We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl.

Today at work I am told that I need to check myself. People find me crude, and harsh. I think I am just honest.

I like to think that he is still waiting for me, and when I move back to New York, we will run into each other on the street and fall in love again. I am not surprised to see Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” as I write this, but I take it as a sign that I need to read it again in a new context. I also need to finish thinking about my life in New York. I always start thinking about it, but I get frightened very easily, and think I might remember something that I purposefully forgot.

My life in New York smells like cannabis smoke being blown through a toilet paper tube stuffed with dryer sheets. It is rotting leaves and fresh garbage, men’s cologne that lingers in my bed long after its wearer has gone home. It feels like the cool breeze of the G train as I wait, warm and sticky, for hours because it is never on time. It feels like a seventeen year old’s ambition mixed with a seventeen year old’s disillusionment. But mostly it is like a dream. I am unsure it ever really happened. The only thing that I know still remains is the love I leave in Queens.

Perhaps because New York is in some kind of suspension of time and space where I can have everything I want. Or maybe I can have everything I want because it never lasts. He will only be mine as long as I am in the City. As soon as I leave we belong to other people.

When I move back to Buffalo from Brooklyn I do the following things with my body: I walk to the gas station and buy a bottle of iced tea and a pack of Camel 99’s. I smoke one. I get a pedicure. I apply eyeliner to my top lids. I smoke another cigarette. I drive to Starbucks. I pick up an Art Voice, read it, and then give it to a much older man that I think is cute. I toy with the idea of marrying him.