you are walking some sidewalk and the humidity covers you like a warm blanket just like you described to me. after everything has happened, i wonder now if you stole that line from someone else. everything is warm and sticky and humid but not sticky sweet. there is no saccharine here, no, not somewhere so close to disneyworld and yet so far from a god you don’t bow to. everywhere are things that remind you of me. license plates of snowbirds, lemons, joan didion books strewn on the ground. mac and cheese the wrong way. coffee crisps at publix. green shorts and black crop tops. deep laughter. hockey. farmers tans on the wrong type of girls. i know you’ll never find someone like me only because all my friends have innocuously said for years that there is no one quite like me, they can’t put their finger on it. there is no one who is the opposite of me. i am singular. i am less of a wildcard than i like to tout. but i am many things and harmless is not one of those words.
there is no one quite like you but for the wrong reasons. maybe i am in the northeast smoking a cigarette on a sidewalk and i think of you and how we used to smoke on your fire escape. there is no one like you because you try to be everything to yourself and everyone else, got lost in the chaos of it all and came out empty handed. i am older, just like you are older, but i got the life i wanted that i worked hard for. and you got the life you insist you want only because you can’t admit defeat. i took the L, baby. I took it and i cried and sobbed and came out of the other side with 2 million words handwritten and typed for you. but i made it to the other side. i got botox and i call manhattan home still. i walked bravely into joan didion’s new york and didn’t know what i was in for, but i ended up staying. just like she did. eight years. it flies by so fast.
florida, swampland, you think you’re ensconced but you’re just sinking. you avoid the city because of all the bad memories, but for you, all the bad memories are just of what we could have been before you ruined it. of course, you don’t see it like that. you say new york is full of elitists, there was no one worth being friends with in this city. and that is not untrue. i mean, i won’t argue with you about that. you wonder for years what i am up to. and i do too, frankly. but the difference is that i grew up and you stayed the same even though we both got older.
tenminutethoughts 