After Waking

Perhaps the hardest thing about sharing a bed with your sister is the mornings. The way the sun rises crooked through the blinds. How it starts at eye level, straight as an arrow. Gradually tracing your body like a prism. How your mom’s voice sounds when it enters the room, limbs akimbo. A siren, a death knell.

In the summer, sheets sticking to your body, the flimsy mattress covered in sweat. You and your sister wearing camisoles and chones. Carboard egg crates wedged underneath the box springs. Your mom used to sleep with you too, before you got too maduro. A bedroom without intrigue, without contact or touch. Nothing like in the telenovelas she watches every night.

When you’re older, it doesn’t matter whether you remember the dream or not. You could be an astronaut, a vigilante, burn up in a car crash. How you go to sleep just wishing it would stop. Every damp mark something you’ll need to scrub off by hand, burying your shame. You wonder why it is you’re coming undone, like a reptile shedding its skin.

In the winter, eating pupusas with your hands before crawling into bed. You and your sister back-to-back, the covers up to your necks. Your body curved like a leaf, a nautilus. What are you thinking about? you ask, knowing she’s still awake. Her fingers scouring the celular she hides from your mom. The image of her in his bed. Sheets rustling like animals, walls full of eyes. The candle in the glass on the floor burning low.

At the kitchen table, your mom holding your nose when you drink sopa. Acting out in school, just to feel her palm hot on your face. In bed, not knowing what to do with your hands. The way you reach for a blanket and brace against flesh. Your mom on the dingy futon just outside the room. How you beg her to sleep somewhere else. Her voice insistent through the wall: one day you’ll thank me for this, hijo, you just wait.

It was like that for years. Being loved and feeling nothing at all. The stray trace of an arm, a wisp of hair, an errant touch. Waking up with your arms laced around you like a strait jacket, hard to explain. The times you are first to notice the sheets, and, more often, the times you aren’t. Morning after morning, so far back there is no before.

Then, years later, sharing other beds. Lumpy pull-outs, tall headboards made of brass, four-posters like the ones you saw on TV. Strangers you’d meet one night and never see again. Amantes you would know intimately. Lying on your back, a body at your side, sheets pulled up to your neck. Tracing the room with your breath. The sun coming in crooked through the blinds. Learning what it is to love, and still feeling nothing.

Four Blind Men and a Chicken

The three of us had finished eating, but we kept picking at the small dishes in the center of the table – vinegar peanuts, stalks of garlic shoots, julienned carrots – well-past the point of being full, like we would at a restaurant in China. 

“There’s an old saying in Chinese,” Bo said, switching into Mandarin. “It’s called ‘Blind Men Touching an Elephant.’” He looked around the table until his eyes met mine. “Have you heard of it?” Before I could answer, Jay set down his chopsticks and sighed. 

“He’s always telling me stories like that,” he said, shaking his head jokingly. “Like I’m supposed to just know every chengyu in creation.” Of the thousands of chengyu – idiomatic proverbs – in Chinese, I’ve probably retained only a small handful of the ones I’ve learned over the years. Always consisting of four characters, they often mean nothing without explanation, and knowing the context for the story is crucial for interpreting the moral, much like an Aesop’s fable.

Jay made playful eyes at Bo, and I could tell he enjoyed the impromptu language lesson as much as me. Jay and Bo – one American, the other Chinese – had met in Beijing and had recently moved to Seattle. Spending time with them was like finding a little piece of China in the states – shoes stacked neatly by the door, a cast-iron wok hanging by the gas stove. It helped to stave off my occasional pining for life on the other side of the world, and I was grateful for it, if for no other reason than to reduce the things I felt missing in my new life.

“The saying goes like this,” Bo said, picking up a curlicue of spinach. “Four blind men come across an elephant in the woods.” The scene appeared to me more comical than the proverb probably intended – a line of men in tinted glasses and safari hats, goose-stepping through the forest. 

“When they approach the elephant, each of the men ends up touching a different part,” Bo continued. “The first man holds the tail and thinks it’s a snake. The second touches the elephant’s leg and says it’s a pillar. The third man holds the elephant’s ear and calls it a fan. Finally, the last man reaches for the elephant’s trunk and decides it’s a tube.”

I interrupted Bo to ask him what the word “tube” was in English. I was following the conversation but it had been months since I’d heard Mandarin, and I had plenty of questions: What were four blind men doing in the forest? How did they manage to get around? Wouldn’t an elephant object to being prodded that way? It all sounded pretty dangerous, but the moral of the chengyu had nothing to do with wilderness safety or animal cruelty.

“The truth is that none of the men were correct,” Bo said, sipping from a glass of wine. “We have a tendency to overexaggerate what we think we know. By focusing on a single part, we lose sight of the whole.” Jay and I nodded our heads. “I think you have a word for it too,” he said, switching back into English, “tunnel vision.” 

When I talk to friends about Seattle, I have a tendency to qualify my experience. Oftentimes, I tend to characterize it in opposition to somewhere else – New York, China – and how it doesn’t live up to those places in some way – the degree of exploration, the vibrancy of the social life. Even the more unsavory aspects of other places – the pollution or the commuting time – seem to get elevated by the same imbalanced appraisal. But holding fast to those small details over the big picture, much like the blind men, seems to miss the point. More often than not, it’s a defense mechanism; by speaking to what’s lacking in a given place, you emphasize what you hold dear: namely, that those friends – wherever they may be – are at the crux of my happiness, and can make any place feel like home.

Bo went to the fridge and took out a Tupperware of sliced watermelon for the table. I knew I needed to do a better job of broadening my perspective, to talk about my life in Seattle without being worried that friends outside the city would feel any less valued. But the whole time, my mind kept drifting back to the image in the chengyu: four men alone in the forest, with only each other and their hands at their disposal. Evidently, Jay was thinking about the same thing. 

“It’s like whoever came up with that chengyu knew why every gay club has a back room,” he said, which to anyone else would have come off as a non-sequitur. 

“A back room?” Bo asked, not seeing the connection between the statements.

“You know, where people go to feel like blind men,” he said, flashing a smile. “Groping around in the dark.” 

*

“I can’t remember the last time I went to a night club,” May said, at an outdoor patio in Capitol Hill later that evening. It was a perfect 70-degree night – a hallmark of the Seattle summer – and May was joined by two other friends, Neela and Barb, whom she’d known from when she used to live in the city. 

May, like Jay, was a friend of mine from college, and though she was from Seattle and had lived there well before I arrived, she was now based in Los Angeles and was just visiting for the weekend. She was wearing a loose-fitting blouse with sleeves down to her elbows, and had the assured, easy comportment of a transplant returning home for a limited time: gathering friends at her favorite places, with the assurance that almost no entreat would be too extravagant. I was certainly no exception. It had been years since I’d last seen May – at a birthday dinner in New York following my return from Beijing – and I was eager to make time to reconnect. 

On the ledge encircling the patio at the bar was an organized array of miniature plastic dinosaurs, their colors prismatic from the neon glinting off the Rainier advert. One of the dinosaurs had a Mattel car in its mouth; another was eating a Batman action figure, its sinewy arm snapped off beneath. I ordered a veggie burger that was mostly brioche and a $3 PBR – a meal that could have passed anywhere from Portland to Williamsburg. I had been trying of late to eat less meat, but in a way that defied easy categorization. I tried to explain my particular situation to Neela, a real, card-carrying vegetarian.

“It’s like being a freegan,” I said, taking a chunk out of the bun. “I can only buy and cook vegetarian, but I can eat anything as long as it’s going to waste.”

“Or as long as a friend orders it,” May butted in, glaring impishly. The night before the two of us went to a karaoke bar in my neighborhood and ended up eating at a Chinese restaurant past 2AM. In every direction, the streets glistened with purple light shimmering off the neon signposts, evoking the guise of Beijing. We joked that night about a couple at the table in front of us that appeared to vanquish an entire banquet, and then we proceeded to do the same. May ordered a beef chow fun that I easily had most of, before I stumbled home to my empty apartment, hoarse and still tipsy, the world aglow just outside my kitchen window.

It had been months since I’d been out that late. Courtney was away at a bachelorette party in Napa Valley for the weekend, so it was just me, left to my own devices. It didn’t hurt that May was in town – which made going out to see her a prerogative – but it spoke to a greater phenomenon too. I find that I do things alone that I’m less apt to do with a partner – playing at being single gives you license to be more unhinged, to jump more fearlessly into the unknown. It had shades of my former life in Beijing, when every day felt like a new adventure. When we’re in relationships, we have other forces to reconcile, tradeoffs and compromises to make. But when you’re single, there’s only you, and less of an ability or willingness to make excuses.

“It’s true,” I said, giving a nod to May. “But even if I don’t support the industrial food system, it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t still support my friend’s choices.” I smiled weakly, knowing full well the fallacy of my argument. But Neela simply nodded and went back to eating her Tuscan salad, the rest of us momentarily inured with our drinks.

“We should all get tattoos,” Barb perked up, having barely said a word for most of the evening. Barb had a small frame and a farmer’s tan with a wide-brimmed hat tipped over her face. “It’s like what friends do, you know, when they haven’t seen each other in a while.” 

We had each had a couple of beers at that point and I was feeling sluggish; I had intended to get dinner with May and call it an early night. Though I was familiar with the concept of friend tattoos, the actuality of it was still beyond my grasp. Whether it was fear or squareness that motivated me, I had never desired to get a tattoo. There was something garish, I thought, about displaying an image so permanently on one’s body, that it represented an unusual faith in one’s present self to have good judgment. But perhaps, I reasoned, the right opportunity just hadn’t presented itself to me yet. 

“Why not?” May replied, stretching her arms over her head. She tugged on the end of her sleeve and revealed a slim, band tattoo. On the outside of her arm, facing away, was an illustrated drawing of two bunnies hopping in a meadow. She turned her arm and, on the inside, were those same two bunnies, this time having sex. Neela and Barb laughed and drew the group’s attention to their respective tattoos: a ship with a billowing white mast; the outline of an oak tree, its roots extending down the length of Neela's forearm. 

“What about you?” Barb asked, staring straight at me. I had just met Barb and Neela that evening, but apparently that was enough to pass as friendship. I have an almost reverent aversion to impulsive decisions; it routinely takes me four trips to a department store to buy a single pair of pants. The decision to get a tattoo was far weightier, and yet, I was surprised by my own response. 

“Sure,” I said, hardly believing my own words. 

Barb got in her head the idea for a tattoo of a chicken – a baby chick – and started Googling images on her phone. She scrolled feverishly, pausing every so often to get the group’s reaction. We went back and forth for a while, wanting more of one element or less of another, trying to align our four viewpoints into a single, unified vision. The one we eventually landed on was simple, with a coquettish expression and a bright plume of yellow feathers. We all nodded like blind men, marveling at what we had created together. In tandem with the bunnies, it contributed to May’s vaguely Easter-themed tattoo, and was also somewhat ironic.

“You’re an animal rights activist now,” Neela told me, tugging at her striped top. “You would never hurt a baby chicken,” she said, smiling. “At least not personally.”

*

Before I knew it, the four of us were in Pioneer Square. There was a spry giddiness to our conversation, like we were underage college students scheming to buy booze. It was a Saturday night and the streets were a bizarre mix of nightclubs and homeless shelters, each with brightly-lit signs and their own set of loiterers, difficult to tell apart. On the corner, a convertible with its top down was paced a few yards from an alley with trash piled in an open dumpster. The tattoo parlor was called Phoenix but spelled with an f – the yearning of grandeur tempered by experience. 

The inside of the tattoo parlor looked like a teenager’s bedroom – a crooked shelf of DVDs, throw furs and assorted tool supplies, a bloated stack of external hard drives on the ground. There was a half-finished two-liter of Pepsi on the table, an Xbox controller with no batteries, and girlie posters that lined each of the four walls. We sat on a beat-up sofa, next to an Eeyore plush toy with a pierced septum. All at once, I felt my hands start sweating; I hadn’t factored the tattoo shop into my decision. I flipped through the photos in a portfolio lying on a side table: bloody daggers etched into necks, flaming skulls on shoulders. Neither had I considered where the tattoo would go. 

I looked around at May and wanted more than anything to validate our friendship. May and I had known each other for over a decade, and I was grateful that she came to Seattle to visit. I thought about how I learned to talk about Seattle in a way that was mindful of faraway friends, to explain that they were still loved in spite of the distance. There’s something to be said about the lengths friends are willing to go to memorialize a shared experience, to celebrate time together. But by making a judgment on one thing before understanding the whole context, we risked suffering from tunnel vision. The fact that we were getting tattoos for the hell of it felt reaching, like we had something to prove.

It took the better part of twenty minutes before the owner emerged from the back room, leaving us plenty of time to change our minds. Barb was the first to speak up.

“I had a premonition about this,” she whispered, sounding graver than I’d heard her. She seemed unperturbed with the fact that it had been her idea in the first place. “I think I’m out.”

Neela and I quickly followed suit. My rationality got the better of me. I couldn’t imagine making a split-second decision like that, picking a body part on the spot for a tattoo after having just barely decided on the design. What if, like the men with the elephant, I had gotten it wrong? I wondered how often this happened, a group of friends with blind ambition, arriving at a tattoo parlor only to suddenly change their minds. 

But, much to all of our surprise, May was undeterred; she wanted to get the tattoo alone. More even than to the people involved, she felt committed to the bird, to the manifestation of its many distinct pieces becoming whole.

“It’s perfect,” she decried, commenting on the owner’s sketch, before asking for more tweaks – the beak on the chick smaller, the body fatter. She sat down in the kind of leather chair you would find at a dentist’s office, the owner holding the needle like a drill. 

“This is really happening!” May exclaimed, as the needle made its first pass. I was nervous for her too, mouthing the same words in my head. But the needlework was smooth and unerring. The owner traced the outline of the bird in black ink and then used a different needle for the shading. It was mesmerizing to watch the image come alive with each injection of color, the smudges of blood after every flurry of shading. The whole process looked so smooth, like a street artist drawing a caricature in Times Square, only with May’s skin as a proxy for canvas. 

By the end, May’s skin was red and puffy, but the owner assured her that it would be a brilliant yellow once the swelling went down. When he was finished, he wrapped May’s arm in saran wrap like a leftover sandwich and gave her a few packets of Vaseline.

“How did it feel?” I asked, like a gossiping school child. 

“Like being scratched incessantly, but worse,” May said. “Like a cat with its claws burrowed deep under your skin.” I was amazed that the whole time her face didn’t register any pain. Neela turned to me in the doorway. 

“Did it make you want to get a tattoo yourself?” she asked, as we made our way out into the chilly night air.

“Less,” I said, and then, thinking longer, “and more.”

*

The next morning I slept in, and it was almost noon before I texted May about the tattoo.

“It’s healing well,” she said, “I’ve been applying the cream the guy gave me.” There was an extended ellipsis in the thread. “Only, it looks a little more evil than anticipated.” 

She texted me a photo of the back of her arm. True to the owner’s word, the swelling had gone down, and the feathers were a bright yellow. But I could see what May meant: the chick’s eye was white and appeared to be glowering, a marked change from the sketch the owner had drawn up the night before.

“It’s maybe a ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ situation,” she said, with only a hint of grief. I was transfixed by the image of the bird, holding my breath as I imagined it materializing somewhere on my body too.

I replied back: “Maybe we’re all still groping in the dark.”

We Write Our Own Endings

In my dream, I was standing in my pajamas in front of the giant clock in Grand Central. The station was crowded – I don’t think I’ve ever seen it any different – and people were streaming in from all directions: dismal commuters, men with pleated pants, toddlers in strollers, bridge-and-tunnelers clutching aluminum tall-boys. I was a child again and carrying vegetables in my arms, zucchini and artichoke as immaculate and inert as the cornucopia of fruit atop Carmen Miranda’s head. It felt like I was standing at the center of a compass, with paths that forked in every direction – only I couldn’t decide which way I was going. One week had passed since I moved to Seattle, and already I seemed to be moving somewhere else.

This preoccupation with movement should not have come as any great surprise. My girlfriend Courtney and I drove to Seattle from New Haven last August to move into our new apartment. She stayed out there, but for the next six months I lived in New Haven, I found myself cleaving to an unrooted existence. I sublet a room in a crumbling brick house with five college juniors next to a 24-hour falafel restaurant. The restaurant’s exhaust fan blew directly into my bedroom window and the smell of rotating lamb permeated my every waking moment. The room had shag carpeting and a twin mattress, and I stowed away a clean set of dishes for every time I made food. In December, I bought one of my roommates his first legal drink; I graduated from college the same year he celebrated his bar mitzvah.

Without Courtney, it appeared, the idea of home was illusory. I left the house before my roommates woke up and came back most nights after midnight. On weekends, I traveled up and down the Eastern seaboard like a freight conductor, oscillating each week between friend’s couches in Boston and New York and Washington, DC. It was a perpetual (and premature) state of goodbye as only I could relish; each goodbye felt more powerfully sad than the last. And yet, I thought it would make the eventual leaving easier, trying to hone and perfect it like it was a stage on the path to enlightenment.

My roommates almost never saw me; save for my time in the office at work, I barely left a shadow. The travel helped, but it never completely staved off the feeling of loneliness. My mind was with Courtney, in Seattle, but my body was always somewhere else. I couldn’t seem to get used to the idea of sitting still. On the day I eventually moved out, I polished off a can of Spaghetti-O’s from a microwaveable cup, my last ode to young adulthood, to long distance relationships, to living a bachelor’s life. 

I bought a one-way ticket to Seattle for February. I was both nervous and excited, eager to finally make good on my promise to leave but still not entirely emotionally prepared to go through with it. I was born in New York and had lived on the East Coast for the majority of my life. It was where I had family and friends and an entire life. In Seattle, I had a girlfriend and an apartment, but almost no friends and little idea how I would spend my days. There was something about being ungrounded that made it easy to question everything. For months, I asked myself if I was making the right choice. In spite of all my griping about the city – how it’s changed in both huge and imperceptible ways – New York still felt like home. 

It didn’t help that my last trip to New York was through Grand Central. For four years, it had been a perennial waypoint, the confluence of two worlds. On one end were the tracks that led to New Haven, where I’d lived on and off for the past five years, and on the other, the station doors that spilled onto the streets of Manhattan, the city where I grew up. By the time I woke up from my dream, I never did find my way out of Grand Central. Every step I took led me right back to the same spot under the giant clock. I might have only considered those two directions, but in reality, the destination could have been anywhere, as enigmatic and far away as one of the clusters of stars painted above the station like a Venetian ceiling.

For the two years when Tyra and I dated, there was a sense of anticipation every weekend I took the train into Grand Central. New York was a retreat, a place to escape the affectations and provincialities of New Haven. But it was also deeply familiar. Pulling into Grand Central on Friday night felt like baptism, like rediscovering myself. As long as I visited enough, I could indulge in the fantasy that I was a part of the city, and that life ceased to exist there without me in it. But Sunday night always brought me back to reality, when each week I trudged the two hours home to New Haven, the bright lights of the city retreating against the twilight. 

But Grand Central holds other significance too. On Halloween, the day Tyra and I broke up, we had the talk there, on the benches in the lower-level dining concourse. It was awful. And not just awful in the way that ending a relationship is always awful, but it was the spectacle of it, how public the whole thing was. For months afterward, I couldn’t think about New York without replaying the whole terrible scene in my head: the reasons why we should still be together, the reasons why we were destined to fall apart. The two became linked, and deep down, part of me was apprehensive about going back. Without knowing it, New Haven began to feel like its own kind of retreat, an escape from a former life, the life I’d left behind. 

On my last day in New York, I walked through my old neighborhood with my best friend Sam. I’ve known him since middle school, and he knows my propensity for nostalgia better than almost anyone. We started with the water tower by the Gowanus Canal and headed north on Smith Street, passing Court and then Clinton, until eventually we got to Carroll, the street I grew up on. The whole time we talked about how we would miss this feeling, the wandering and discovery that seemed to typify so much of the time we spent in New York together. Sam mentioned how sudden this all felt, and I agreed. Despite knowing for months that I was leaving, there was no good way to prepare for it. 

Sam was with me for my first big move in 2009, at a 24-hour Burger King in Bay Ridge the night before my first flight to China. It certainly felt like I was leaving New York then, too, but in a lot of ways I knew it wasn’t forever. I was 22 and newly graduated and craved for the chance to create an experience that was entirely my own, knowing full well it was only temporary. Even though I went to college in the Midwest, I had always been back to New York for summer breaks and holidays. In the back of my head, I knew that New York would be there for me when I returned. 

But this move felt somehow more permanent. Seattle was a place I could start a life, and Courtney, someone I could start a life with. Reliving all those memories with Sam made it that much harder to imagine leaving. But memory is dangerous because it paints a static picture. The reality is that it is impossible to reclaim a time that has passed. Even more, there is something valuable about leaving a place, for good and bad. Had I never left New York for China back in 2009, I would never have known that there were things I did miss about New York. The irony, of course, is that you appreciate somewhere most only once you’ve left it. It’s as if you need new experiences to ascribe meaning to, to allow time to pass so that you can appreciate all of those old memories anew. 

On my last night in New York, we went out for drinks, and it was after midnight when we pulled up to MacDougal Street to get pizza. There wasn’t any parking, so Will and Katie double-parked and stayed in the car while Sam and I went in. The line was long, but it was warm out for February, and no one seemed to care. There were girls in knee-high boots, fraternity brothers in matching striped shirts, a basset hound leashed to a hydrant sniffing around in the trash. I was exhausted and nearly sober, out past midnight for the first time in a month. All around, the noxious smell of Axe body spray, Justin Bieber blaring from an iPhone speaker, the comparing of fake ID photos. We were two people from the front when it finally dawned on me: Sam and I were the oldest people there. 

When I was younger, I couldn’t understand the passing of time: how fads fell out of favor, the way habits were made and lost, why we stopped seeing certain friends. Suddenly, I felt like I was asking that same question again. A drunk guy from outside barged in and started yelling and asking for napkins, tomato sauce running down the length of his arm. “There’s a box by the door,” one of the cashiers droned, gesturing a finger, as if this was not even the first time this hour that someone had asked. New York is a young city or it’s an old city, where people go to make their dreams or return long enough later to deny ever having had them in the first place. The question was: how did we find ourselves on the other side of it? I turned to Sam, and I could read it on his face too: even if I did stay in New York, how long could we really do this?

When we got back to the car, Will started asking me questions, the kind you ask someone who is leaving a place he loves and doesn’t know the next time he will return. What will you miss most about the city? he said, peering at me in the rearview mirror. Images cycled through my mind like a zoetrope. The Cyclone in Coney Island. Sneaking into movies at the Regal. Staying up in Tribeca until sunrise. Walking to the tree in Rockefeller Center with a thermos of brandy. I thought of all the missed connections, the people I would never meet. And then, the pervasive fear that this city was a part of me, and how there would come a time, months or years from now, when it wouldn't be and I would no longer be a New Yorker. 

Seeing me struggle with the question, Will turned around to face me in the backseat. What will you miss the least? This time, I had an answer ready. I remembered all the hours I had been in Grand Central, a routine so ordinary people spend their entire lives doing it. And how even now, years later, I can’t think of Grand Central without remembering the last time I was there with Tyra, the moment she turned to look at me before streaming through the turnstile doors. 

If there was a silver lining about moving to Seattle it was this: live somewhere long enough, and everything gets imbued with meaning. There was a part of me that would always miss the drama and the feelings associated with nostalgia. But in some ways, I was ready to leave New York. I liked the uncertainty of starting out somewhere new, the challenge of making a place your own. Seattle was a blank slate of stories where nothing yet had been written. Every place, every experience, and every moment would become an entirely new memory. I thought about the breakup with Tyra and how, months later, I met Courtney in New Haven. Sometimes we need to write our own endings, if only so that new beginnings are possible.

Sam and I said goodbye, as we always have, on the corner of 6th and 8th Street, where I take the subway down to Brooklyn. As much as we could over the years, we parted ways here, whether it was after a long night out, or in the morning, a few blocks from his parent’s apartment where I crashed the night before. This time, not knowing what else to say, we just stood outside the station. It was late and the wind had picked up, but we stayed there, quietly, trying to take in every last detail, not sure when we would have the opportunity again. I didn’t know yet whether my new neighborhood would have the same crooked sidewalks, tall oaks in metal planters, the streetlights that framed the street like a noir film. The same way I didn’t know why after so many evenings that ended exactly this way, I would inevitably remember this one the most.

They tell you in hindsight you miss all moments equally, but you miss the last of anything most of all. The last time Tyra turns to leave you at Grand Central. The last time you take the D train back to Brooklyn, counting the steps to your mom’s apartment. The last time you fall asleep on the pull-down sofa, dreaming of the city, of Seattle, the new life that lies ahead.

Blood Bank

It’s quitting time on Friday at the Red Cross. When the boy arrives on his bike, it has stopped raining but the roads outside are still wet. There is a single nurse drawing blood and a burly man by the backdoor stacking blood packets into a cooler. The room is small and, at seventeen, the boy is the youngest person there. Ahead of him are a heavyset man in his 50s, a woman with a sleeve tattoo, and a tall businessman in a suit. All of them look as though they’ve been waiting a long time. 

It’s a warm day and there is no air conditioning. The boy remembers the time when his mom was in the hospital, how hot and sticky everything felt to him too. He can see his bike chained to the tall oak tree by the front entrance. He considers leaving right then and there, but the receptionist taps him on the shoulder. “It’ll only be a minute, hon,” she explains, the name “Patricia” written in curvy script on the nametag affixed to her gown. 

But it is not a minute, and the boy grows impatient. “Two Princes” and “Working for the Weekend” fade in and out over the scratchy FM station. The businessman unfolds a newspaper and the boy cranes his neck, wanting to think about anything else. The nurse is surrounded at the center of the room by four patients on collapsible metal stretchers. There is a shock of cords and clear plastic tubes connecting the patients’ arms to blood bags like deep crimson tentacles.

The boy thinks that doing this will help someone, in the same way that someone wasn’t able to help his mom. But pretty soon, his neck is damp with sweat and nerves. Just then, Patricia comes around with a stack of lifestyle magazines like a stewardess on a long flight. She is humming the melody to “Genie in a Bottle,” which trickles in over the tinny speakers. The boy snatches a magazine without looking at the cover and she winks at him, like she’s punctuating the end of a sentence.

“I brought these from home,” Patricia says, a pair of dimples glinting on either side of her cheeks. She looks down at the boy’s lap. “That one’s my favorite,” she says with a grin. “The only problem is I can’t read it without getting hungry.” She winks at him again, and the boy is not sure if it’s a nervous tick or something else.

The back page of the magazine has a feature story entitled, “Marathon Runners Share Their Guiltiest Pleasures.” The boy thinks it will be about bungee jumping or strip clubs, but really it’s about eating low-fat ice cream after races and sometimes adding chocolate syrup. One runner confesses to a jelly doughnut after an ultramarathon. Another says he’s vegan but secretly enjoys it when restaurants serve him butter on his toast.

Time passes slowly. When it is finally his turn, the boy is led to a table shielded from the rest of the waiting area by a cardboard screen that resembles the trifold boards at a science fair. The nurse asks him if he faints easily, if he has lived outside of the country for at least five years, if he has ever been diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob. The boy shakes his head. The nurse tells him that his blood pressure is low and asks him if he takes an iron supplement before breakfast. He nods. He has never given blood before but it seems like the right thing to say. 

When the needle goes in, the boy screws up his face so he doesn’t have to see. He is lying on one of the four stretchers at the center of the room, his legs close together. His veins are hard to find and the nurse shifts the needle around, this way and that. The boy starts to panic now, fidgeting in the seat, going pale. The nurse sighs impatiently and hands the boy a rubber ball that is only slightly smaller than his fist.

“Squeeze every five seconds,” she tells him. The boy is using all of his energy to count the seconds in his head and clench his fist like he is about to punch. For a moment, he thinks he sees Patricia staring back at him, her eyes magnified by her glasses, a pink handkerchief sticking up from her pocket. He is gazing drowsily when the music fades, and he doesn’t notice when the nurse takes away the ball and the needle and raises his arm straight up to the ceiling.

“What would you like?” Patricia asks him, when it is all over. On the table are Lorna Doone and pretzels and 8-oz. cans of Ocean Spray. The boy has a piece of blue surgical tape wrapped around his elbow but his blood packet is not stacked with the others in the back. “Cranberry juice,” he says softly.

“You really tried your best,” she says, nodding her head. “That’s what really matters.” Patricia spreads the snack packets out across the table and touches the boy on the shoulder. “Everyone always complains about high blood pressure, but no one tells you low blood pressure is just as bad.” The boy runs his eyes over the Lorna Doone and pretzels, but there is a sinking feeling in his chest and he doesn’t feel at all like eating.

Patricia, determined, pulls out a half-dozen cans of cranberry juice from a crate in the back and stacks them onto the table. “This will be our little secret,” she whispers, a finger pressed to her lips. She keeps winking at him and smiling, like they are accomplices in a bank heist. 

By the oak tree in the parking lot, the boy takes the cans from his arms and starts to shove them inside the bicycle helmet dangling off of his handlebars. It has begun to drizzle again and the sun is low in the sky. The boy is still light-headed but he moves quickly, hoping that no one nearby will see him. He manages to get all eight cans crammed between the chin straps when Patricia careens through the double doors.

“I can’t let you leave like that,” she says, visibly out of breath, her nametag bobbing up and down on her chest. “I was watching you from the window.”

The boy looks up from the cans piled like contraband in the helmet, but doesn’t meet her eyes. “It’s no big deal,” he says shortly, “I bike like this all the time.” He undoes the lock and throws a leg over the bike frame. Patricia shakes her head.

“It’s a Friday night and people will be drinking,” she says. “The roads aren’t safe.” The boy scrunches up his shoulders and sighs. He makes a move like he is about to leave.

“Look,” she tells him gravely, “I’m a mother.” Her eyes dart from the boy’s arm to the helmet. “They call me ‘Paranoid Pat,’” she says, placing a hand over her heart. “I don’t like to see blood.”

The Subway Map in the Bathroom

It’s 9PM on Christmas Eve and you arrive at Tae’s door with a six-pack of Guinness, a phone charger, and a pair of fleece-lined pajamas. Her studio is a third-story walk-up, located halfway between a billiards bar and a 24-hour bodega on the Lower East Side. From the outside, it has the kind of dense granite façade that could almost require a doorman, but inside, the stairs creak, and the peeling paint on the banister has gathered in a pool of pastel green on the landing.

“Hope you don’t mind, but I got bored waiting,” Tae says, motioning to the bottle of scotch on the counter when you open the door. She is wearing a pair of checker-print shorts and a loose-fitting sweater that reaches her thigh. Her long hair is tied up in a bun, and she fixes you with a look that suggests neither excitement nor displeasure at your presence. “Glasses are in the cabinet. Knock yourself out.”

Tae is a friend of a friend. You’ve seen each other on a handful of occasions and get along fine but until now have never hung out on your own. Had it not been for Christmas, and the unhappy fact that you are both alone, you would hardly have any reason to see her now. But there are few emotions more compelling than misery, in a city – bewitched by winter mirth – that is even less forgiving during the holidays.

“Thanks,” you say as you step inside, setting down your bag and shoes by the door. Her apartment is small in a way that suggests closeness and a sincere lack of belongings. The front door opens directly into the kitchen; her fridge, upon a quick scan of its contents, doesn’t have enough ingredients to make an omelet. 

“I’m not much of a cook,” Tae says, intuiting your response before you can speak. You think about taking each bottle of beer out of the cardboard sheath and giving it its own place on the shelf, but decide against it. There is an unassuming, no-nonsense charm about Tae. She grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis and moved to Manhattan after college. When you asked her a few months ago why she chose New York, she said that she was tired of constantly fielding questions from people who had never met an Asian person before.

“It was like having to represent all Asian people, everywhere, all the time,” she told you, at a birthday dinner for a mutual friend at Fontana’s in the fall. “This may sound really fucking idealistic but I just thought I’d find more people here like me.”

It sounded so much like a dozen other “Why New York?” stories you’d heard that you could practically fill in the rest of the details yourself: daughter of Korean immigrants, only Asian American in her high school class, full ride to state college. In reality, your own story is pretty similar, having grown up the only son of a Puerto Rican mother in Cincinnati. But the reason why you came to New York is far more naïve, and you were thankful in that moment that Tae didn’t think to ask.

“I only applied for jobs here, and when I got one, I bought a one-way ticket and never looked back,” Tae said. The lights at Fontana’s dimmed in anticipation of the post-dinner crowd. You and Tae were crowded at the end of a long table. Outside of the host, you didn’t recognize anyone else at the restaurant. Tae propped both her elbows up and looked lazily at the ceiling. She wasn’t self-conscious about not wearing any make-up, but you noticed her features right away. There was a terse directness to the way she spoke; having spent so long being questioned, she didn’t seem to care what other people thought of her. 

“I wanted to stop pretending to be someone I wasn’t,” she said, staring straight into your eyes. She stretched her arm out across the table and took your hand in hers. “I just wanted to be.”

*

“Sorry the trains took forever,” you say, as you close the fridge and open a beer.
 
“It’s a holiday for Christ’s sake,” she says. “It’s a miracle they run at all.”

Inside Tae’s studio, it is remarkably warm despite the weather. You are still wearing your coat, which is not warm enough for December, but too warm for the kitchen, so you take it off and place it in Tae’s outstretched arms, who slumps it, along with her sweater, over the lip of the couch. 

“Shall I give you the grand tour?”

Out past the kitchen is a small bathroom. In front of you, a black leather couch and a coffee table. And directly to your left, Tae’s bedroom. She props the door open and you poke your head into the unlit room. In the dark, you can see the outline of a wardrobe, a made bed, an old window screen she repurposed to hold jewelry. The bed is piled with pillows that nearly enclose it on four sides like a sandbox. You feel a knot in the pit of your stomach, like looking at something you shouldn’t see.

Tae takes a seat on the sofa in the living room and props her legs up on a chair. As she slides down, her shirt rides up to reveal a band of tawny skin just above the waist. She doesn’t offer you a seat and you don’t want to appear impatient, so you sit down, gingerly, like you are submerging into hot water. 

“What shall we watch?” she asks, as she places a laptop on the coffee table and takes a sip from one of your beers. You decide on a James Bond movie she has already seen (“Like I need an excuse to watch Daniel Craig”). She smiles, and you notice for the first time that one of her teeth is chipped. You suspect it might be a point of embarrassment, the same reason she used to introduce herself as Tyra and not Tae when she was younger, so you say nothing. You shift your weight on the couch but still arrange yourself next to her like two pieces on a chess board—adjoining squares incapable of touch. 

The week before when you called it was unseasonably warm, so you were at Bryant Park with your phone out and no gloves. You were doing the thing you always do when you get bad news: walk. You made it to Midtown from Harlem already and only stopped there to use the bathroom. Inside the park, there were dozens of holiday shops selling scented candles, knit scarves, picture frames, New York kitsch. The ice rink was lit up, and couples were bracing against each other and laughing, skating around the outer ring near the wall. 

You forgot when you had even exchanged numbers with Tae, so when she picked up the phone, you were both a little surprised. You skipped the small talk and told her that you and Raquel had broken up. You said that your plan to spend the holidays with her family in Westchester had fallen through, and that it was too late now to buy a ticket to Cincinnati. It all came out much calmer than you expected, like you were narrating the plot to a story. You didn’t really know why you were telling her any of this. Your lips were moving but it felt like you were watching yourself talking into the phone from somewhere else.

Tae had never met Raquel, and there weren’t many people you knew in the city to begin with. You could almost hear the gears turning in her head, trying to figure out how to respond. The last time you saw her at Fontana’s, Tae was wearing a white blouse with the collar undone, a braid of hair wrapped across her neck. You pictured her now, her eyes skimming the menu, the camber of her lips, the way her hand slid over yours at the restaurant. All at once, you asked her what she was doing for Christmas. For a moment, the receiver was cold.

“Bring a change of clothes,” she said, finally. “You can spend the night.”

*

By the time you’re close enough to touch, James Bond is tied to a wooden chair in the middle of a large, empty room. He had escaped from a train chase only to be captured by a group of men and brought to an abandoned warehouse. As he is being held inside, you feel yourself sinking into the leather plush of the couch. You glance at Tae out of the corner of your eye and forget for a minute what it is you're doing there. Tae is on her second beer and you trade in yours for a glass of scotch. There is a part of you that is anxious, worried for his fate, even though after so many movies you can predict the ending before it happens.

When Tae sits up abruptly on the couch and cranes her neck toward you, you think that this is the moment she is going to kiss you. You have been preparing yourself for this, in spite of the fact that you have been sitting in near silence for a half-hour and still haven’t made contact with any part of her. You turn toward her instinctively, like a flower facing the sun, steadying your arm against the back of the couch. But instead she leans in to your ear, like she is about to tell you a secret.

“I should tell you now that my bedroom is like a college dorm,” Tae says, as matter-of-factly as reciting a grocery list. “The walls are so thin that I can hear everything that my next-door-neighbor does, and vice-versa.” A grin appears across her face, and you realize that it is meant more for your peace of mind than her own. 

You think of your own apartment then, the two-bedroom you share with three other guys in Harlem, like boarders, and how you were too embarrassed to ever let Raquel see it. It was the only place you could afford when you moved to New York six months ago. There is no heat in your room and when it rains you have to put buckets underneath the ceiling to catch water. But you figured you would be spending most of your time at Raquel’s anyway, so you didn’t really think much about it. You remember Raquel’s apartment in Chelsea with the marble counters and the hard-wood floors, the queen-sized bed with a headboard, the fridge full of organic produce. 

The villain in the Bond movie is shouting something now, and you tilt your head to try to make out the words. Tae slides the coffee table back and gives you a firm look, like she means business. You’re still weighing the pros and cons of being there, when she starts in abruptly. 

“It can make situations like these uncomfortable,” Tae says. She motions to her bedroom and then again to the couch where you both are still sitting. “So we’re just going to have sex out here.”

You don’t know if you’ve feigned surprise or are genuinely caught unaware. The scotch has a strong effect on you, and it takes you a minute to process what she said. You are still wearing your bewilderment plainly on your face, and Tae seizes on it immediately. 

“Well, honestly, what did you expect?” she asks, placing her hands on her hips. “You really didn’t think we were going to fuck?”

*

You lament, for a moment, the days before college, when just going over to a girl’s house was an accomplishment. You had to make up some excuse to your mom – that basketball practice ran late or that you had to meet for a group project – and at best you could do it once a month, so that she didn’t start to get suspicious. The girls you liked in high school lived in ranch houses in the suburbs, away from the petty crime and the projects, and drove their dad’s SUVs to school. They liked to ask you questions, like whether or not you knew how to salsa, and how to pronounce words for them in Spanish. You liked them because they wore lip gloss in flavors like cherry and root beer, and had parents who always seemed to work late. 

You spent hours with them, applying all your wit and charm to look enticing, hoping it might lead somewhere. And then, there were the times when you were actually alone with a girl, your mind racing the whole time. Maybe she hadn’t started talking about another guy yet, but she hadn’t shown you any special interest either. Your eyes kept shifting around the room, taking in the antique Armoires, the gilded-edged rugs, the silk blinds. 

You asked yourself the question are we going to do something with such monotony you could have sworn you were keeping time. If you were lucky, you might make out on the couch until you heard the sound of a car pulling into the drive, and then start in on grammar drills like you were one of her tutors. Your clothes stayed on and the cushions hardly budged; there was a certain thrill to it, a perverse sense of denial. 

You are not prudish about sex, despite the fact that you grew up in a Catholic household and for a long time believed you would save it for marriage. At Ohio State, half the girls never considered sleeping with you because you’re brown, and the other half came on so strong you could have sworn you were Mario Lopez. But even now, you sometimes feel like you have to be more complicit than you are. Most of your friends wouldn’t think twice about sleeping with a girl they had just met. But you knew early on that you were too meek to be a lady-killer. More often than not, you have to act the part, like a tough guy on a soap opera. Something always holds you back.

Tae is shuffling around the living room now, converting the leather couch into a single horizontal slab, like a dark plank in the sea of her apartment. She is ferrying bedding and pillows from her bedroom, the corners of the sheets dragging along the floor. Not only is Tae’s bedroom not soundproof, you realize, but neither is the rest of her apartment. With the movie off, you can hear Christmas music pouring in clearly from the bodega downstairs, the melodies of Nat King Cole and Doris Day, one after the other, in the dimly-lit room. 

You used to watch holiday movies with your mom on Christmas Eve in Cincinnati – Rudolph and Charlie Brown and the Snow Miser on primetime network marathons. It was never anything special, but even in college, you would never miss coming home for the holidays. The two of you would eat empanadas on plastic trays, on the lumpy green futon in the living room with the space heater wedged between you. The TV antenna was broken a lot, so sometimes the shows would come in fuzzy or in black and white or with the sound turned off. It hardly mattered how many times you’d seen them, it felt like you could watch those movies forever. 

“What does it matter if we don’t have a tree,” your mom used to say, “or that the kids in the movies always have two parents?” She’d sometimes say it in English, too, for emphasis. “I know that you’re going to figure it out,” she said. "With a wife and kids, what it means to be a family.”

Tae finishes adjusting the sofa bed and lies down sideways on it, her head propped up on a pillow. She stares at you now with a look that suggests both self-assuredness and impatience, like she’s the swim team captain and you’re the last person to get in the pool. Your response comes off more puzzled than excited. Still looking at the white wall behind her that used to be a backrest, there is a part of you that wonders what she sees in you. 

She motions you over with a flourish of her legs. It has already been a week since Raquel called to break it off, but it seems to hit you all at once. You want to have sex at this moment the same way you did when you first lost your virginity – to prove in some stupid, insignificant way that you are wanted. 

*

Raquel was the first girl you met in college. She was in your freshmen English seminar, and you talked after class about Sandra Cisneros and Junot Diaz, and how you wished that there were more Hispanic writers in the mainstream. Before you met her, you didn’t think there was such a thing as a bookish Latina – her in the horn-rimmed glasses, a Bel Canto novel tucked under her arm. But at the same time, she could pull off a crop top and leggings, sing along to every verse of Selena. One minute she was talking power to the people and the next about the best wine pairings with cheese. She made it look so effortless, having a foot in each world. 

It was a quality unlike anything you’d ever known, and yet, you had spent your whole life trying to find it. That’s when you knew. You courted her for months, didn’t give up even when she told you she had a boyfriend back home in New York who could bench-press you in his sleep. You started getting meals with her after class. You surprised her just because, left flowers for her when she came back from break. You wrote messages on slips of paper that you left underneath her door, starting off with just a few words, gradually ballooning into letters, hot and fast as confessions. 

She was different from the girls you used to like in high school. She made you her grandma’s pollo guisado recipe in the tiny kitchen in her dorm room. She talked like you did, in two tongues, hardly aware when one ended and the other began. The first time you made love, she pressed her hips into you and arched her back, bracing her arms against your shoulders. You wanted to say something, how invincible you felt in that moment, but her eyes were closed and her body tensed, her limbs softly easing into yours.

“I don’t really like kissing,” Tae says, as you touch your lips to hers. “You’d be surprised how many people have no idea what they’re doing.” She has a calm kind of detachment, like she knows what she wants but has little riding on the outcome. You are still waiting for a sign that anything you’re doing isn’t wrong. She reaches her hands down the length of your torso and undoes the buckle on your belt. You concede, and only when you close your eyes again do you realize that you’re still thinking about Raquel.

On weekends, you and Raquel used to drive out to watch movies in Cedar Park. It was forty minutes from Columbus, but felt exactly like the white neighborhoods you sometimes visited in high school with its verandas and fountains, the paved carriageways lined with plants. Raquel had grown up in Westchester and found the whole area comforting. It always surprised you a little bit, to know that someone like her could still call a place like that home. 

You let yourself dream sometimes about settling down in New York with her, of buying a brownstone in Brooklyn with a front yard and a wrought-iron fence. You had never been to New York, but at the Regal in Cedar Park they sometimes showed movies like When Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail. You agonized over how the streets looked, wanted to know them intimately, like New York was a place you belonged. You thought about how these perfect strangers, in spite of all the chaos and spectacle of the city, had managed to fall in love, and how one day you would go to New York with Raquel and fall in love too.

Tae pulls her shirt over her head and climbs on top of you. She is wearing a black bra with a clasp at the front that holds her small frame in place. She is holding you now through the thin layer of your boxers and you reach for her too, starting with her waist, along the softness of her stomach, and settle on the smooth recess just beneath her chest. You touch her body for the first time, as if navigating a new city.

“Do you have a condom?” she asks, as you slide your hand inside the ridge of her bra. You make a mental note of the items in your bag by the door and shake your head. You fantasize for a moment about how your kids might look, cocoa skinned and almond eyed, if Tae were pregnant with your child. 

“Sometimes I don’t even know why I try,” Tae sighs, twisting herself off of you and wrangling up her bra straps. “My friends keep telling me not to bother with hopeless men.”

You wonder why she doesn't have any condoms herself but quickly forget it. You decide to overlook this slight, in the same way you choose to ignore comments about your accent or the way cops seem to single you out for routine stops in your neighborhood in Cincinnati after dark. Your mind goes blank, and all you can hear is the sound of “Silver Bells” filling the silence in the room.

“The bodega should sell them,” you suddenly say out loud. 

Lying on your back, you map out the proposed journey in your head. You put on your jacket and walk the three flights downstairs. The cold air stings your face and the lights of the East Village are just visible in the distance. A decade ago you’d run the risk of getting mugged or worse, but now there’s just empty chatter and the dull glow of the bodega’s red and yellow awning on the corner.

You slip through the clear plastic curtains and scan the aisles. The area behind the counter sells cigarettes, toiletries, and lottery tickets, and there is a fridge full of popsicles by the front. You glance over the packages, craning your neck so as not to appear anxious, and eventually settle on a bright red package that claims to be made for “His and Her Pleasure.” For minutes after, you stare intently at a shelf of Famous Amos and Wrigley’s, like you came in for something else.

When you set the condoms on the counter, the man who rings you up laughs so hard you think that you picked up a box of Tampons by mistake. When you look up, you realize that he is the same cashier, dressed in a beater and Levi’s, who sold you the six-pack of Guinness less than an hour ago. 

“Fues rápido, vato,” he says, shooting you a wide grin. “What, was she just up there naked like that, waiting for you?”

When you buzz in and walk back upstairs, you set the box of condoms down at the foot of the sofa. You take off your shirt and lie down on the couch, but something feels different. The living room is bare and unfamiliar again and you are full of doubt. You imagine Raquel, who loved making out to Amelie, who wanted you to touch her so slowly it nearly killed you, and realize how little you actually know about Tae. Out of the corner of your eye, you see the laptop on the coffee table. You think about James Bond, trapped somewhere in that warehouse, and suddenly worry if he will ever make it out.

“What’s wrong?” Tae asks you, with a mix of concern and frustration, and you know that you can’t tell her the things that would probably make you less of a man in her eyes.

*

You are staring hard at your reflection in the bathroom mirror. You look at the thin scar along your right eye, the shiny blackness of your hair, the flush of red in your cheeks. Those parts are all yours, and yet nothing feels quite right, like you are standing in a fun house. The floor is fitted with white and black checkered tiles; the hand towel matches the gray of the rug. You look at the drain in the sink. You see a rubber stopper in the water and pull it up until it empties, just to make sure it still works. 

For a long time, you think about leaving, about not saying a word to Tae and taking off right through the front door. You want to walk as far away as you can, to disappear completely. You are just about ready to go when something catches your eye. Against the far wall of the shower is a vinyl curtain fashioned out of a subway map. The island of Manhattan is blown up in the center, but you can still make out the other boroughs – the inlet of Staten Island, the conjoined twins of Queens and Brooklyn, the bulbous crown of the Bronx – each with its crisscross of colored subway lines leading into and away from the city. 

You remember the dog-eared map you used to carry around with you everywhere you went, and how it was only native New Yorkers, you were told, who could understand the conductors when they announced service changes over the intercom. You pore over the curtain like a relic, tracing with your finger your route from Harlem to the Lower East Side. The vinyl is smooth, and seems to embody the antithesis of an actual train’s path, swooping gracefully, unerringly from one stop to the next. 

As you wind your finger down the map, you stop at Union Square, where you used to transfer to the L to go across town. You think about how many nights you had made that trip, taking the train to 8th Avenue, and then walking the six blocks to Raquel’s apartment. When you arrived in New York, it was the middle of the summer, when the whole of the city seemed to shift outdoors. There was something so novel about it – businessmen walking out of work at 3PM, elevated subway cars strewn with beach chairs and sand buckets – that you couldn’t let yourself think about how distant you and Raquel had grown. 

Every time you saw her, it was about how exciting the city was. It was why you put up with everything – the crowded trains, the long commute – like no sacrifice was too great. You were captivated by the fantasy of New York, and yet, at the same time, blinded from the reality: that you were not part of the life Raquel saw for herself in it. For months, you ignored the signs, found solace in the fact that she was as ignorant of your life in Cincinnati as you were of hers in New York. You should have known when she didn’t want you to move in with her that she was trying to hedge her bets. The whole time you lived in New York, you had none of your belongings at her place: not a scrap of clothing, not a toothbrush.

But it still doesn’t feel real to you yet. You think about Raquel coming back from Westchester after Christmas and you taking the train to meet her in Chelsea, just like you had before. You wonder if everything in her neighborhood – the dry cleaners, the Farmer’s Market, the Barnes & Noble – will suddenly become off-limits to you, how you might hardly be able to go anywhere in the city without thinking of her. 

With your finger still on Union Square, you follow the path to Tae’s house, continuing down the Lexington Avenue line and stopping at Astor Place. You think about making the journey in reverse, following your finger up to Union Square, and going right past it, riding the train all the way back to Harlem. You measure the distance with your hands. You consider how far you’ve gone and how far you still have to go.

*

By the time you get out, Tae has moved all of the bedding back to her bedroom. She is lying down on the mattress, facing the window. Her bedroom looks different than you imagined it earlier: the dresser is teak and looks Victorian, there is an L-shaped desk in the corner decorated with seashells, and the window screen with jewelry is nowhere to be found. It’s like New York in a way. You wonder how long you have to be somewhere before you stop feeling like a complete stranger to a place.

Tae is not yet asleep; the blankets rise and fall irregularly with each breath. You draw back the covers and lie down next to her, your chest facing the ceiling. For a moment, you doubt whether or not you should be there, but Tae slouches toward you with her back, and you edge close to her, like a lover, forming a seal against your chest. 

“I’ve thought about this for a while,” she says, her face still turned toward the window. “Even before I knew about you and Raquel.” Tae has never mentioned a boyfriend to you, so you guess that none of them worked out, but not for lack of trying. She lets out a deep breath and arches her back. You nod timidly, knowing it was what you thought you wanted too. 

“You never did tell me why you moved to the city,” she says, and you’re not sure for a second if she really said it or you made it up in your mind. You close your eyes and steady your breathing, pretending to be asleep, but she turns around to face you. 

“It’s a reminder for me,” she says. “New York has a way of disappointing you.” She is looking at you but her eyes seem to sail past yours to the door behind. “Every day is this series of bad dates and missed stops and delays. But it’s where I live, and sooner or later, you learn to live with it.” You think about why Tae first came to the city and whether or not she found what she was after. 

“So what’s your reason?” Tae asks again. “Why did you decide to move here?” The ceiling fan whirrs overhead. You think about the small disappointments, the tiny failures that made up every day, and wonder why you endure them too. 

“I wanted to fall in love,” you say, still staring at the wall in front of you. 

You are both silent for a time, and your gaze shifts to the window by the side of the bed. Outside, the moon is shining bright against the night sky. You think about waking up on Christmas morning when you were a kid, how you used to will yourself to stay awake by counting stars from outside your bedroom window. Even long after you knew better, there was still a part of you that wanted to believe: the full stockings, the presents gathered around the stove. Christmas day, by comparison, always came as a letdown. You didn’t want to fall asleep because you liked the anticipation, the infinite possibilities of what might be.

Tae turns away from you now, and, instinctively, you stretch out your arms, nestling one under Tae’s neck and the other around her torso. You think about how sad it is that yours was the best company she had managed to find and yet how, in the months and years that would follow, there would probably be worse, men who smoked and drank, who gambled or picked fights. You wonder how long we let ourselves keep trying in spite of failure, to still believe in a fantasy that we know to be false.

You are lying beside Tae when she falls asleep. You try to count stars, but the light is too bright, and there are none that you can see outside the window anyway. You wrap your arms around her and close your eyes. Maybe you didn’t know any better then. Maybe you still don’t.