This is my person
Years ago, before we went speakeasy, the bright windows of Redbeard Bikes drew in all kinds of people on cold nights, some of them with zero interest in buying a bike, or anything at all.
Years ago. October. A couple. Kids, really, teenagers.
“Do you sell Sharpies?" asked the girl.
“No, sorry.”
“I’m sure that in this whole store, they have a Sharpie.”
“We have Sharpies," I said, "but you asked if we sold them. You can borrow one if you want.”
The girl pulled out a padlock.
“We’ll write our names on it, then hang it on the Brooklyn Bridge.”
I made a face.
“You disapprove.”
“Yes, it’s bad for the bridge. Where are you from?”
“Here.”
—
Yesterday I met a dear friend for coffee in Tribeca. She was visiting from out of town. We’ve known each other twenty years.
“You're gonna be so disappointed in me, Kasia. We got a tree.”
I told her we might be getting a tree, too.
After, I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to speakeasy Redbeard, where I made fruitless phone calls to figure out health insurance for 2025.
At intervals on the Bridge, photographers had set up elevated rounds of Astroturf big enough for one person, or two people who love each other enough to take a selfie together. Astroturf pedestals.
At each pedestal, a speaker blasted “Empire State of Mind” on loop. Which made it feel, up the bridge and down again, that this song is literally the soundtrack of New York.
Insurance wants to know what I think of their customer service. “We’re all ears,” they write. At best, they answered my question in a roundabout inconclusive way. At worst they didn’t answer my question at all, but some other question, perhaps one they chose at random with their eyes closed.
These days you buy a tube of toothpaste and promptly get a satisfaction survey in your inbox. There ought to be more nuance to these surveys, a higher threshold for asking someone’e opinion.
In my own life, I am trying to close the car door quietly, and the kitchen cabinets, and also to keep looking at the cup or plate or bowl until it’s one hundred percent on the table.
But of course much of the time I am not in my hands, I am not in my body, I am hovering somewhere in the sky like an unmarked drone. Searching for myself and not finding myself.
—
The way a person looks at their significant other while their significant other is taking a photo of a stranger on the Bridge.
This is my person, I get to keep them.
SOUNDTRACK
CandyLand by Coco Rosie
Amor Profundo by Hermanos Gutierrez
(Hit play and close your eyes)
Divinity School goes out every Sunday at sunset.
When you can’t find the words… send these instead.
