DAY ONE

Did I forget all this or simply bury it? It's unbelievable. I mean, New York is obviously unbelievable. But the memories are unbelievable. I think of myself as having an awful memory but after the drive from the airport I have to question that assumption.

The memories came rushing back during the drive through Holland Tunnel with all the force of that tidal wave in that comet movie. By the time we came shooting out of the tube I was suffering from such a euphoric flood of pure memory that the raw impact of being back in my old neighborhood was, well, it was almost sexual in impact. I remembered it all. I remembered the dramatic and the mundane. I remembered three years of memories at once. I remembered walking those streets, sitting on that bench, shopping at that deli on that night and buying exactly one froz-fruit bar, two packs of cigarettes and a litre of coke. I swear I remembered even individual cobblestones, classifying them according to the arguments or the kisses I had whilst atop them.

But I also remembered being the Me who had done all those things. It was as if I had somehow committed that self to memory and mothballs and had inadvertently made her less real and just as we passed Carmine that self was suddenly standing on a pedestal, with all her historicity and glamour. A lovely figure but an artifact nonetheless.

DAY TWO

All I did today was hang around with my ex boyfriend. Yet another thing I had forgotten: once upon a time I really did share my life with someone. I really am capable of being in a relationship, of even being a desirable object with which to be in a relationship. And further, it is clear to me that I have not dramatized the significance of this lack in my current existence. I have not fabricated its importance based on myth or hearsay.

It was lovely to see him because he is on his way out of the city and if anyone could be capable of convincing me not to move here it should be a native New Yorker in the throes of dissatisfaction. He failed, of course, which I found empowering because it means I am crazy. I am crazy enough to ignore the nice, rational things and therefore I am crazy enough to realize the current dream. You whittle down your desires and they become attainable if only because they are so comic.

But perhaps the most interesting aspect to my day was how little I noticed about the city. I barely even glanced at the buildings. I didn't have to. I walked out the apartment and turned the right direction without even once consciously stopping to evaluate my location. The details were not interesting because they were too familiar. The ecstasy of being back here after so many years came not from the familiarity of the structures and the environment but from the recognition of that familiarity. Being on 25th street was not thrilling, but spontaneously knowing that I already knew I was on 25th Street without having to stop and query my mind like dumb terminal machine, now that was ambrosia. The knowledge itself, the returning tide of trivial spatial, geographic, architectural knowledge was tangibly pleasurable.

DAY THREE

Forgot about blue laws. Remembered that New York is exactly like every place else. I remembered that people still wait for things, and get hot and shop in dull stores, and pay too much for non-essential sundries and generally speaking fail to live up to their own standards. And that made me happy.

DAY FOUR

It is not as easy to mix business and pleasure as the phonic lilt of the phrase itself suggests. And yet one of my favorite stereotypings of New Yorkers is that they never allow their pleasures to be devoid of business. So my current discomfort with the blend does not bode well for an eventual return. But loss is relative. I suppose.

DAY FIVE

Today I remembered what a nightmare it is to be broke in New York. The bank card fiasco took hours to resolve. It was obviously a test. Because in addition to the money fiasco there was the subway fiasco where I hopped into a downtown-only station when, already late, I needed to go uptown. And as if that wasn't already insulting enough to someone who used to consider herself a new yorker -- at least for the duration of her stay here -- there was the technological fiasco which shamed my non-new yorker self into a desperate search for the apparently one-and-only place downtown with a telnet client.

The entire day was like one of those annoying tests where a lover or a friend will subject you to some new activity or environment or food product which means everything to them and subsequently to the future of your relationship and the whole time they look at you with this pretend casual stare intently trying to gauge your reaction to whatever treasure it is that they have chosen to spring on you all unprepared. And you, knowing that it is a test of this nature, sculpt your reaction to fit their expectation to such a degree of precision that you find you have tricked yourself into actually experiencing the faux reaction and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera everyone rides off happily into the sunset no one even remotely in touch with anything resembling the reality which clearly never mattered in the first place.

DAY SIX

Have remembered that New York doesn't notice. Doesn't care. Hasn't changed. And all of that is a huge relief. The desire to be insignificant vying with the desire to be noticed, both swallowed up whole by the urban leviathan. Canceled out. One less variable to be accounted for.

DAY SEVEN

Traveling is all about sitting. About keeping your body very still and very contained within some small, cramped space while a larger object conveys you from one place to the next. This paradox, if that's what you want to call it, bothered me a lot when I used to temp. I know I wrote about it in the piece with the MacPaint 1.0 ashtray graphic so I don't want to go into it again except to take the occasion of the thought's resurfacing to point out that there does seem to be something about traveling which jogs not only the memories of the past but the thoughts of the past. Reliving, suffering through, those old thoughts again is enough to depress anyone. Rethinking is such a waste of time and yet it is very difficult to stop yourself from rethinking a familiar thought, from savoring an old proof or wandering down a path of cleverly crafted, psychotic rationalizations. Boston brings back a lot of those types of thoughts and I find that the journey back here has left my mind about as unscathed as my body; it seems both remained immobile during the trip.

DAY EIGHT

Again this trip seems to be all about sitting. Sitting on the chair where my last relationship began, sitting on the loveseat couch where I spent a summer sleeping with my legs draped over the armrest, sitting in a grey office guest chair trying not to knock over towers of cds, sitting on poured concrete benches in suave industrial dining spaces, sitting on short, rickety wood chairs in small, atmospheric bars, sitting on curved booths upholstered with dark velvets, sitting on plastic chairs on decks or porches or terraces or whatever-they-are in the not-dark of a new york night, sitting on overly designed molded wood cubes cast about seemingly at random in a red lit social space, sitting on red plastic subway benches, grey plastic subway benches, orange molded subway seats, brown upholstered train seats, blue upholstered bus seats. Sitting on kitchen stools and living room couches and dining room chairs and bedroom floors. Sitting lastly in a wheel chair, a chair with wheels, a chair with rollerblade wheels and a chair formerly known as a shopping cart. And talking, talking, talking. Trying all the while to somehow (impossibly) infuse your seated figure with actual presence.

DAY NINE

The Fourth of July and the only thing I can think of today are independence metaphors too pathetic for even a virtually private text such as this. Though the latter, the business about virtuality, brings to mind the question of whether inner space is dependent on outer space -- and whether or not I lean toward dualities out of biological preference, esthetic inclination or mental laziness.

DAY TEN

Today New York is dull. Just a big city filled with lots of things that I don't want to do. New restaurants with incompetent wait staff and fat people in bad t-shirts. Mundane conversations and bland tomatoes and too many small windows. Perhaps I'm just being peevish. Or maybe I've somehow become a, what would the word be?, mispolithrope (a hater of all cities). Damn. Why can't I remember my greek? Why hasn't anyone solved the memory problem yet?

July 1998