I sit in a too-warm corner of La Esquina, waiting for my friend to arrive while damp patrons order fish tacos at a register across the room. Other diners approach a doorman guarding the downstairs restaurant – a cavernous space you have to walk through the kitchen to get to, passing Mexican cooks in cloth caps and dirty aprons, the tile floor littered with chopped vegetables. “I’ve got a party of ten for ten-thirty ready for table three,” he says into a headpiece, as though he were directing flight traffic and not large parties of friends to the wooden tables below.
It’s dark and raining outside. Not too much, just enough. Winter is handing over the reins to spring with a painful slowness. I have been cold for nearly half a year, buried in a knee-length coat with sleeves that have begun to fray at the wrist. I have watched my boots turn into scuffed, stained pieces of leather, the black rendered an ashy patina, worn into an accidental suede. Shit-kickers, my dad calls them. Boys walk past in their loafers with no socks, their ankles exposed under denim turned up into petite cuffs. Urban dandies, ready for summer.
Lily arrives, wearing lace bellbottoms and a smile. I haven’t seen her since November. I feel like I’ve slept through this season, holed up in my apartment with warm sheets and a frantic need to be somewhere else.
We go downstairs. The girls order drinks at the bar. Margaritas. Lily gets salt on her glass and talks about giving up modeling, being in school and learning to learn again. She mentions maybe going somewhere tropical this summer. I’ve known her since she was sixteen, going to jobs and castings with her mother in tow. She’s only twenty-two now and I feel so old. Six years have flown past and I have difficulty cataloging the meaningful events of my life, like trying to trace your steps through a desert without use of a map.
After the pitcher is good and gone we walk in the rain down Kenmare, passing sooty buildings and the red lights of cabs. Lily and I walk ahead of her two friends, traveling through the streets of the Lower East Side. I hate this area – its brick buildings and lacking of trees. No matter how expensive the rent gets, no matter how extensive the remodeling – the exposing of brick and the refinishing of old hardwood, no matter how many Americana-hipster-bistros and vintage stores live at street level, it will always feel like tenements and immigrants, the people who built this city and were forgotten about. New York City sits in simultaneous denial of and homage to its past.
We duck into another subterranean space, this one with concrete floors and peeling green wallpaper. A bartender sporting a beard and a bored face mans an unprofitable bar. I feel as though I’ve walked into a weird basement party filled with high school students, none of whom I know. The room is sparsely populated with thin young girls I recognize from runways and magazines: twentysomething models and their doting boyfriends. Everyone looks the same, toothpick arms and skinny jeans, androgynous faces covered in lines of paint, like a crowd of beautiful dishrags, gray and nondescript.
Dubstep plays through incapable speakers, barely translating the intense bass lines. Still, it sounds like sticking your head in a gear box. Waaaahhhh waaaaahhhh waaaaahhhhh. Everyone swings their arms around and bends their bodies in impossible ways, throwing up their voices in a collective “WOOP!” in the small spaces where the music lolls.
I dance in the corner, my friends sitting on leather stools drinking cheap booze out of plastic cups. I wonder if I look my age, if I look as old as I feel. My blonde hair swings around my body and into my face as I dance with slight reservation. I watch my shadow move against the aging wall, both of us slowly crumbling, doomed to bear witness to the passing of time. I feel as though I am living a youth I have missed – recklessness, drunkenness, 4 a.m. parties with strangers. We are all getting older so quickly. I feel my seesaw dipped and sliding closer to thirty and I’m scrambling back towards the top, attempting to wage a war against time and gravity, my valiant act of futility.
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