Not yet six in the morning and I was eating some oatmeal that already was a couple hours old. People are their principles as theory in action. The preparation of this breakfast may have cost me a final thirty minutes of extra sleep but it saved me from spending fifteen dollars at LaGuardia. And so this staunch character ate his gruel in terminal B. I used to love airports. Happily showing up three hours early for my domestic flights just so I could be a stranger among strangers. Drinking coffee and writing in my diary and watching the people go. And while that’s still basically all I ever do, I’ve lost all love in my heart for traveling by air. If I had my way, I’d never step foot on a plane ever again. A tall restless-legged germaphobe who travels coach on discount airlines, I’m not expecting comfort. But it isn’t the means I find myself increasingly dreading. It’s the end. Because boarding this plane, headed to Chicago for a connecting flight to San Francisco where Honora was waiting with Ashleigh and John Michael to drive us four hours further north to Juliette’s wedding, already I was thinking, “I miss New York.”
“No, no, it’s all good—you don’t owe me that,” said Honora, after I apologized for never personally telling her about my breakup with Austin. She wasn’t with the rest of us at that restaurant in Williamsburg a couple months back, when a question from Sarah left me with no other choice but to spill the beans. Something I was, ultimately, grateful for, getting to let everyone know in one fell swoop. Or almost everyone. I’ve been friends with Honora for 12 years. I absolutely owed her that. With Ashleigh and John Michael in the back, and Honora behind the wheel, we were well on our way to Fort Bragg. I’d only been to California once before, joining Shannon for her trip home during our senior year’s spring break. Touring Alcatraz, Shannon and I were walking around the grounds when suddenly we ran into Tony—a Croatian-born Swedish exchange student who went to Emmanuel with us for one semester. During which he slept with one of our closest friends. It’s a small world after all. And on karaoke night at a Pismo Beach dive bar, I narrowly avoided a hate crime after singing “I Touch Myself” to a crowd of cruel-eyed townies. I was so shocked to learn there were people like that in California. But it’s Shannon’s protectiveness I remember the most, that and her anger. She became my sister that night. Driving by a hotel called The Dudley, Honora sent a picture of it to Shannon before asking me where she’s living and what she’s up to these days. They’ve fallen out of touch. My male brain, gay as it may be, couldn’t begin to comprehend the complexity of friendship between women. But in Honora’s voice, and later on in Shannon’s texts, I swear their tone was one and the same. I wish I could do something to bring them closer again. That if I do owe anything to my friends, this could be it.
Steadying herself on my arm to take off her heels, Honora walked barefoot down the rest of the path leading to the waterfront altar—where Juliette and Liz’s very famous wedding photographer was waiting to document her unshod arrival. “Cool,” said Honora. Taking our seats and looking back over our shoulders, we watched the brides make their way down that same path, through a field of tall, golden grass. Ashleigh was already crying. But when Juliette came fully into view, looking truly perfect, I had no urge to cry—rather, I wanted to scream. Feeling so euphoric, so gleeful, so proud of this friend, this old, old friend, who’d already succeeded at what she does best: creating something beautiful. And she was so present for it. Present enough to not just look me in the eye as she proceeded down the center aisle but to do so with a wink. Standing at the altar, she looked at all of us and said, with a Gwyneth Paltrovian smirk, “I need a tissue.” Vows were exchanged, rings were warmed, and we pelted the newly pronounced brides with rice. Forced to fire their butch lesbian DJ after a string of one-star reviews suggested this emcee might be in crisis (she showed up to a recent wedding wearing red flannel pajamas), the reception wound up being more of a seated dinner than anything else. Which still would’ve been lovely even if we weren’t seated across from this one aunt who referred to Juliette, repeatedly, and somehow warmly, as “that little bitch.” During the speech from a maid of honor, as she was telling us sweet stories about Juliette’s mom and grandmother, this aunt looked over at us, made a gun with her fingers, and shot herself in the head.
The four of us rented this perfect little house, a yellow ranch with a pink porcelain toilet and paintings of bare assed ladies hanging on every wall. It was right on the water but we didn’t realize that, not until we pulled into the driveway that first night and saw, right there in front of us, the sun setting over the ocean. A couple minutes on foot through the backyard was all that separated us from these craggy cliffs dropping straight down into the Pacific. Home from the wedding that night, in the pitch black, the four of us walked out there. Looking up at stars burning brighter than I’d ever seen, even in New Hampshire, we tried to find Taurus, and Leo, and Sagittarius. If I’m phobic about anything, or at least anything concrete, it’s being in an isolated house at nighttime. I should have been terrified. But I wasn’t, not so long as I had these people with me. And yet, waking up early that next morning, I did everything I could to slip out of the house unnoticed. I walked down to the cliffs and, staring at the water, I saw a seal. It felt so good to be alone.
Jolted awake every five minutes—or so it felt—I would’ve thought there were still hours left to go but, sneaking around the window shade, I noticed the first hints of dawn. This red-eye from SFO had reached JFK. Sharing a ride home with Ashleigh and John Michael, we got in a car driven by a woman named Lourdes. …And I feel like I just got home/And I feel… A couple days later, back at the museum, I was talking to Grace. She’d also just returned from a trip, spending a week with friends in Alaska. A native New Yorker, a Queens girl, Grace grew up here. All her life, she said, whenever she got back home from a trip somewhere else, she’d resent it. That her shoulders would tighten up the second her plane hit the tarmac, already on the defense, the offense, already so mad over this reunion with the crowds, the filth, the familiarity. But during her week in Alaska, despite all those trees and rivers, despite the moss on the rocks and some seals of her own laying on a buoy, surrounded by all that grandeur, all she could think about was home. I asked her if she was happy to be back in New York and Grace said, “I am so fucking happy to be back in New York.”
And after more than a month away, his five weeks in North Carolina come and gone, Austin was also back in New York. He landed around noon but I didn’t see him until later, not until I was home from work. That morning, I overslept, and my oatmeal made a mess of the microwave, and milk leaked all over the fridge. Racing into the kitchen to wash my dishes, already late for work, I found Kiera, our roommate, quietly cleaning up the coffee grinds she’d spilled all over the stove. A plague on both our houses. Different people in different ways asked how I was feeling to which I said, more or less, “Same as always.” Opening the door to our bedroom that evening, we smiled at each other. Austin seemed so small, laying there on a bed that suddenly looked so big. How quickly, I guess, we forget. I made dinner that night, meatballs with rice cooked in pickle brine and salted yogurt on the side. It’s his favorite thing I make. I used to cook every single night for us. A lockdown necessity that stuck. But then I got into the habit of living off the leftovers of a huge pot of soup, cooked once a week, just for me. I barely enjoy it, let alone anyone else. If I were to count up all the meals I made this year for me and my boyfriend, I could do it with one hand. But as we sat down to eat this dinner, Austin was nothing but grateful. He offered to take care of the dishes but I wanted to do what we’ve always done—for Austin to wash and for me to dry. Same as always. I felt a little out of practice that night but only for so long. In time, I remembered. Exerting myself after what was already a long day, with a rich dinner in my stomach and our potentially mold-riddled air conditioner on full blast, I lay there beside Austin, already asleep. And for the first time in a long time, for the first time in five weeks, as a matter of fact—I wasn’t wheezing and the pain in my ribs was gone. I could breathe.
“Brian, how are your finances?” asked Ian, from the other end of the table, out to dinner with Nick, Ashleigh, and Shannon. My other Shannon, that is. Visiting from San Francisco, she was in town for the week. I hadn’t seen her in years and, when I stood up to hug her hello, she was so much taller than I remembered. Someone asked how she likes San Francisco and with a heartfelt exhale, Shannon said, “I love it.” I know so many people, too many people, who don’t like where they live. It was this line of thought, home and housing, that had Ian asking about my finances. He is from Connecticut, after all. “Well, I have to say—I’m sad. Because it really does seem like my era of cheap living is coming to an end.” They all laughed, not that I was kidding, though maybe that’s exactly what made it funny. I have never spent more than $825 a month in rent. It’s unheard of, even if most everyone in my life has to hear a lot about it. Just about everytime I see Koko, she’ll say to me, “I’m always telling people, ‘I’ve got this friend Brian who works, like, three days a week and lives in Clinton Hill and spends nothing. I have no idea how he does it.’” But in my consultation of Craigslist and Listings Project and the occasional Instagram Story, something’s started to feel inevitable—September will mark the turning point.
They all agreed on one more drink someplace else but I needed to get back to the dog. Telling me to come inside to say my goodbyes, Ian joined Nick and Ashleigh into the bar. But me and Shannon stayed outside. She was still in the middle of telling me about this interview with Patti Smith that she loved so much. How Patti talked about the presence of her mother, and her husband, and Robert Mapplethorpe in everything she does, despite all these people being long gone. I said that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. “You seem to be doing okay, Bri,” said Shannon. “But are you? Are you sad?” Reaching out to touch my arm, Shannon had so much to offer—while also saying she knew I needed to leave. I was dog sitting, just a couple days into a weeks-long stay with Maya the Chihuahua and I try to stay at her apartment as much as I can. Earlier, when I first took my seat at this restaurant, situated on a block of the Lower East Side that I very happily can’t escape, I said, “I want my heart buried on Orchard Street.” And looking at Shannon out on the sidewalk that night, reflected in the tears in her eyes, the same color blue as mine—I could see the streetlights. Under our feet, the ground broke.
Walking down Washington and crossing Atlantic, Clinton Hill became Prospect Heights. Both “Brian” and “Burns” mean, among other things, “hill.” We become our names. Outside the building, I rubbed my palms against my shirt, trying to keep them as dry as possible for the inevitable handshake. In addition to seeing the bedroom, I was here to meet the two other people living in this three-story house—a middle-aged gay couple who have their art studio down on the first floor, their bedroom up on the third, with a small but fully furnished room for rent on the second. Over the last two decades, they’ve rented it out to nine different people. Dancers, writers, fashion students. Someone who identified as “queer” when it was still a pejorative and a straight boy from the Midwest who stayed for two and a half years. “No, no, I’m used to it,” I told the couple, looking at me looking around the room, perhaps appearing smaller than ever given my height. “I’ve been known to say that I live a ‘nun’s life.’” They really laughed at that and I suppose it is funny—the first time someone hears me say it. And there was more where that came from, a few more opportunities during the house tour for me to punctuate their remarks with some smirking little bon mot. I’m good at that. But then, sitting down at their kitchen table and presented with a glass of water, even if we all wanted this to be a conversation, we understood it was an interview. I tried to explain how I’ve spent so much of my adulthood, so far at least, in other people’s homes. That in dog sitting, and living with Keely’s grandmother in Chicago, and telling the stories of real families in recreations of their tenement apartments, I’ve come to better understand my own place in the world. But I failed. Barely finished with this half-cooked thought, I interrupted myself to say, “As creepy as that sounds!” The warmth on their faces cooled to something cautious, something pitying, even. Listening to their stories about the past tenants, it was clear they wanted someone intriguing, someone with personality. An individual who would inspire new fascinations and perspectives. But even at my best, the couple times I did manage to finish a sentence, I fear I was nothing more than polite.
“I walk up this stairwell and think, ‘This is where I did some of the most miserable manual labor of my life,’” Austin said, on our way up to Caroline’s top floor apartment. Walking up those same steps, I also had a thought—is this the last time I’ll be here? I didn’t share that with him, but I don’t think I needed to. Renting a ten-foot cargo van from a West Village garage a couple years ago, Austin and I helped Caroline move twenty years of life out of her country house upstate back to her Carroll Gardens walk-up. With Caroline sitting illegally on the floor—and, at one point, with a gin and tonic in her hand—I prayed we didn’t get pulled over. I’d never driven a vehicle so large. Let alone while weaving through Sixth Avenue traffic and switching lanes on the Parkway. It was stressful and it was exhausting and it was one of the best days of my entire life. We learned so much about her. The consummate Englishwoman, mannered and prim even after all these years in New York City, Caroline was still Austin’s boss at that point. But boundaries were no match for sentiment. Everything she owned had a story and we listened, enraptured, to every one. Opening up an early-eighties music magazine to a spread about the London punk scene, she pointed a finger at the photographer credit. Leaning in close enough to smell that vinegary sting of old ink, we read Caroline’s name. Just when I thought I couldn’t love her more. Austin has known Caroline since he was 18, when she hired him to work reservations at a restaurant, all those years ago. But for whatever reason, he hadn’t told her what happened with us, not yet. So when we arrived upstairs, and gave Caroline our drink orders, and a friend of Caroline’s daughter asked us how we knew each other, I didn’t speak. I couldn’t. But with ease, and something resembling honesty, Austin said, “We date.” And then the stranger asked us how we met.
“On Facebook in 2015,” said Austin. “He commented something funny on a mutual friend’s post and then I looked at his picture and thought, ‘He’s cute.’ So then we became Internet friends. For years. Totally platonic. Just friends. But then in 2018, he moved to New York and, on his first full day here, we saw A Star Is Born in theaters. We started hanging out after that and just never stopped. He’d come over to my apartment every night and lay on my bed and we’d just talk and talk for hours. And all my friends were telling me, ‘He’s got a crush. He must. He loves you.’ And I’m like, ‘No, no, no—we’re just friends.’ But then we have tickets to see Mitski one night and we drank some champagne before the show and, during the set, I put my arms around him. And he lets me do it! And I’m thinking, ‘Okay, sweet, we’re gonna go back to my apartment and, you know, make out!’ So that’s what we do, we go back to my apartment and we’re down at the front door and suddenly Brian says, ‘Alright—I’m gonna head home!’ So, yeah, we don’t talk about it until a couple days later when I tell him, ‘So—I didn’t mean to do this, it was never my plan, I promise but…I have feelings for you and…I think you do, too.’ And then Brian says, ‘That is so sweet but—I don’t.’”
We had a small crowd at this point, laughing and cooing at all the right moments. Not just the daughter’s friend, but another woman named Kathy, and—with freshly mixed drinks—Caroline herself. We’ve told this story so many times to so many people and this unrequited twist always comes as such a surprise. What they thought was the conclusion was only our midpoint. And same as always, after Austin started the story, I finished it.
“I was more gentle than that, of course,” I said. “I just felt like he was my best friend here. And I was worried that if we took that step, and things soured, I’d lose that. I didn’t want to take that risk. But he was so great. You know, telling me that I could come over tomorrow and we could hang out like always and everything would be the same. And it was! It really was. But then a couple months go by and he’s telling me one night about some date he went on with some boy and I thought to myself, ‘Okay, why am I absolutely seething with jealousy right now?’ And then we’re laying in his bed—fully under the covers, mind you, clothed but still—and we’re watching My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Like, two days before Valentine’s Day. And Austin says, ‘Okay, I know I said that the ball is in your court and that, if your feelings ever changed, you’d have to be the one who brings it up but…what about that ball in your court?’ And then, well—the rest was history. And, uh, that risk, you know, my worries about taking that risk on our friendship…it was totally worth it.”
Asking Caroline how I could help, as her party moved from the living room up to the roof, she handed me a beer and said, “You can give this to Marc for me.” Once upon a time, Caroline and Marc were partners. Living together in the East Village, they broke up while she was still pregnant with their daughter, but got back together just before she was born—and separated for good a couple years later. That was every bit of 25 years ago. But the same day I met Caroline for the first time, right up on this roof, I also met Marc. He’s always invited. “Brian, I’ll have you slice this up for us,” said Caroline, handing me a platter and the chocolate babka I’d brought along with me. I got it from a kosher bakery called Moishe’s. It’s like a time machine in there, with its fake wood paneling and linoleum floors. The self-serve diner pot of coffee against one wall and old New Yorkers paying for their black and whites in loose change. I watched a customer say, “Hell, why not, how about two of those, I’ll take two” only for the ancient lady behind the counter, all whiskers and motherly scorn, to say, “Two?!” I was grinning ear to ear, like an idiot, standing in that bakery. “That’s still there? Moishe’s? On Second Avenue?” asked Marc, after I told everybody that story. The Moishe’s I was talking about is on the Lower East Side. The one he was thinking of, as it turns out, isn’t there anymore. After forty years in business, it closed. Marc told us that when he walks up and down Second Avenue these days, he can’t look for the clubs or bars or theaters he once loved. Because they’re not there. All that remains for him, now, are the buildings. And in the archways, the cornices, in the remnants of long gone marquees, dimly familiar but etched in stone, he tries to remember. “I wasn’t just living in a neighborhood, even then I understood that,” Marc said. “I was living in a history.”
Cam reached out, texting me, among other things, “I hope you’re doing okay.” All these months later, he learned about the breakup not because I told him—but because he read about it. It’s no fun to start a conversation with such a downer, I could place the blame there. But that’s not really it. He and his wife and their baby moved to Massachusetts this summer, leaving their first house as a family for a new one someplace else, and I knew next to nothing about it. I’d hardly talked to him. But here he was, starting a conversation I was too hesitant, too guilty to start—and it took me an entire week to respond. Cam’s perspective in my life is a unique one. Straight, punk, male, he’s truly peerless. And I cherish that, I cherish him. But as I read his messages, combing through his two-cents on where he thinks I should live and the kind of guy I should be with, I didn’t feel counseled so much as course-corrected. Nevertheless, I drafted up a mostly jaunty but requisitely firm response that would, surely, warrant his white flag. Instead, we fought. I told him, “If you’d asked me more questions over the years, maybe you would’ve known about the many facets of my personality that have always been there.” And he told me, “I’ve appeared in your writing more often than you’ve actually initiated a conversation with me.” We’ve since made up, Cam and I. But I was sick to my stomach going to bed that night. His suggestions I could disagree with but not his feelings. Feelings that, suddenly, had me thinking of all my fights with Austin after a night out where I felt I never had the chance to speak. And all the times I wished my dad had something more to say. Everything Cam shared about me, I recognized as the truth. I’m nobody’s responsibility. If I want to be among the living, I have to put myself there.
But how?
In Queens, coming to see a place I might live, Mary appeared to me. Full of grace not just once but twice. Assuring me the deliberation was heartbreaking, the couple chose someone else for the room and so my search continued. “I know it’s not Brooklyn,” said a girl named Rachel, reaching out about a room opening up in her apartment. “But Ridgewood is the Brooklyn of Queens.” Still dog sitting Maya, I left one person’s home to go see another. And on my way out of her building, I thought about that couple, and that little room in their beautiful home, and all the beds I’ve slept in, alone, that weren’t mine. Already, I could see the blessing. Maybe now’s the time to start telling different stories about myself. Rachel brought me upstairs where she introduced me to her roommate Hannah. Blessed art thou amongst women, indeed. They’ve both been in the apartment for a while and have nothing but good things to say about it. Rachel and I have some mutual friends but it’s me and Hannah who seem to have the most in common. Both of us were born in New Jersey but her family moved to Vermont when she was twelve while, at thirteen, mine moved to New Hampshire. I’ve been thinking a lot about that move lately. All that change and all those goodbyes, all at once—and that it happened right around this same time of year. Maybe I’ll get to talk to Hannah about it one day. The bedroom is in the back and overlooks all these little yards, for houses mostly, but also a church. I looked through the window and the first thing I noticed, over a fence and behind a tree, was a statue of Mary. When I first arrived, before telling Rachel that I was here, I took a picture of the building next door. People live there, I’d imagine, but it’s also the offices for a radio station. Nailed to its facade, in an old wood frame, there was a drawing of the mother of God. And encircled all around her, like a halo, in Spanish and Polish and Russian and Arabic, over and over again, I read the words “Radio Maria.” A Madonna without child, gazing dreamily off to one side. And once I climbed that stoop and said that I was here—she would have been looking straight at me.
Coming back from an afternoon walk with Maya, I said yes to Rachel and Hannah. That I’d love to live with them in Ridgewood. Of course, the formal application process hadn’t even begun yet. Also, I’d be expected to pay a broker’s fee for a broker I never consulted. But if all goes as planned, I found a place to live. And l I began to sob. It was just me and the dog but still, with a paper towel, I covered my face to shield the sorrow. These wrenching, gasping heaves that the neighbor through the wall might’ve mistaken for laughter. That was the saddest I’ve ever felt, I think. Days later, at work, talking to Daryl, he said to me, “But Brian, do you know what I’m thinking about those tears? What I’m hearing from you? I think I’m hearing acceptance.”
Maya’s apartment is a five minute walk from ours. That makes things easy and it makes things hard. It was so different, doing this back in Boston, when I lived in Allston but spent every other weekend with a dog in the South End. Living out of a bag with no simple way of getting back and forth, I couldn’t afford to forget a thing. Meanwhile, a couple summers ago, when the power went out in the middle of the night—without a second thought—I got up, carried Maya for three blocks at three in the morning, and scared the shit out of Austin as we climbed right back into bed. If ever I needed anything, I could just go home. Juliette’s wedding was a factor but, really, it was these two weeks with Maya that changed our plans, that shifted the timing of our final goodbye. Figuring I might as well just look for a place in September if I’d spend so much of August off on my own. But just about every other night, I walked those three blocks for those five minutes to spend some time with Austin. Sometimes I brought Maya, sometimes I was on my own. Kiera is in Scotland, away on vacation for a couple weeks, so he has the apartment all to himself. By the time she returns, I’ll have moved away. Bidding our farewells, she said to me, “Austin and I are gonna make such a mess of this place.” It was said with laughter, and warmth, a winking understanding of my tidy, tidy ways. But she might as well have stabbed me in the heart. Because all these nights that I came over and looked around the bedroom, at the laptop in the sheets, and the soda cans on the desk, at a day’s outfit laying raptured on the floor—here it was. The mess I always forbid him to make. Austin, at last, can feel at home.
“How’d you like this summer?” asked my mom, calling me on her drive home from work one night. “Obviously there was a lot to deal with and I know you’re sad but—I hope you were able to enjoy it. Did you?” It’s not just that she loves summer, for me, my mom is summer. And I’m cut from that same cloth. When she was a teenager, my mother and her family went on vacation to Huntington Beach, visiting an older sister who’d just moved there. And in her own words, “I was a raging bitch that week.” There were a lot of photographs taken of her during that trip. And when I look at this 16-year-old girl, with the Farrah Fawcett curls and scowl on her face, I know her. In this one picture, the best one, fully reclined on a beach chair in her purple one-piece, my mother is tanning. Her eyes are closed and her skin is bronzed and she’s doing her favorite thing in the world. But if I look closely enough at her face, at the clench in her jaw, the tension around her mouth, clear despite the film grain—I recognize that anger. The happiest summers of my life still left me sad. Literal beach sand through the proverbial hourglass, it just comes and goes so quickly. This sweet, special thing. Talking to Jarod in the break room, I said, “It’s like my whole life, everything I do, it’s this exercise in slowing down time. All the dogs I used to take for the same walks everyday, these tours I do over and over again, all my routines, never wanting to travel anywhere, all of it. The summer before going away to college, my prayer every night, my literal prayer, was, ‘Please, God, may this time go by as slowly as possible.’ I hated New Hampshire! Why would I want that? But I did! It’s all I’ve ever wanted. To just—pause.” I think I know who I get that from. But regarding this summer, as much as I hate to admit it, it’s only time that will tell. Because there’s been a lot of sadness. I’ve been furious and I’ve been scared. I’ve known the solace of laughter, of nights out with friends, and how quickly that all disappears once I’m walking home alone. And yet, with as strong a will as ever, I wish this summer would never end.
I tried to tell Austin a story, but I couldn’t do it. All done dog sitting, I was back home. For a week, for one final week, Austin and I were together. We’ve started discussing what things might look like on the other side. Whatever makes me the happiest, says Austin, is what we should do. That the frequency—or infrequency—of our communication and our getting together can be dictated solely by my feelings. That’s what he wants. I said that’s very generous, and I meant that—but I also told him it leaves me feeling utterly alone in all this. Telling him I couldn’t begin to understand such rationality in the face of feelings that, most of the time, leave me feeling destroyed. Where am I in that logic? Where is he? Where is his destruction? After I all but demanded this, Austin explained he’s most scared of how he’ll feel in a month, of how depressed he’ll be once I’m gone. While, for me, it’s taking everything I have to survive what little time we have left. And he tried to make it clear that he wasn’t being blase, that I wasn’t looking at the been-there-done-that cool of someone who’s been through this before. I was looking at Austin, enjoying us while he still can. Sitting eventually in silence, I tried to hear that. But once laughter got back into bed with us—as, sooner or later, it always did—I tried to tell him that story. About a gentle moment with a stranger during my afternoon’s walk. There wasn’t much to it, half a story, if that. But I couldn’t do it. Opening my mouth, I choked on my words.
But walking west on Christopher Street, nearer every moment to the Hudson River and its reflection of a fractured sunset, as the two of us headed to dinner a couple nights later, I managed the impossible. Telling Austin about the woman who asked me, “What are you taking a picture of?”
I turned to see an old woman looking at me from the top of her stoop. If I’ve walked past her home once, I’ve walked past it five hundred times. Years ago, living in Bushwick, I’d take these long walks across Bed-Stuy in pursuit of trees and bricks and quiet. Peering through the linteled windows of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, I’d think to myself, “I’ll never be able to live here.” It seems I’m back where I started. The looped route of my eight-mile daily walk takes me past this old woman’s Clermont Avenue brownstone twice, there and back. And seated on a chair, she’s always outside. Sometimes she’s with other Black ladies her age, sometimes little children, sometimes alone. But we’ve never spoken. Not until that afternoon, when I stopped short on the sidewalk and pointed my phone straight up at the sky. Taking the headphones out of my ears, and apologizing for it, she repeated her question and I said, “Oh, just—the sky’s so blue today and it looks so beautiful through all the leaves. I was struck by it.” It was a beautiful day. If I didn’t know any better, with how cool it was, a high in the low seventies, I would have thought it was fall. Resting my foot at the bottom of her stoop, I got closer. Looking somewhere way over my head, and smiling, high on her threshold of home, she said to me, “That tree. I look at the arms of that tree, or at least that’s what I call them, the branches, I call them the arms. I look at that tree and I look at her arms…and I see wrinkles. There are wrinkles on her arms. She’s old. For a long, long time now—she’s been right here.”