“I placed it on pause and made a cup of Nescafe, slipped on a hoodie, and went outside and sat on my stoop. It was a cold, clear night. A few drunken kids, probably from New Jersey, called out to me.”
All the time I feel different versions of myself splintering off.
For example, when I lived in New York, I was the drunken kid on the street. We weren’t wearing enough clothes for the season and I was obviously not from there. On nights we were bored or when we’d drunk enough whiskey, or both, we’d get impulsive and want to draw strangers in to our antics. Sometimes we’d yell up to parties; many times we just entered them. One Halloween, my friends and I heard loud, live jazz coming from open windows in an apartment complex in Bushwick. The door to the building happened to swing ajar for a moment and so we walked up the stairs and up two flights, following other people in costume until we opened into a large loft with a band in one corner, a photographer in the other. I remember there was a man playing trumpet, swinging the brass horn from side to side on beat. The four of us made our way to the dance floor—the party large enough to absorb four strangers without much notice—and then had our photograph taken, the night captured forever for us.
If I had stayed in the city, would I have become the older woman with her Nescafe, watching the world from the stoop? I imagine some ghost of myself has stayed on in New York, growing older, some exact copy of me, haunting the streets of Brooklyn. There’s a version of me in Madrid, growing older and more adept at Spanish, working in advertising and eating dinners of clover salad and tortilla espanola at ten at night. A version of me in Ohio, living down the street from parents, swimming at their pool every weekend and dating someone from high school that I’d run into years after we graduated. There’s a version of me that liked it so much in Hamilton, New York that I stayed to work and make art and bask in the green summers, who drives into the city every few months to see some friends.
You can't stay everywhere you leave a piece of your heart, sings the band Little Mazarn in their song “Vermont.” I saw them play one night in Charlottesville. It was early summer and I sat on a blanket on a hill across from the garage where the band played. Behind us, in the park, a man with no shirt on moved slowly as if he was dancing or doing tai chi, stopping every few beats to lift his hand to the sky. Their show happened just in between little late May showers. The man I was with at the time sent me a message later about how beautiful it had been: I mean, the half-naked guy commencing with his gods and not giving a damn who else’s gods looked on with judgement or amusement. There is a version of me who never turned away from that night or that life. I cried when they played that song. I told myself I was crying for Charlottesville, the fact that I’d eventually leave it, knowing some splinter of my heart would always be here. But I probably was crying for some other things, too, that I knew I’d need to leave soon. I was house sitting in a large old house downtown and I went home to it that night and slept badly, a fan roaring all night.
The kids ask Patti, what the fuck time is it? in the next line on this page of M Train. It is New Year’s Eve and they want to know if they’ve missed midnight. If you have to ask if you’ve missed it, you were probably having a better time than anyone sitting around waiting on a clock. If you are wondering if you missed it, you probably didn’t move naked and new into the next year. Yourself, part of your heart, is probably still in the last year, drunk, stumbling in sequins. That’s how I like to think of the parts of my heart I’ve left behind. I hope they’re happy, cold on a clear night, no shoes on like a teenager from New Jersey who has nothing yet to lose.
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