The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile and the other’s welcome.-Derek Walcott
Lifework
It was winter 1999. I was watching When Harry Met Sally at my parent’s house in Connecticut. After sleeping with Harry for the first time, Sally got up to get herself a glass of water.
I loved what I was witnessing; an independent woman standing in her own kitchen in a plush bathrobe. The glasses Sally drank from were hers. She got back into her own bed pulling a comforter as plush as her robe around her. Harry was looking through a box of index cards. “You alphabetize your videos?” Yes, because this is her apartment.
At the time I was renting a dark bedroom from an unstable woman on 48th and 8th. Jackie (not her real name) lived there with her son, an overweight child she constantly criticized. Jackie was very maternal with me at first. But her attention soon became smothering. Her contradictions were maddening. While I was never allowed to have friends over her two adult sons frequently visited when Jackie wasn’t there. As punishment for not cleaning up enough, Jackie gave away her son’s dog. One morning I had to rush home from my job at TIME magazine with cash because she hadn’t paid the electric bill.
Sally’s well-appointed apartment was paradise.
Almost 5 years later I am standing in an empty apartment on 93rd street.
The closing had happened in Long Island City that afternoon. That was my only trip before or since to that neighborhood. To make everything feel even more New York the management company was in the same building as the soundstage for the Sopranos and Sex and the City.
I had been living at 109th Street for 4 years after leaving the 48th Street dungeon. After the closing, I packed two bags and took a taxi to my new apartment. It was empty except for the living room couch. Moving would happen over the weekend. At last, no more living inside someone else’s insanity.
My eyes and hands stroked every surface: the exposed brick wall, the moldings on the white walls, and the three large windows in the living room. I spun several times on the hardwood floors.
As I gazed into the bathroom mirror it was as if the newness of this space greeted a newness in me.
On that chilly February night, I was a bit Carrie Bradshaw and I was Meg Ryan. And I was myself, a version of myself I hadn’t been before or since.
This year marks my 20th year in this apartment. This will be my last decade in New York. My paradise now is a condo on a golf course in Palm Springs, California.
My hope is that the next occupant of this apartment will greet this space with the same buoyancy I did all those years ago on a February night.
petwork/gigwork/lifework 