all 102 stories of it, and beneath a windowless white room in a dingy old lab on the seventy-first floor.

Raphael Pope-Sussman is a contributor to This Recording. This is his first appearance in these pages. He twitters here.

Photos by Leonard Sussman.

"My Love Is Winter" - The Smashing Pumpkins (mp3)

"Glissandra" - The Smashing Pumpkins (mp3)

In Which We Take A Quick Trip Back To The Place Where Things Stop Feeling Familiar

Sincerely

by JANE HU

It's still a really big mess thinking about "me" right now, especially in New York.

I want to say:

1

The city feels so, so permissive, but also the opposite of that.

2

Banter and cleverness is basically just a way of levelling out affect — one communicates the possibility of mutual understanding through a performance of dialogue. Really, it's just a way to avoid awkwardness — to keep conversation going (what New York is best at?) without giving any of your true affect.

3

New York is defined by its skyline — but it is just as sprawling as it is vertical. When you're in the midst of New York, you're psychologically as well as physically on the ground. If you're a newcomer, like most of us are, you often have no clue where you are.

4

As a 23 year old who came here mostly to write, I feel like introversion no longer works, especially with the internet.

5

Since this city doesn't feel like its ideology (find your essence! be your best self!) has changed since the 1950s, we need to think about what the internet does to our sense of self in New York. Especially when you can be creative anywhere.

6

I might never write a very confessionally thing about New York. Maybe after I am out of New York, and clear my head and figure out how to approach it.

7

What is your reason for coming down to New York if you're simply going to sit inside and read books and screens all day? What is anyone's reason for coming to New York?

8

Native New Yorker means alien everywhere else. It's a weird thing to belong, as though rooted, to this place - but since this place is the epicenter of what represents the good life elsewhere, you feel so safe but it must be stressful.

9

Where did people get the idea that one can find oneself in New York? This city makes me physically, as well as emotionally, dizzy/unmoored.

10

It's the absolute worst place to figure yourself out because it runs on frenzy - it's so fast all the time.

11

In a room with writers and thinkers in New York, you constantly banter without risking anything. No one is showing you what they think about you. No one will validate your feelings or show you when you're acting off-script. Right?

12

I connect to the West Coast more. I'm not sure why. It's just as fake, but at least it acknowledges that or embraces it in another way. I think I'd like the traffic.

13

So you're in New York to become an intellectual and you realize everyone around you is doing the same and doing it better and doing it maybe (maybe not?) without going home each night and fretting about it and wringing their hands about it.

14

I compare myself to others so I don't end up being swept into a stereotype because other people in New York are generally holding onto something old and really problematic.

15

There is very little room for just staying because staying is not only financially impossible. Staying, in my situation, is a form of failure. And also a form of being alone.

16

You can't own your privilege/narcissism, and still get to comment wryly on how you know you're a narcissist. At least the 20-somethings do this. I want to go to a party where it ends with everyone crying.

17

I hate the sexual politics happening in the room.

18

All New York stories are about coming and going. I want to know what it's like to talk about staying. Because that's what I want for myself. A place that will let me come and go, but also would let me stay too.

19

The worst part about all this is: I feel like a cliché!

20

I just can't self-consciously write about my Feelings about this anymore. Because then it feels like a performance which is the opposite of what I want to be. That is what I think New York lady writers do: perform their feelings.

21

Do you know how many e-mails have prompted me to burst into tears this month?

22

I think I am leaving for real pretty soon.

Jane Hu is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Montreal. She twitters here, and you can find more of her writing here. She last wrote in these pages about her summer reading. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Photos by the author.

"Fiddle" - Olivier Jarda (mp3)

"Tendencies" - Olivier Jarda (mp3)

The new album from Olivier Jarda is titled Good Luck Cartel.

In Which We Barely Bring A Change Of Clothes

Goodbye Station

by LUCY MORRIS

I was up at Grand Central the other day and walked by the line of airport shuttles on 42^nd Street, where I more than once deposited different boyfriends and where they more than once deposited me. I remembered in an instant the individual goodbyes we exchanged and the looks in their eyes — green, green, brown, brown — in those moments, and seeing my own eyes — blue reflected back in them.

That was all very good and edifying in its own way: there are nuances of life you are unable to sense until you’ve intertwined yours with someone else’s for some period. But none of it was as good and edifying as what’s been happening the last few months: there are just as many nuances you are unable to sense until you’ve made your life solely yours, assembled a set of routines and rituals and plans for which you alone are responsible.

I want to say all of this comes as a surprise but I’m afraid it doesn’t. I think deep down I always suspected it could get better than those greetings, those goodbyes, whatever pleasures came in between.

This is not to say I assumed it actually would.

+

For a while late last decade, Micah and I lived out at the southernmost tip of Brooklyn in a house crowded with other people’s furniture. We were legally prohibited from painting the walls or getting rid of the excess of knick-knacks because of some issue with the original owner’s will. It was a material abundance we were too young to deserve, to know what to do with. Sometimes when we didn’t want to do the dishes we’d go to the basement to dig out the silver cutlery of the elderly woman who had lived — and died — there before us.

I was too small for the size of our house, for the seriousness of Micah’s intentions, but maintained a steadfast ignorance of these facts, a quiet campaign of avoidance that I assumed was essential to all relationships. During the years we were together, I hardly went out at all, as if I was afraid that seeing what else and who else was out there might make it impossible to go home again.  In the end, it turned out I was right. Once I did start going out and seeing what else was there, I could not return to that house near the Verrazano, to Micah’s overwhelming affections, to our bed with the misshapen blue sheets we struggled to fit to the mattress each morning.

When I moved out, I found that everything I owned fit into the back of an SUV. This confirmation of my material compactness should have been a relief but instead I found it alarming, as if it indicated some other insignificance or inexperience. It seemed that in the absence of a love that had swelled up into all the corners of my being, into all the hours of my day, I was highly portable, my existence in one place — or with one person — more or less temporary.

Having a major space in your life suddenly vacated is no rarefied tragedy: it happens to most people, and likely more than once. But it takes a long time to fill that expanse inside you again, the minutes and habits and parts of yourself that used to be shared. This did not bother me then and it does not now: it’s a fact of a life in which you choose to love and I would not choose another kind.

+

The appeal of what came next was not that it was better — I knew from the start it wouldn’t be — but rather that it wasn’t as big, that it would in fact be so small, so insufficient, I could start restocking my life with other things again. I took long walks alone around the northern edges of Prospect Park the summer after I left. Everything felt simultaneously new and rusty: a rerouted commute on the same trains, the choreography of cooking old meals in a new kitchen, pacing unfamiliar streets until they became known. I was suddenly aware, too, that there was now a whole variety of experimental forms of pleasure available to me, minor and major, risky and not.

One of these, located somewhere on the axis of minor and risky, was Jonah. If there can be a single explanation for the trajectory of any love, it goes like this: it’s fun until it isn’t. Jonah was no exception.

The last time I recall feeling fondly towards him, early one evening in late summer, we were outside drinking Red Stripe and playing Scrabble. Jonah won the game by a huge margin and then confessed to cheating throughout, but with a grin I had noticed he employed specifically in instances where he wanted his behavior excused, not just with me but with everyone: his friends, family, employers, store clerks. It was an effective expression — humbly crooked but with eyebrows raised as if to say, “How could you not forgive me?” — but once you caught onto it, it was hard not to observe the frequency with which it appeared, and then not to wonder why he was constantly in need of forgiveness, or doing things that required it, however trivial.

I allowed him this for the reason I allowed him many things: it made me wonder. But after a while, to no one’s surprise — including my own — wonderment ceased to be enough, started, in actuality, to seem like an absurd premise for spending time with someone. We continued to become less tender to each other, until we were only capable of being pleasant after we had sex — although during the act we both managed to persist with our minor cruelties.

On another outdoor night, one of the last we spent lodged against each other in the hammock with string imprints forming on our cheeks, a few bats swooped down near our heads and we yelped simultaneously. I remember how embarrassed we both were in the moments afterward at our show of fright. In the whole history of bad things people have done to one other there is no accounting for what we choose to be ashamed of. There is also no accounting for what we choose to forgive.

On that same night, after the bats, I recall whispering, “I love you,” in the way I now can see many people do, when they have run out of other things to say to each other, or stopped looking for more precise ways of relating. But I knew as I said it that it was the only time I had ever lied about loving someone, and although I have done many other things wrong since — left a whole trail of different errors in my wake — I have never again done that.

+

Peter’s bed was so big I could lie across it horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, and still not reach the edges. I was very tired when I first arrived in it, but simultaneously having a lot of trouble sleeping. The exhaustion was a broad one, an encompassing uncertainty that made me lethargic and unproductive during the day but also unable to put my mind to rest when I turned off the lights. Peter’s main allure at this particular moment was that his sleep schedule was compatible with mine. We spent three weeks staying up all night talking and then more than a year trying to replicate the intimacy of those weeks, and for the most part, to everyone’s surprise — including our own — we actually succeeded.

In the months I spent camped out in his attic apartment, I rarely brought a change of clothes with me or used his shower, but I was closer to him than I’d ever been to someone else. As happens when you feel unchallenged in other aspects of your life, I rerouted my energies into conducting the relationship as a kind of experiment, testing out behaviors like jealousy and anger, from which I had so far mostly abstained. I had a hypothesis, which I announced to him often, that the ability to exercise these latent emotional muscles was proof of a deeper bond. This was met with minimal reception and was also never proven correct or incorrect, but it was certainly facilitated by the fact that we could sleep in the same bed after arguments without even noticing the other person was present.

Late in winter we both got sick for a month, shared a Neti Pot, let cough drop wrappers and Advil bottles and Kleenex pile up around us. We watched movies to rest our voices but could never make it through one without pausing to talk. Then we got better; it got warm. On weekday afternoons we went to a public water park to float down the lazy river while listening to the oldies station, toes hooked around each other’s tubes to keep from drifting. By then I had begun to worry that the lazy river days were symptomatic of something bigger, that Peter was in some abstract sense slow moving and was reducing my rate of acceleration by proxy — I would have generally preferred to swim laps — but our conversations were actually so rapid I could never figure out where to stop them.

I knew well the sheets on the cot that served as his couch; he slept there, not in his bed, when I wasn’t around. When I talk to him these days, I know he is lying on that cot, and I feel guilty — and then I don’t — for the excess of my own bed, the room I now have to spread out, how I wouldn’t exchange it for anything — or anyone — anymore.

+

The month or two that Ryan spent pursuing me, I spent much of my time hiding out in a large store in the Flatiron District where my cell phone got no reception. There I could thumb through racks of dresses I’d never wear and delay confronting his attempts to win me over. I put it off not because I didn’t enjoy them, but because I did, a great deal, and this was so unfamiliar a sensation to me, so unlike my customary ambivalence that I found it almost physically uncomfortable. To convince myself it was a good use of my time, I usually needed a drink in hand when I called him, leftover party gin in leftover plastic party cups I stacked on my windowsill after we hung up.

On New Year’s, after the countdown and the kiss, we locked ourselves in the bathroom at a party to take a nap. The tiles on the floor were the same as the ones in my mother’s house; my eyes blurred as I studied them. I slept with my head on Ryan’s hip. The rivets of his jeans left an imprint on my forehead.

Some time later we crash danced around my tiny bedroom, unsettling my precarious piles of books, knocking the cheap garment rack that served as my closet at an angle. We had a lot of fun together and not much else, which was the kind of less consuming experience I had believed I wanted but turned out was probably constitutionally incapable of. We fell asleep on top of the covers, this time with his chin on my shoulder, and in the morning we had sex.

“What do you want to do today?” Ryan asked afterwards, pulling on a t-shirt, and in response, without thinking even for a second, I said, “I think we should break up and also we should go to the Met.” Which is exactly what we did. Standing side by side in the American Wing, it was like nothing had ever happened, which seemed like a good sign. But generally this — the suggestion that nothing has changed, when things substantially have—is actually the deadliest sign of all.

Afterward he called me from California to say he wished I was there, which was what we both seemed to think I wanted to hear, but in that moment I realized it was not, that I did not in fact want to be in California at all, I wanted to be where I was: slightly but forgivably late for dinner with a friend across town, sprawled on my bed staring into the apartment across the street. This was a sight I now confronted more than any one person’s face and in truth I found it, in its total impenetrability, more compelling than the eyes and features I used to examine so often. Ryan said he had to go at the exact same moment I did. “I’ll call you later,” he said, and he didn’t, and I was surprised to discover how relieved I was by this, how much more I immediately liked him knowing that we were no longer in any way obligated to each other.

By now I hardly had any real obligations to anyone beyond whomever I promised to meet for a drink, go on a walk with, have over for a meal. I had expected to feel unmoored in the absence of a major commitment, but instead I felt flush with time, the very best kind of currency. I dispensed it freely to the people whose company I most appreciated, and in a very limited way to everyone else. I found this significantly more fulfilling—in reality it made me far less lonely — than I had when all the free hours of my day were accounted for, pre-allocated, in large part, to someone else.

+

On the days when the past sneaks up on me in a song or smell or unanticipated flash of nostalgia, on those occasions when I cannot help looking back, it is difficult not to be upset with myself for how I spent the first couple years of this decade and the last few of the previous one. I was frivolous with my time and money and body and energy during what could feasibly be the only period in my life when my time and money and body and energy are wholly mine and unshared.

By some combination of fortune and miracle, I managed to remain employed the whole time, avoid major financial trouble, and not get pregnant, in spite of expending the absolute minimum effort to prevent any of these undesirable outcomes. Perhaps it is as simple as this: there are periods in life when this is the most you can hope for, the absence of select failures, rather than solid accomplishments.

It is good to have this knowledge but what’s better still is exiting that kind of period and entering, by a similar combination of luck and chance, a new one.

Lucy Morris is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Manhattan. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Brighton Beach. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Images by Louise Bourgeois.

"Watching the Fires Waltz Away" - Damon Albarn (mp3)

"The Marvelous Dream" - Damon Albarn (mp3)