I Know A Place We Can Go

Maryland, summer 2020.

NYC, summer 2020

The whites of your eyes promised impossible clarity.

Maggie Smith

Sometimes a love story is also a ghost story. 

‘I’m giving you a night call to tell you how I feel.’

Color story & Red Hook looking like an old New York. 

84 degrees, iced tea with fresh mint, every living thing inside my home (plants breathing, dog snoring, David cooking), peony bouquets, waiting for art supplies, a phone call, eating watermelon. Nothing is right with the world and yet there is still watermelon on an 84 degree day.

Sundown(er). 

My first takeaway tea in over six weeks.

Finally time for peony bouquets.

Evening angel / quarantine portrait. May 8, 2020. 

Quarantine walks in search of better news. 

Quarantine walks in search of simpler times. 

My fantasies of making a life for myself in NYC never included living through a pandemic. I thought about repeat terrorist attacks, hurricanes stronger than Sandy. There was a time when the closing of tiny local institutions I have loved since I was a teenager, places that made the city feel accessible and absurdly alive, was the worst thing that could happen to it. My own naïveté shocks me. The affect of empty streets, businesses that may never reopen, food deserts, the death toll, especially among the city’s most vulnerable populations, is profound. The affect of forcing space between myself and everyone else, of not seeing my neighbors’ faces, is creating emotional strain. I rely on eye contact and a smile to momentarily connect me with a stranger. I rely on the constant and sweet “Yes, of course!” when I ask a stranger if I can pet their dog. I rely on the warmth and solidity of a person’s shoulder pressing into mine on the train. I rely on the easy banter with my bartender. These moments have allowed me refuge and relief from the isolation and loneliness of daily life. I did not realize how monumentally important these tiny miracles are to me until I no longer had access to them. This is to say I miss not only my friends and family, but everyone I don’t know, too.

Lower Manhattan. 

My first time having alone time with this Fearless Girl.