In Which We Unveil A Mercury-Based Map

This is the conclusion of a two-part series. You can find the first part here.

Dances With Something

by LUCY MORRIS

New York was the first place I moved in with someone, and also the first place where I moved out. The moving in happened in increments, some clothing here, an extra phone charger there, until everything I owned was in a house I couldn’t recall having made a formal decision to live in. I moved out in just one afternoon. As I steeled myself for it, I thought about how people speak as though making commitments is the hard part, when actually extricating yourself from them is considerably more difficult. But once I knew I could do the latter, once I could see there would always be an out, it seemed suddenly that everything was available to me, that I could try almost anything I pleased without lasting repercussion. New York is a dangerous and ideal place to have this realization: there is no limit on what to try.

I left my boyfriend’s house in Bay Ridge on an unseasonably warm spring day. My best friend had borrowed someone’s SUV in exchange for a bottle of scotch. We drove along a straight stretch of Brooklyn we usually only passed beneath by train. I felt the weight of what had ended pushing against my lungs, making me want to cry in a terrible way that I thought would never end and, in truth, didn’t for a while. But my feet were on the dash — something so rarely experienced in New York that it seemed double the pleasure — and Catherine was next to me, her familiar freckled hand guiding the gearshift, and I could in some small way already sense the breadth of what was ahead, not just the wide avenues laid out before us, Ocean and Flatbush and beyond, but all that might happen next.

What did happen next was someone else. I showed him around my new neighborhood like I owned it, even though I knew that I didn’t, that I would, as always, soon be leaving. We walked from Crown Heights to Bushwick one outrageously hot night, and on the way home he drunkenly smashed a forty on a deserted stretch of Bedford. I had a sudden, strong impulse to run, not because I was scared of him physically but because it seemed that if he could injure these streets I loved — and I knew the cement had no nerve endings, that this was irrational — he could injure anything in his path, anything else I might care for.

I was by then starting to think I could no longer share parts of myself with another person at all, but I especially could not share my time with New York, which was already starting to run out. I wanted New York to be wholly mine and, to my surprise, the more I felt that it was indeed mine — the more familiar I became with the curving streets in different pockets of Brooklyn, the more afternoons I escaped work early to sit alone in the MoMA’s sculpture garden — the less it seemed I needed anyone else there with me. I had no desire for someone next to me on the sidewalk, slowing my pace. I didn’t care for long subway rides with someone leaning on my shoulder, intending for me to nudge them awake at our stop.

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On an April evening four or five years in, when I found myself somewhat adrift — I then believed that spending days in an office absolved evenings idled irresponsibly — a former professor took me out for dinner in Nolita. Over a nicer meal than I had had in many months and more wine than I had had, too, she dispensed two pieces of advice. One was: “Never leave your belongings with a spurned lover.” The other was: “Young women need to learn to say fuck you with their mouths and not their bodies.”

I took the subway back to Brooklyn afterward a little tipsy and feeling better than I had been, as if equipped with these recommendations I could now start life, or at least the summer we were on the cusp of, anew. I had already violated the first piece of advice and my possessions had not been burned or dumped on the lawn, as my teacher suggested, but even that might not have been as bad as the consequences of ignoring the second piece, which I continued to do, not in great numbers but for a while longer than I should have. There was a period when I wanted to say fuck you to almost every guy I knew in New York, mainly for their failure to be the one I wanted who was at that time far away, and often I did say it with my mouth but usually only after too many drinks, and then I’d wake up the next day in their beds anyway, thinking about my professor and how I’d disappointed her. That was easier to think about than the fact of having disappointed myself. When you wake up with a thought like that, it is almost impossible to get out of bed.

My weekday commute was over an hour each way, but the Saturday and Sunday mornings when I had to climb out of someone else’s bed and go home seemed to be the longest subway rides of all. I never hated New York more than in those hours: hung over on the R train, slumped in the hard orange seats, eyes shut tightly and hands pressed to my ears, as if that resistance to the present could alone block out the morning mariachi band and whatever awaited me at the end of the line.

Sometime later I became unable to ride the Brooklyn-bound R at all, went dramatically out of my way to avoid its crackly announcements — Next stop Union — that filled me with a disproportionate sense of doom. I developed many of these fastidious avoidances in New York, of entire avenues and certain bars or restaurants and several different movie theaters. I found that these self-imposed restrictions were not limiting but instead enriching: making certain places off limits to myself not only created urban obstacle courses I secretly found satisfying but also made the places I deemed available that much better, that much more mine.

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I could make these road maps of places to avoid and places yet to go, but they were constantly changing. The restaurant on Avenue A where Catherine and I often ate lunch one summer mystifyingly moved a single block south without announcement. Bodegas stopped carrying the right ice cream so you had to find another; library and café hours changed; my own place in the city kept rotating and, accordingly, so did the plot of private markers radiating out from where I lived.

The years, whatever new homes and relationships and routines they each contained, began to stack up and I became increasingly aware that for those whose nostalgia is primarily rooted in personal geographies, New York is a complicated place to make your home. You want, selfishly, for a neighborhood, a landmark, a street to stay static as a background to your memories: you may have changed, but you’d like the place to remain as a monument to the person you were there. Twice I moved out of neighborhoods just before many of my friends moved in, and this meant I was often returning to places I had once lived and confronting what had changed (to consider if I had) and to see what had stayed the same (to wonder if I had, too).

I noticed one night on my way home from a party in Brooklyn that my old bodega on Nostrand had acquired a neon sign that flashed “GOURMET.” I thought of all the sandwiches I’d bought there to take home to my dank basement apartment nearby, and also of the produce store down the street where a guy I was seeing bought me a pineapple I later proceeded to vomit on his lap, and the many nights I padded home past the Key Foods, the smoothie joint, the check cashing-turned-pizza place. I had been so finely attuned to my surroundings without even trying that it seemed not inconceivable that it was mutual, that the streets — Sterling and President, Franklin and New York — would still hold some of the mistakes I’d been trying to forget. But everyone knows streets are just streets and after a while they ceased to remind me of anything, were merely courses I followed to barbecues, bars, and readings, not to deeply nested parts of my memory.

This ability to detach on demand, familiar to people who move frequently as children, is superbly freeing. It’s also hard not to imagine that it is in some way deeply damaging, that after a while it starts to ruin you for a more fixed, a more definite type of life.

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I know that eventually I will force myself to forget these things — erasure being the simplest way to reconcile the past with the present — which is why I make note of them now:

There was a Thai restaurant on Second Avenue that I thought resembled a spaceship where I ate immediately before and immediately after the dissolution of my most significant relationship. In the midst of an early July heatwave my brother came to visit and we walked from 23rd Street down to Chinatown and back up, stopping for two movies and three meals along the way, all the while groaning and blaming each other for our discomfort. We had large parties in our narrow St. Marks Place apartment, with cases of $5 champagne and 5 lb. boxes of pastries, and there was always a moment when I sank into the couch in my party dress as things wound down around 3 or 4 AM, resting my head in my hands, listening to the late night chatter of those who had stayed. There was the birthday I spent at the Russian baths on 10th street and this one Ethiopian restaurant on 6th Street I took boyfriends to, while keeping a different one on 4th Street to myself. Once in a rainstorm I was walking down Broadway when a stranger offered me an umbrella for free: “It’s janky but it works,” he said. There was the time Catherine and I ended up at the North 3rd Street sublet of two 30-something men new to the city, whose financial limitations meant they shared bunk beds, although their budget did seem to afford them the sprouted wheat bread, the Irish butter, the artisan jam they offered us late that night — this being the kind of mildly insane New York contradiction that you can’t get bogged down in if you want to survive.

And then there were the days — in fact, the vast majority — that were totally un-extraordinary, were just going to work and coming home and cooking dinner. But those days were also New York in their own small ways that won’t exist where I’m going next: the exasperating struggle for a seat on the subway, the vegetables picked up at the corner produce store where exotic fruits loomed in crated pyramids, the disturbingly proximate sound of the neighbors’ TV as we turned on our own.

I remember all this and one day I won’t, which is maybe the most New York thing of all, because for a while you can still note that this nail salon used to be a record store you liked, but then the nail salon becomes a trendy bar, and eventually there are only so many incarnations you can hold onto. At some point you move to a different neighborhood, you get busy acclimating to its own distinct features, and you can no longer be bothered with some memory-based map of what was, somewhere you no longer are.

In preparing to leave now for several years, my worry is not that things will have changed when I get back — because inevitably they will — but rather my concern is that I will have changed, that it will all mean and be something different, something lesser when I return. The potential of this loss is overwhelming for me to consider, certainly greater than the loss of boyfriends, friends, belongings along the way. The simplest way to describe it is as the loss of a place where I was very young and where then, in tiny, painful increments, I became a little older. And in leaving the place where I came of age — and the apartments, parks, offices, and avenues therein — it is unavoidable that all the ages I was before will slowly start to fade away.

I believed at the start that the purpose of these paragraphs was to say, in the tradition of many before me, goodbye to a place. But it turns out that these paragraphs instead exist to say goodbye to a certain time. And already things are not what they were when it began for me. For one thing, I ride the R again without second thought; my list of avoidances has, overall, gotten shorter and the list of places I love longer. I see now that there are consequences, but this doesn’t bother me as I might have expected. That skyline-induced rush of good feeling, which comes to me now more frequently than it once did, does not curdle as it did before. It seems I’ve finally found the formula to make it last. That this occurred only shortly before departing is not lost on me, but that’s just it: the great certainty of New York is its uncertainty, the turnover and changes and late-coming revelations being the only guarantees there are. And this is what I fear I will miss the most.

Lucy Morris is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find the first part of Dances With Something here. She is a writer leaving New York. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Brighton Beach. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"This Is The Kiss" - Gareth Dickson (mp3)

"Get Together" - Gareth Dickson (mp3)

The latest album from Gareth Dickson is entitled Quite A Ways Away.

In Which She Has Begun To Leave New York

This is the first in a two part series. You can read the second part here.

Dances With Something

by LUCY MORRIS

For a long time I had a theory that if the three central components of your daily life are your job, friends, and romantic preoccupations, you are allowed to fuck up at one of the three at a time. If you are happy with your community and how you spend your days, it’s okay to act impulsively in love. If your relationships of all kinds are fairly stable, you are permitted some imprudence with work.

I am not by nature a reckless person. But I found that recklessness can be learned, and it’s useful to experiment with it from time to time, to see what it’s like, to see what might happen.

If you’re interested in parting with some portion of your sense of responsibility, there is no better place to do so than this. The trains run forever; you can stay out all night. If you are low on money, you can eat Trader Joe’s samples for dinner. I went with a friend to an absinthe tasting-combo-singles event to get buzzed for free one summer evening, although neither of us was actually single and we were also underage. I plus-oned to open bar parties and wandered into Chelsea gallery openings to snack on hors d'oeuvres and to feel, however briefly, a thrilling proximity to prosperity. But if the opposite of consumption is what you’re after, that’s also possible: it’s amazingly easy to seamlessly disappear from someone’s life here, and this, too, was something I saw fit to try, vanishing off other people’s personal grids, vacating any common ground we might have once shared — coffee shops, subway stations, whole neighborhoods — leaving behind no evidence that I had ever been there at all.

I did this for the reason I did many things in New York: to see if I could. Has there ever been worse reasoning? But when you find yourself, for instance, at a hotel rooftop party you’ve snuck into, leaning over the railing, your face looming out over the city with the sense that all eight million inhabitants are in your field of vision, and there is a drink in your hand and a friend by your side, it is difficult to see any kind of consequences. You think that if a city can belong to you — and in moments like this, that’s how it appears — then anything, any wish or ambition or person, can also be yours.

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Each time I moved to a new neighborhood here, the first thing I did was extricate my sneakers and shorts from their boxes and go running. I didn’t run particularly fast, nor for any duration — just enough to stake out the pieces of Brooklyn and then Manhattan that I could identify as mine, even though the unacknowledged end of that thought was always for now. Although I always left, the routes of those runs remain indelible, occupying space in my memory I’d rather reserve for the Russian vocabulary my job requires, some real knowledge of American history, or my myriad Internet passwords.

These paths — up and down 86th Street and later Eastern Parkway, around Alphabet City and along the East River — are emblematic of all the time I have spent in New York, busily accumulating an array of urban knowledge that will be entirely useless anywhere else: mental maps of cafes and library branches in the event of a Wi-Fi emergency, express versus local train stops, tiny triangular city parks ideal for spontaneous sit-downs to call your parents, recalibrate. The legend in my mind denotes the grocery stores with the cheapest canned beans and pasta, the streets most pleasant to walk down at different hours of the day, the bars with the very best happy hour deals. Somewhere up there, too, I keep a mental schedule of regular free museum hours, monthly dance parties and a variety of other events that, more often than not, I didn’t actually attend.

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During my first several summers here, I went frequently to the Forever 21 in Union Square, both because it was heavily air-conditioned and to try to superficially recreate myself. This was a practice I continued for years, accruing a range of unwearable rompers and crop tops and earrings so long they got caught in my hair. I stopped doing this at around the same time that I started going to bars, which I soon found offer another venue for camping beneath an air vent and temporarily reinventing yourself. The problems with this latter practice are well established but they are also less tangible — at the very least, they take up no space in your closet.

As I pack now, dumping drawers onto my bed for sifting, culling a crate of shoes, I see a collection not of things I necessarily loved but rather of trends that were: skinny jeans, pointy-toed flats, off-the-shoulder jersey dresses, above-the-knee boots, lace tops, high-waisted skirts, neon blouses, boat shoes. In these garments — a dress I recall being impatiently unzipped by someone else’s hands, a torn t-shirt advertising some once beloved band, a necklace I nervously fastened in advance of a job interview — I see vague glimpses of the person I was when I wore them.

For the most part that person was very young. By that I mean the kind of young where it is possible to be so happy — say, on speedy late night train rides over the Manhattan Bridge with the city shining before or ahead — that you suddenly find yourself in the realm of the sad, the good feeling flushing over you unexpectedly beginning to curdle.

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The currency of much of this period was whatever we could trade in: discounted meals at the Greenwich Village restaurant where someone worked, free drinks at the Brooklyn bar someone else presided over, a spare desk at a Soho office when a boss was out of town. We cut each other's bangs, passed around clothes we no longer wanted, shared prescription pills, proofread each other’s cover letters. I cooked many dinners in exchange for company, and appeared on just as many other doorsteps with bottles of cheap wine for friends taking their turn at the stove.

Friends now seems entirely too insufficient a word for the people with whom I’ve spent these years. Catherine and I met often for dinner, wandering around Manhattan hunting for the right restaurant, the search mainly a pretext for prolonging the pleasure of each other’s company. Sarah had a spare set of my keys and came to stay a few nights during a period when I was re-learning how to sleep alone. One long spring, I had Jeanne over for dinner every Monday, and after we ate we’d linger for hours in my living room, facing each other from opposite ends of the big purple couch, evading whatever it was we were then evading. I met Zara at Botanica many Tuesdays after work; at some point when my employer became erratic about paying, she offered to lend me money, and I didn’t take it but the gesture sat with me for a long time. On a January evening in the middle of a breakup I took a taxi I couldn’t afford to Williamsburg, because I couldn’t bear to cry on the L, but I also couldn’t afford, I felt, not to be sitting in Jen and Tag’s living room eating pizza, waiting for what was wrong to right itself.

We hand-delivered pints of soup for throats that hurt and handles of gin for hearts that did. These were the people I listed as emergency contacts, to whom I was connected by constant phone calls and emails, offering and receiving advice when it was merited, consolation when it was called for, and a host of other forms of help and encouragement along the way.

Some nights we danced for hours. “Do you like zees?” a Turkish marine asked me on the roof of Brass Monkey one memorable night as we all turned our twisting bodies to watch a couple having cinematic sex in a window of The Standard. I locked eyes with the friend I’d come with. There was already someone whose bed I could stumble into at the end of the night if I wanted, but half the reason we were out was to stall the fact of that, to instead be around people with whom all gestures were insignificant, to lose ourselves, together, in crowds of those entirely unlike us. “Not really,” I told the marine, and a few hours later the bed I stumbled into was my own, my friend safely asleep on the floor next to me.

Some afternoons following those sorts of nights we’d get sleepily stoned in Prospect Park and lay out on blankets, mindlessly chewing on chives and other plants I insisted I could identify from a foraging tour I’d once taken there. There was no shortage of things to do together: forays to the Met, afternoons at cafes, outdoor movies. But, in truth, the very best times I had in New York were at kitchen tables in apartments across the boroughs, scarfing down pasta and greens with my friends.

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The most worthwhile things I did here were always the ones I was unaware of even participating in. I barely remember the concerts or parties I declared were going to be “incredible,” the art exhibits or author readings I proclaimed “life-changing,” or even the minor triumphs of early adulthood — locating a good doctor, deciphering tax documents, learning when and how to quit a job. In the end, these achievements all paled in comparison to establishing relationships of the kind that allow you to learn, for a second and more perfect time, what it means to be family.

It’s true that I likely could have done this anywhere, with other groups of people, but the fact was that I didn’t, I chose New York, and it is for this reason, not the presence of relatives here nor my familiarity with its grids and operations, that the city has ascended past other places I have lived and, almost without me noticing, rendered itself home.

You can read the second part of Dances With Something here.

Lucy Morris is the senior contributor to This Recording and a writer living in New York for the moment. This is the first in a two part series. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Brighton Beach. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"The Way I Are (French version)" - Timbaland ft. Tyssem (mp3)

"Girlfriend (French version)" - Avril Lavigne (mp3)

In Which We Barely Bring A Change Of Clothes

Goodbye Station

by LUCY MORRIS

I was up at Grand Central the other day and walked by the line of airport shuttles on 42^nd Street, where I more than once deposited different boyfriends and where they more than once deposited me. I remembered in an instant the individual goodbyes we exchanged and the looks in their eyes — green, green, brown, brown — in those moments, and seeing my own eyes — blue reflected back in them.

That was all very good and edifying in its own way: there are nuances of life you are unable to sense until you’ve intertwined yours with someone else’s for some period. But none of it was as good and edifying as what’s been happening the last few months: there are just as many nuances you are unable to sense until you’ve made your life solely yours, assembled a set of routines and rituals and plans for which you alone are responsible.

I want to say all of this comes as a surprise but I’m afraid it doesn’t. I think deep down I always suspected it could get better than those greetings, those goodbyes, whatever pleasures came in between.

This is not to say I assumed it actually would.

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For a while late last decade, Micah and I lived out at the southernmost tip of Brooklyn in a house crowded with other people’s furniture. We were legally prohibited from painting the walls or getting rid of the excess of knick-knacks because of some issue with the original owner’s will. It was a material abundance we were too young to deserve, to know what to do with. Sometimes when we didn’t want to do the dishes we’d go to the basement to dig out the silver cutlery of the elderly woman who had lived — and died — there before us.

I was too small for the size of our house, for the seriousness of Micah’s intentions, but maintained a steadfast ignorance of these facts, a quiet campaign of avoidance that I assumed was essential to all relationships. During the years we were together, I hardly went out at all, as if I was afraid that seeing what else and who else was out there might make it impossible to go home again.  In the end, it turned out I was right. Once I did start going out and seeing what else was there, I could not return to that house near the Verrazano, to Micah’s overwhelming affections, to our bed with the misshapen blue sheets we struggled to fit to the mattress each morning.

When I moved out, I found that everything I owned fit into the back of an SUV. This confirmation of my material compactness should have been a relief but instead I found it alarming, as if it indicated some other insignificance or inexperience. It seemed that in the absence of a love that had swelled up into all the corners of my being, into all the hours of my day, I was highly portable, my existence in one place — or with one person — more or less temporary.

Having a major space in your life suddenly vacated is no rarefied tragedy: it happens to most people, and likely more than once. But it takes a long time to fill that expanse inside you again, the minutes and habits and parts of yourself that used to be shared. This did not bother me then and it does not now: it’s a fact of a life in which you choose to love and I would not choose another kind.

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The appeal of what came next was not that it was better — I knew from the start it wouldn’t be — but rather that it wasn’t as big, that it would in fact be so small, so insufficient, I could start restocking my life with other things again. I took long walks alone around the northern edges of Prospect Park the summer after I left. Everything felt simultaneously new and rusty: a rerouted commute on the same trains, the choreography of cooking old meals in a new kitchen, pacing unfamiliar streets until they became known. I was suddenly aware, too, that there was now a whole variety of experimental forms of pleasure available to me, minor and major, risky and not.

One of these, located somewhere on the axis of minor and risky, was Jonah. If there can be a single explanation for the trajectory of any love, it goes like this: it’s fun until it isn’t. Jonah was no exception.

The last time I recall feeling fondly towards him, early one evening in late summer, we were outside drinking Red Stripe and playing Scrabble. Jonah won the game by a huge margin and then confessed to cheating throughout, but with a grin I had noticed he employed specifically in instances where he wanted his behavior excused, not just with me but with everyone: his friends, family, employers, store clerks. It was an effective expression — humbly crooked but with eyebrows raised as if to say, “How could you not forgive me?” — but once you caught onto it, it was hard not to observe the frequency with which it appeared, and then not to wonder why he was constantly in need of forgiveness, or doing things that required it, however trivial.

I allowed him this for the reason I allowed him many things: it made me wonder. But after a while, to no one’s surprise — including my own — wonderment ceased to be enough, started, in actuality, to seem like an absurd premise for spending time with someone. We continued to become less tender to each other, until we were only capable of being pleasant after we had sex — although during the act we both managed to persist with our minor cruelties.

On another outdoor night, one of the last we spent lodged against each other in the hammock with string imprints forming on our cheeks, a few bats swooped down near our heads and we yelped simultaneously. I remember how embarrassed we both were in the moments afterward at our show of fright. In the whole history of bad things people have done to one other there is no accounting for what we choose to be ashamed of. There is also no accounting for what we choose to forgive.

On that same night, after the bats, I recall whispering, “I love you,” in the way I now can see many people do, when they have run out of other things to say to each other, or stopped looking for more precise ways of relating. But I knew as I said it that it was the only time I had ever lied about loving someone, and although I have done many other things wrong since — left a whole trail of different errors in my wake — I have never again done that.

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Peter’s bed was so big I could lie across it horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, and still not reach the edges. I was very tired when I first arrived in it, but simultaneously having a lot of trouble sleeping. The exhaustion was a broad one, an encompassing uncertainty that made me lethargic and unproductive during the day but also unable to put my mind to rest when I turned off the lights. Peter’s main allure at this particular moment was that his sleep schedule was compatible with mine. We spent three weeks staying up all night talking and then more than a year trying to replicate the intimacy of those weeks, and for the most part, to everyone’s surprise — including our own — we actually succeeded.

In the months I spent camped out in his attic apartment, I rarely brought a change of clothes with me or used his shower, but I was closer to him than I’d ever been to someone else. As happens when you feel unchallenged in other aspects of your life, I rerouted my energies into conducting the relationship as a kind of experiment, testing out behaviors like jealousy and anger, from which I had so far mostly abstained. I had a hypothesis, which I announced to him often, that the ability to exercise these latent emotional muscles was proof of a deeper bond. This was met with minimal reception and was also never proven correct or incorrect, but it was certainly facilitated by the fact that we could sleep in the same bed after arguments without even noticing the other person was present.

Late in winter we both got sick for a month, shared a Neti Pot, let cough drop wrappers and Advil bottles and Kleenex pile up around us. We watched movies to rest our voices but could never make it through one without pausing to talk. Then we got better; it got warm. On weekday afternoons we went to a public water park to float down the lazy river while listening to the oldies station, toes hooked around each other’s tubes to keep from drifting. By then I had begun to worry that the lazy river days were symptomatic of something bigger, that Peter was in some abstract sense slow moving and was reducing my rate of acceleration by proxy — I would have generally preferred to swim laps — but our conversations were actually so rapid I could never figure out where to stop them.

I knew well the sheets on the cot that served as his couch; he slept there, not in his bed, when I wasn’t around. When I talk to him these days, I know he is lying on that cot, and I feel guilty — and then I don’t — for the excess of my own bed, the room I now have to spread out, how I wouldn’t exchange it for anything — or anyone — anymore.

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The month or two that Ryan spent pursuing me, I spent much of my time hiding out in a large store in the Flatiron District where my cell phone got no reception. There I could thumb through racks of dresses I’d never wear and delay confronting his attempts to win me over. I put it off not because I didn’t enjoy them, but because I did, a great deal, and this was so unfamiliar a sensation to me, so unlike my customary ambivalence that I found it almost physically uncomfortable. To convince myself it was a good use of my time, I usually needed a drink in hand when I called him, leftover party gin in leftover plastic party cups I stacked on my windowsill after we hung up.

On New Year’s, after the countdown and the kiss, we locked ourselves in the bathroom at a party to take a nap. The tiles on the floor were the same as the ones in my mother’s house; my eyes blurred as I studied them. I slept with my head on Ryan’s hip. The rivets of his jeans left an imprint on my forehead.

Some time later we crash danced around my tiny bedroom, unsettling my precarious piles of books, knocking the cheap garment rack that served as my closet at an angle. We had a lot of fun together and not much else, which was the kind of less consuming experience I had believed I wanted but turned out was probably constitutionally incapable of. We fell asleep on top of the covers, this time with his chin on my shoulder, and in the morning we had sex.

“What do you want to do today?” Ryan asked afterwards, pulling on a t-shirt, and in response, without thinking even for a second, I said, “I think we should break up and also we should go to the Met.” Which is exactly what we did. Standing side by side in the American Wing, it was like nothing had ever happened, which seemed like a good sign. But generally this — the suggestion that nothing has changed, when things substantially have—is actually the deadliest sign of all.

Afterward he called me from California to say he wished I was there, which was what we both seemed to think I wanted to hear, but in that moment I realized it was not, that I did not in fact want to be in California at all, I wanted to be where I was: slightly but forgivably late for dinner with a friend across town, sprawled on my bed staring into the apartment across the street. This was a sight I now confronted more than any one person’s face and in truth I found it, in its total impenetrability, more compelling than the eyes and features I used to examine so often. Ryan said he had to go at the exact same moment I did. “I’ll call you later,” he said, and he didn’t, and I was surprised to discover how relieved I was by this, how much more I immediately liked him knowing that we were no longer in any way obligated to each other.

By now I hardly had any real obligations to anyone beyond whomever I promised to meet for a drink, go on a walk with, have over for a meal. I had expected to feel unmoored in the absence of a major commitment, but instead I felt flush with time, the very best kind of currency. I dispensed it freely to the people whose company I most appreciated, and in a very limited way to everyone else. I found this significantly more fulfilling—in reality it made me far less lonely — than I had when all the free hours of my day were accounted for, pre-allocated, in large part, to someone else.

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On the days when the past sneaks up on me in a song or smell or unanticipated flash of nostalgia, on those occasions when I cannot help looking back, it is difficult not to be upset with myself for how I spent the first couple years of this decade and the last few of the previous one. I was frivolous with my time and money and body and energy during what could feasibly be the only period in my life when my time and money and body and energy are wholly mine and unshared.

By some combination of fortune and miracle, I managed to remain employed the whole time, avoid major financial trouble, and not get pregnant, in spite of expending the absolute minimum effort to prevent any of these undesirable outcomes. Perhaps it is as simple as this: there are periods in life when this is the most you can hope for, the absence of select failures, rather than solid accomplishments.

It is good to have this knowledge but what’s better still is exiting that kind of period and entering, by a similar combination of luck and chance, a new one.

Lucy Morris is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Manhattan. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Brighton Beach. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Images by Louise Bourgeois.

"Watching the Fires Waltz Away" - Damon Albarn (mp3)

"The Marvelous Dream" - Damon Albarn (mp3)