Something about the rain

It rained almost every day in New York City during the month of May. Here's what I thought about.

Several consecutive weeks of rain had transformed New York City into a damp, drowsy, and disorienting planet - Caladan or Kamino perhaps - seething with dripping Midtown creatures deploying, closing, and shaking out umbrellas, wan and hopeless. This isn’t to say that the month of May saw no sunshine at all. Yes, there were sunny days, but they were feverish when they occurred, allergenic and too bright: miserably Spring-like. A handful of perfect New York weekend days appeared, at least on paper, but when you crossed the threshold of your apartment, you were met with eye-watering blasts of wind, which quickly smeared the clouds over the sky, casting quick undulating patches of sun onto the ground.

On one of these foolishly sunny days, I had to go into work.

I floated into Midtown in a murky suspension of Advil and stagnant tequila. My stomach, a chasm of booze, was in desperate need of carbohydrates. On the train I stared into space, the cold condensation of my iced americano, was the only sensation grounding me to reality. The bumps and turns on the rails jostled my limp body, which I had tried to make appear professional and normal in a crisp white shirt and black slacks, a spectre of the pleasing assistant seen in the weekdays prior.

The sun screamed pleasantly over a balding Park Avenue, which was stripped of its usual swathes of Midtown worker bees. Mid May and the tulip beds lay headless in neat rows - past their prime - nothing now but strong stalky necks. My own lower body, the only activated region of my corpus, stepped each step from memory: choreographed and latent. That I had to absent-mindedly armor myself in this attire to navigate 57th street on a Saturday so beautiful it practically smelled of Aperol and bike rides was known to me the preceding weeks. Four weekends, I preached to my friends, was all that this job needed from me a year.

A shell shocked clink of shot glasses resounded in my consciousness: two rounds of them thrown back to back, spit flying out of belches and haughty laughs, mocking my current state. I choked on consecutive gulps of cold water to alleviate the hangover. My body recoiled at the sensation, as if I was trying to drown myself with each swallow. I clipped at my keyboard and watched the letters form sentences that would usually make sense to me: Gavel account. Airway bill. Rostrum.

Two weekends later, my friend Carlie visited Leo and me and stayed with us in our apartment.

It was my first Memorial Day weekend in New York. The past two years, I had gone home to Dayton for Memorial Day, crossing my fingers on the plane that the weather would be warm enough to swim in the Little Miami River, or at least to tan in my friend DJ’s backyard, margarita in hand. Sometimes it was, but May has a nasty habit of betrayal, and I figured I’d enjoy my time off in my apartment, something I rarely do.

We got out of work Friday at 1:00 PM. It was cold, dipping below 50 degrees, sputtering rain here and there like a leaky faucet. I was determined to ride the bus up Madison Avenue to the Met to see the John Singer Sargent and a chinoiserie shows my college friend had told me about over Georgian wine the night prior.

I was the youngest person on the bus. The middle of the day is rush hour for the wealthy and elderly of the Upper East Side. To my left, a thin woman in athleisure sat with her Westie atop her lap, which an old man across from us stared at relentlessly. I texted Carlie my plans, knowing she was still at home, probably shoeing the cat away from her belongings which he was always determined to rummage through. The Westie rested its head on my knee and the woman and I smiled at one another.

The scene on the steps of the Met was the same as always: swathes of people in colorful clothes, taking pictures and standing around confused by which line to choose, under the burnt-sweet smoke of rotating hot dogs and spinning pretzels. I picked the shorter of the two lines and entered the Great Hall, which was full of the stench of wet clothing, and the clean, familiar aroma the Met always had. When I moved to New York, I spent two days a week here: determined to map out every corner while listening to ambient noise and refreshing my Gmail to see if I had gotten a second interview at X, Y, and Z galleries.

I headed straight up the stairs and turned left at the European painting wing - I would make no such meanderings today. SARGENT AND PARIS, in screaming vinyl letters, was the last thing I saw before answering a phone call from Carlie.

“Sham! I’m here - I had Leo pay for my ticket because God knows I wasn’t paying 25 dollars. Are you here?”

My nickname. She is one of a few people to call me this: a remnant from high school. I instructed her to meet me upstairs in the Modern and Impressionist hall. I was standing behind a large Rodin sculpture. I was thrilled to see her - as my growing excitement for the exhibition was only doubled by sharing it with a friend. We took in each work: Sargent’s luxurious portraits of beautiful youths and striking socialite women before venturing downstairs to Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie. I liked it so much I bought the program.

The rain continued through Saturday and Sunday. The week dredged along.

Carlie’s residency on Leo and I’s couch had inspired many late night talks: her recent breakup with a Russian scientist at Columbia, characters from high school, and the theme of the week, which was frequency. Namely, what things we declared as being low or high vibrational. These conversations elicited the three of us alternating between our own lists of this, that, and the other. Tik Tok is low vibrational. Packing your lunch is high vibrational. Et cetera. Carlie, a resolute triple Capricorn, inspired me to follow through with these changes. Shortly after she returned to Columbus, I deleted Tik Tok and Twitter and began to read in every spare moment I could find.

Toward the end of the day Thursday, there were some protestors outside an Italian clothing store, screaming profanities about animal abuse, sprawling adages in chalk on the sidewalk, and tousling with security guards. I took the distraction as a queue to leave early: I was to attend a friends gallery opening a few blocks north. I walked, perhaps slower than I might usually. I noticed in the 48 hours sans-social media that my brain had slowed down, and consequently my body. I was listening to the Ladybird soundtrack when a cloud peeked behind a building and revealed a golden expanse of sunlight onto Madison Avenue.

I saw an older man in a suit who wore glasses like my grandpa used to wear, and as he jovially carried on with his friend, I noticed acutely how blue the patch of fresh sky was. A wound, almost, burning and icy cool from the gusts of East River wind. The atmosphere beckoned a feeling of a certain 2009 phenomenon: Obama-era Night at the Museum Americana type-vibe. A snapshot of my childhood brought to life by my passed grandfather’s image. My stomach wrung around itself with a dreary nostalgia, a hope-drunk homesickness that made my reflection in the Loro Piana display window seem more alien than ever: a sore thumb, my long hillbilly face at a diametric opposition to the pedigree of old money New York.

I arrived at the gallery door and rang the doorbell, which never seemed to work. An Orthodox Jewish woman in a long black sheitel opened the door for me and I strayed in, rapidly wrapping my headphones around my palm in a coil while drawing back a tear or two. I waited for the elevator and was looking forward to gathering myself alone but to my horror was eventually joined by five other gallery-goers, and we even stopped at the floor before my friends gallery to pick up a mother and father and their child. A tall woman looked at me over the heads of the shorter people in the elevator and I could tell my previous vulnerability on the street was showing on my face. The doors opened.

After a sleepy, half-drunk ride home on the train after the gallery, I emerged from Dekalb under a brilliant, pre-summer sky: Cosmo pink and bottle blue. My stomach turned, and all of the sudden I was filled with another shot of dread - a heart-sinking longing. When was the last time I looked at a sunset with my mother? I must’ve in the past, but my memory was failing me - I closed my eyes and remembered my grandparent’s back porch, unaware if it was a fabricated memory or not. It doesn’t really matter. The realization of time and space flooded over me in any icy wave. I was now home, unlocking one of the many locks to my apartment, and found no one inside.