abby's road

new york

Mid-May. Throngs. I had never seen so many people in Washington Square Park on an uneventful day. Every corner teemed with masked mouths and eager eyes. Everything electric and new.

But storefronts were shuttered on Myrtle Ave. My favorite jukebox out of order. No pinball at Milo’s Yard, just an overcrowded patio and room for me at a booth.

I was on the East Coast for my sister’s wedding. Will and I took the train from Massachusetts and stayed at a garden-level Airbnb in Bushwick for a week. When I got back to Denver, I had the sense that I was descending on a sleepy little cowtown, nowhere to go and nothing to see.

Weeks later, a colleague who was visiting New York emailed me: “Can't believe you left that magical city.” Neither could I.

la

Driving up the Pacific Coast Highway in the backseat of my best friend’s boyfriend’s car, all I could think was: Tinder. Not the dating app, but the grass. It was late July, and the drop of a single match, it seemed, would set the Santa Monica Mountains ablaze.

For a while I convinced myself that moving to LA would solve my every problem. It’s all so glamorous, the sun and surf and celebrities. But something struck me as grotesque about the billionaires tending lush gardens in the Hollywood hills while a megadrought threatens to render the region unlivable.

I do love LA, and I have a great time whenever I’m in town, but my intense desire to move there left me when I started picturing the Valley flooded and the hills in flames. Nowhere is really safe, but a mile above sea level, we can at least pretend.

denver

The light is different in the west. I have the corniest analogy: Imagine strolling through the hall of presidential paintings at the National Portrait Gallery. You’ll walk past centuries of pale old faces gazing forth from musty canvases. At the end of the hall, you’ll find Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of President Obama shrouded in flowers and vines, the green oil incandescent on the canvas. That’s how the light is in the mountains, crystalline and dazzling, so unlike the muted tones in the East Coast woods where I grew up. I can’t capture it on an iPhone or even really describe it. But it’s real, a trick of the atmosphere, a video filmed in high contrast.

I’ve been here just about 13 months, and I don’t know how long I’m going to stay. Last month, we moved to a new apartment on the other side of town. It’s as big as the house I grew up in, with in-unit washer and dryer, and within walking distance of a bunch of shops and restaurants. Most importantly, it allows pets. Will and I adopted a four-month-old kitten and named him Shinji, like Neon Genesis Evangelion, but mostly because we were spitballing names and that’s the one that stuck. I’d had guinea pigs and birds before, but never an actual mammal pet. I don’t know what to do with all the love I feel for this little black cat. He comes to me in the morning with his jingly toy in his mouth, asking to play fetch. As I write this, he is slung across my feet in bed, warming them while he sleeps.

I have a clearer view of the mountains from my new apartment, and every night, the sun sinks down behind them, shrouding them in shadow and painting the western sky with wild streaks of color. Night sets in quickly, cool and dry. I open the windows wide and sleep well.

cyberspace

TW suicide

And I see everyone gettin' all the things I want. And I'm happy for them, but then again, I'm not. Just cool vintage clothes and vacation photos. I can't stand it. Oh God, I sound crazy. —Olivia Rodrigo, “Jealousy, Jealousy.”

I resent you presenting your life like a fucking propaganda brochure. —Fiona Apple, "Relay"

All these social networks and computers got these pussies walkin' 'round like they ain't losers. —Jack Harlow, "Industry Baby"

There’s this woman I follow on Instagram. I don’t know her, but some of my friends do. She’s tatted, artistic, and undeniably cool. For a moment this summer, I almost considered taking an underpaid reporting job in the small city where she lives. I imagined running into her in a coffee shop, and what I could say to introduce myself without coming off as weird. I actually saw her in New York once, believe it or not. I didn’t say anything then. And why would I behave differently a second time?

Anyway. She posted on her story one day recently that it had been a year since her suicide attempt. You never would have known. Her life had seemed not perfect, but worth aspiring to, for sure—full of joy and friends and travel. She, of course, did nothing wrong, sharing what she chose to share. I was wrong to envy her. I’m wrong to envy everyone. That doesn’t stop me.

I can’t believe I fell for it, that Instagram trap. I always thought I was too smart for it. (“My heart was not. I took it like a kid, you see.”) I never cared about the likes. I posted shitty memes I made in Photoshop. I forgot to open the app.

But then, I guess, it was hot vax summer, and my friends in New York were having parties, and telling me about the parties, and staying out all night, and posting photos of the clubs and the bars and the Empire State Building, and New York Magazine was going on about the fear of missing out. Even the friends I’d made in Denver, they didn’t seem to have jobs. They were always in Telluride or Moab or Yellowstone or on the top of some 14er, giddy on thin air. This was before the Wall Street Journal’s report that Facebook knew its services harmed teenage girls. It was before Gabby Petito. It was late summer, and I was convinced that everyone had more friends, more money, and more fulfilling lives than me. I had to delete the app for a while.

There are days I remember with such clarity. December 23, 2019. I flew, guiltily, from Logan to LaGuardia after visiting my family in Massachusetts. There were Christmas carolers at the terminal in Boston. It was cheaper to fly than to take the train.

I arrived in New York in the late afternoon and took the bus from LGA to Jackson Heights, then rode the M almost the entire length of the line, into the city and back out to Ridgewood. During the ride, I listened to all 74 minutes of Joni Mitchell's Miles of Aisles.

When I got home, I followed my roommate to his brother's apartment to meet the cat I would be feeding over the next few days while they went home for Christmas. We had a key made at a corner store. They went to go to a bar or something together and I walked home alone. On the way, I stopped at the big old bank-turned-Rite-Aid to look for Hanukkah candles. They didn't have any. I ended up finding a tattered box in one of those Miscellaneous Stuff stores. They charged me $5 even through the price tag on the bottom said $2.

The best party I ever hosted was the NYU newspaper Christmas party in December 2017. The entire staff of 50 and some unaffiliated friends crammed into my apartment in Bed-Stuy. Long-simmering sexual tensions between staff members boiled over that night. People made out in the stairwell. A neighbor I’d never met swung by and asked if she could get in on the fun.

The next morning I awoke with a rubberbandfeeling around my skull and flinched at the jangling of my boyfriend’s belt as he got dressed to start the day.

Second semester freshman year I developed a Saturday habit of waking up as late as I could, getting high, and walking to a diner for a feast. You could eat alone and no one would bother you. At Johny’s Luncheonette on 25th Street one afternoon, January 2016, I eavesdropped on a white guy who ordered coffee and chatted in Spanish with the man behind the counter. I don’t know how we struck up a conversation, but we did. We exchanged the stories of our lives, his twice the length of mine. He was a writer and comedian. He taught at Rutgers. He lived upstairs. He had been in a few episodes of the Chappelle Show. I looked him up on IMDb later; he wasn’t lying.

He told me I had the right idea, smoking weed and gorging myself on pancakes and home fries, an activity with an ageless appeal. And he told me I had it all, 18 years old and in college in New York. He asked me if I had a boyfriend and I blushed and said sort of, yes, and he looked at me like there you go, you want for nothing. I wanted for nothing.

The best summer I had in New York was in 2018, when I interned at amNewYork and rode the subway to new corners of the city every day. The fastest way from the 34th Street subway station to the West 35th Street newspaper office was to take the northernmost exit and walk behind Macy’s, past the building’s waste disposal room from which a putrid, iridescent sludge seeped into the street. One morning I noticed that someone had taken a great big shit right on the granite ledge that formed the base of Macy’s exterior wall. The flowers wanted for rain that summer but the flies, they had a feast.

On my second to last night in New York I bought a burrito and, waiting for it in the little paved triangle in the center of Ridgewood, I jotted down my surroundings on my phone. Some lovely Mexican rock music boomed out from the burrito spot. An insect buzzed from a patch of native plants that the Business Improvement District had put there shortly after I moved to the neighborhood. An apartment door slammed and a woman rushed out. The half moon hung in the sky.

We left New York on Sept. 26 and got to Denver on the 30th. I drove the UHaul the whole way, because my boyfriend’s license expired in 2017. I didn’t crash into anything with the 10-foot box truck. I didn’t even come close.

Above is the skyline as we approached Manhattan from Brooklyn. We took the Queens Midtown Tunnel to 37th Street (below) to the Holland Tunnel. Those two photos by Will—I was driving.

I took I-80 the whole way, through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska. In Ohio, I saw a sign for Ashtabula and had to listen to “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” In Nebraska, I stopped at a terrifying gas station where no one wore a mask.

It looked pretty much like this for 1,000 miles. Photo, again, by Will.

My friend Thomas gave me a copy of On the Road before I left because I told him I wanted to read it because Jack Kerouac’s character spends some time in Denver. Here I am on the road with On the Road.

My new apartment is on a tree-lined street within walking distance of a bagel place and a pizza place—both decent, New York be damned—as well as a coffee shop, two grocery stores, liquor stores, a butcher, restaurants, and several weed shops. Which is to say, it’s a city. Did I mention that weed is legal here?

I was reluctant to move away from the coast because I love the ocean so much. But it turns out the Rockies aren’t so bad.

I’ve drafted this post six (6) times in the last four months, and every time, I tell myself that no one wants to hear it and I stow the words away. But fuck it, this is my blog, and I’ll write about what I want.

I realized, in July, when I rented a car and drove to the Catskills with my boyfriend, that I hadn’t left the city of New York since December 2019. Even though I’m not from here, and I’m always welcome at my parents’ house in Massachusetts, I didn’t leave the city in April, stayed in my apartment and listened to the ambulances screaming all the way to Wyckoff, started trying to count them but lost track every day. I didn’t leave because I couldn’t risk unwittingly spreading the virus to my parents, and I didn’t care to take a bus or train to get there. And what would I do there, anyway? I pay rent here, vote here, pick up prescriptions from the pharmacy here, and, until some fuzzy recent moment, considered this my home.

Early on in the pandemic, it became fashionable among the New York media Twitter circle I inhabit to make fun of those who fled—to parents’ houses, to upstate cottages, to anywhere where birdsong could substitute the sirens. But really, how could you blame the ones who left? I keep thinking about this tweet that says, “The cleavage is not ‘people who leave nyc  / people who stay in nyc,’ it’s ‘people who see the city as a place of [cultural] consumption / people who see the city as a place of lived struggle.’” Allow me to be flip: Isn’t every place a place of lived struggle, barring, like, the Hamptons? Life’s a struggle, and we’re living it.

Let me show you something I wrote in my notes app on October 3, 2019 at 7:11 p.m, as I rode home from work on the L train, euphoric:

From the south side of Union Square, in the yellow dusk streetlight, I spy the creepy clock and my freshman year dorm. I’ve learned that it’s ok to start a story with a time and a place, that not all meaning grows from abstraction.

A year ago I slammed a door because my boyfriend came home in a surly mood and didn’t notice the lobsters I’d left crawling on the counter. Today I bought two more and ordered him to pick up a bottle of wine. I walked from Bryant Park to Union Square and bought Trick Mirror at the Strand. I entered the subway with insufficient fare, waited for the emergency door to swing open as it always does, and, with four other women, scurried through.

The subway rushes me to the home I have created, to the cabinets full of potatoes and rice and canned chicken stock, the refrigerator with butter, milk, eggs; the dull tip of the record player needle; the box of books in disarray. The rags ripped from sheets I’ve lain and loved in, that I use to scrub the bathtub and to wipe the counter clean. The pot I’ll boil the lobsters in, stolen from my parents’ house, which teems with things much the same.

And I know that if I needed to, I could start all over again. There’s no knowing if the world I built in four years will last a lifetime. Tonight, it doesn’t matter.

I couldn’t tell you what I was wearing that day, or how the lobster tasted, and the year-ago argument, now two years past, is a smudge in my memory. Sometime before it got hot out, but after things were bad, so April or May, I forgot my ATM PIN completely—the PIN I used to use every time I bought groceries or refilled my MetroCard—and had to have the bank send me the code in the mail. We’re going through a collective break from reality where our former selves are ghosts. All that sentimental bullshit now tastes funny in my mouth.

Disillusionment, I’ve decided, is realizing that the barista who used to give you free coffee once a week only memorized your name so she wouldn’t have to ask you every time you bought a bagel. That the optician, who remembers your name because his daughter is an Abigail too, is really just some schmuck who drives a car to work and dumps his trash on the sidewalk on the wrong day of the week. That you’ve bought all your acquaintances. That you could buy them anywhere—for less.

I was bothered all day by this story I heard on NPR about a woman who observed the lives of the young couple living in the apartment across the street, in direct view from her own. They were naked all the time, and with the head of their bed situated just below their bay windows, she could see them having sex. Seven or eight months passed when she didn’t seem them in the apartment as often. Then, over the course of weeks, she watched the boyfriend wither away in his bedroom from some type of illness. She watched as people came to say their goodbyes. She watched as he died, with his girlfriend and his mother by his side. And, when the coroner came to take away the body, she ran outside and watched it getting hauled away. Should she have looked away? Was her voyeurism immoral? That was the gist of the show.

I heard that blogs are back so I figured I’d give it a shot. I’ve been working from home since Wednesday because of the coronavirus in New York. I’ve been more productive than I’d expected, but nothing ensures productivity in a news blogger like a global crisis.

Key Food was the most chaotic I’ve ever seen it when I went early this afternoon to pick up a chicken for dinner. The two guys who own the store were wearing these really intense masks and directing customers to different cash registers. The line snaked around a precarious display of frosted donuts and encircled the cheese stand. The manager had to keep telling customers who approached the cash registers from the far side of the prepared foods stand that there was a line on the other side. I think that in another life, I’d design grocery store layouts for a living.

I started buying shelf-stable food a few weeks ago. I’m not afraid that the stores will close; I bought food because I want to be able to hunker down for two weeks without leaving the apartment if I do happen to get sick. The only thing I stocked up that I wouldn’t normally buy anyway was $20 of cold brew concentrate, because I’ll lose my mind without iced coffee, which I buy every day. Fuck off, Suze Orman.

I went for a run today and couldn’t shake the feeling that everything was filthy—the car exhaust, the standing puddles of morning’s rain. Instead of going to the park, I stayed on city roads, spying budding trees and crocuses that shouldn’t sprout in March. People think I’m bullshitting when I talk about New England winters, about the foot of snow that dropped each week and backyard sledding Saturday noon to Sunday night. It’s comforting to think that nature is indifferent to our struggles. I bet it’d be more comforting if it weren’t so far away.

Three weeks in and already it feels like a lousy start. Australia. Iran. On January 12 I slept past noon, bought a coffee, and stayed inside for the rest of the day, as if by crocheting on the couch I could will the outside temperature down from 70 degrees.

It feels futile now to do the formulaic self-reflections and resolutions I always do at the start of the year. Because I’m all right, and I always will be, as long as the earth continues to feed me and the country keeps me free. I’m 22 and I get paid to write and that’s all I ever could have asked.

I used to worry about finding a job, or going to grad school, or having to leave New York. But now it’s not myself or my ability to survive a given situation that worries me. Now my mind flits to the baby I’ve always wanted, the child I cruelly yearn to bring into an uninhabitable world. Now I think of women wrenching coat hangers into their cervixes to remove a cluster of cells the government won’t let them flush away with a swallowed pill. Now I feel my attention flickering, my mind too quick to anger at some bullshit Twitter drama that is so beside the point.

And my wants keep multiplying at a pace I can’t abide. What right have I to desire a house with a dining room table; a kitten and a parakeet; a vegetable garden and a three-bin composter and a rainwater collection system I’ll engineer myself; a rocking chair? What right have I to desire these things when I fear the future I inherit to be one of canned beans over campfire stoves and roasted fetuses on spits like in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road? When everything is on the line? I try to lose my mind in books, to keep myself from thinking it. But always the words return: The end of all wanting is all I’ve been wanting.

The neon sign still glows outside the Chelsea Hotel, but its ghosts have haunted empty rooms since 2011, when scaffolding crept up the facade, obscuring placards honoring Dylan Thomas and Leonard Cohen and all the great artists who lived there. It’s closed for renovation. When it’ll reopen no one knows.

Next door, a sign outside the Quixote declares that it is open for business. The boarded-up storefront insists that it is not.

Across the street is the branch of the New York Public Library where I returned my copy of Just Kids this afternoon. Patti Smith mentions the library in her book; she passed by it every day when she lived at the Chelsea in the 1970s. Some institutions crumble. Libraries, it seems, endure.

I dropped my book in the collection bin and crossed the street to stand below the Chelsea’s sign. I wanted to skip across the black and white tiles in the hotel lobby, to walk where Patti walked. Seeing that it was closed, I started toward the subway home, wondering what glory lay in the old New York I’d never know.

Then two men sprinted east on Twenty-third Street, one screaming, “Stop him! Stop him!” A group of people on the corner turned and stared. A robbery in broad daylight, rush hour, people everywhere.

ESTRAGON: What am I to say?

VLADIMIR: Say, I am happy.

ESTRAGON: I am happy.

VLADIMIR: So am I.

ESTRAGON: So am I.

VLADIMIR: We are happy.

ESTRAGON: We are happy. (Silence.) What do we do now, now that we are happy?

VLADIMIR: Wait for Godot. (Estragon groans. Silence.)

— Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

In January I flew to Europe alone—stayed in hostels, traveled by train, listened exclusively to Joni Mitchell. London, Paris, Barcelona, Valencia, Madrid. I drank very little, didn’t do drugs. Didn’t sleep with any strangers, was haunted by the negative space on the full size mattress in New York where my boyfriend slept alone.

I met many nomadic people and envied them all: people who had no money but earned their stay in hostels by cooking the evening meals; a Moroccan woman who told me about taking acid on the African shore; a Turkish solo traveler who gleefully accompanied me to the Musee de Orsay. In France, the Joni Mitchell song rang endlessly through my head: “I was a free man in Paris, I felt unfettered and alive. There was nobody calling me up for favors and no one’s future to decide.” But at night I subtracted six hours from the local time to gauge whether I could squeeze in a FaceTime call with my boyfriend once he got out of work. My parents texted me constantly, making sure I wasn’t dead. At my most independent, I remained tethered to those who had come before.

So I didn’t run off to a kibbutz or find work on a farm animal sanctuary. I boarded my plane home. Back in New York, I filled the empty refrigerator with groceries. (“Did you eat takeout every day for the past three weeks?” I asked my boyfriend.) I took a razor to the body hair I’d let grow while I was gone. I popped in my retainer; my teeth had begun to turn.

February I was jobless, consuming whiskey instead of weed out of fear of pre-employment drug tests. And then in March I started a fellowship at Mother Jones (read my stuff, if you want). The job felt like a godsend. A national magazine! A biweekly paycheck! Institutional prestige!

But what do I do now, now that I am happy?

Another lyric comes to mind, the Beatles this time: “Out of college, money spent, see no future, pay no rent. All the money’s gone, nowhere to go. But oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go, nowhere to go.”

Sometimes I get into these impenetrable moods that nothing short of a miracle can crack. Post-college despair, the certainty of an imminent environmental collapse mixed with cluelessness about how I want to spend the years leading up to the disaster. Maybe, I tell myself, I’ll go to grad school and wither away in academia, the only place I’ve ever really thrived. It would mean starting anew, the way I fantasized about in Europe. Or maybe I’ll move to Denver with the man I met my first day of college, never love another, never know the heartbreak Joni spills in Blue.

“All roads lead to grad school,” the director of the Spanish Department told me when they announced at graduation that my thesis tied for best in the humanities. That day I felt proud, but now it seems all roads are paved with dread.

Yesterday, the fourth of July, my second in this apartment, I climbed to the roof where the sky filled with the sour smoke of fireworks, as if the city were under siege. I imagined the skyline lightless, like in “By the Waters of Babylon.” I remembered the eight million who share this city, my statistical insignificance. Beckett makes it so plain: we all are waiting for a God who will never come.