A couple weeks before moving home, mid-October it was oddly sunny out. Was this October? I’m imagining wearing a skirt. Maybe this was summer. Late summer, because by then I’d abandoned my bicycle and had taken to traipsing across the Williamsburg Bridge in desolation. I think I was walking to St. Mark’s Place, where I would mourn my beloved bike route from my old job at the bakeshop in midtown. Retracing my steps past the Odessa, wondering about the egg cream at Gem Spa, haunting 2nd Ave, rubbing salt into my wounds like a fucking wretch.
I was stomping my way across the city, snarling at anyone who dared lay their eyes on me. I was 110 pounds and subsisted on yogurt and granola and seitan and couldn’t make it a night without a gin buck and chain smoked on the fire escape constantly. None of it mattered. I had already arranged my clandestine exit.
He really had no reason to stop me on 9th in Alphabet City that day. My eyes were fixed on the road, hands shoved in my pockets, headphones blasting the Roots as I felt each of my steps driving a stake into my arrhythmic heart. And he was far too old for me—tubby too, and balding,. We crossed the street toward each other, he called out to me. I almost growled, but then I realized he had just given the gentlest catcall I’d ever heard. So I didn’t growl. I stopped.
“Miss, you look beautiful today,” he said. “I just wanted to stop and let you know that, and, if you’re not busy later, I’d love to take you out for a drink and show you off.”
He was this stereotypical Italian New Yorker standing in front of me with a kind smile and a polite request to shake my hand. I was twenty-two and the only time I’d heard the word “off” in a romantic proposal usually concerned the preferred state of my clothing.
I told him with a lowered gaze that I would be moving home soon. He seemed mystified at the mention of Los Angeles. Sad, even. “Well, if you ever come back…give me a call, beautiful.”
I walked back over the bridge that night more slowly than usual, stopping in the middle to stare out at a city I’d decided didn’t want me. Knowing that it would take me back, when I was ready. Whenever that may be.
Taylor Yates is an L.A. native obsessed with travelling and patterned socks. When she’s not writing and editing for DUM DUM, she’s biking around the reservoir and playing moody bass lines in her living room. She is currently working on an autobiographical anthology. Check out her work here.