Non-Attachment

I started a part-time job at a little place where I make fancy bar food. It’s fun, mostly because it’s a nice space with nice people, it has a sensibility that I like, I don’t have to be too invested in it, and what it serves is exactly in line with all of its Brooklyn de jour claims.

There’s this individual brown-butter hazelnut cake we sell that is everything I want in a dessert: dense but soft, nutty, moist, rich, perfectly sweet. It resembles a boob because it’s an upside-down muffin and it has an aurora of maple frosting on the center, which is then crowned with a toasted hazelnut. I keep a close eye on how those sell, and when there are leftovers they’re up for grabs by the staff. I sweep them, and whatever other pastries look good, into my backpack stealthily. This is unwise of me, but it’s not sustainable. Soon enough I’m going to be sick of those brown butter hazelnut cakes and everything else on the menu.

Friday night I had two glasses of wine after my shift. Then I loaded up my backpack with leftover pastries and headed home on my new bike. At home, I ate two hazelnut brown-butter cakes and a pain au chocolat. Then I spread out on my sofa and finished the new Toni Morrison novel. It was 9:00 PM on a Friday and I had no other plans. I decided to go for a run.

Punishing yourself is sometimes a good idea. Going for a run on an uncomfortably hot Friday night, after it’s dark, is a type of self-punishment that’s pretty easy to recognize. When I see sweaty, lumbering, late-night runners, I always think of that afterschool special “For the Love of Nancy”—the one starring Tracy Gold, loosely based on her eating disorder. So I willed myself to subdue the dregs of my wine buzz and the still digesting pastries I’d eaten, and I set out.

I took a familiar route, from my apartment in Fort Greene out to the furthest border of Boerum Hill, where Union intersects with Columbia, and then down along the piers until Brooklyn Bridge Park begins. On the way, I ran through Verandah Place, an unassuming little block where the writer Thomas Wolfe owned a home. This block lost its charm for me a while ago when someone told me how many millions the houses there are selling for, but it’s still a nice way to cut west and break up the scenery. I ran through a cloud of fireflies. They circled and dodged me in dazzling, fleeting arcs.

I got to the main part of Brooklyn Bridge Park and stopped at its southern-most corner along the water. I rested my hands on the rail there and released a long wail-sigh of a fart as I took in the city line. It was dark except for Manhattan’s characteristic glitter and a party boat floating by, and the East River was agitated. Those at the park were agitated, too, but languid in the heat. Couples and trios walked in fumbling diagonals, careless of anyone attempting to get around them. A boy on a scooter threatened to throw a tantrum, and his parents didn’t care.

I was aware, as I have been for many of my recent runs, that I need to enjoy this while I can. It could be one of the last, and on some miserably cold day in whatever city I end up moving to, doubtlessly when I’ve strayed from my current exercise kick, I will remember this balmy run with some throbbing nostalgia.

The thing about making peace with New York is that you either give up on giving up, or you just give up. Both are resignations, but the former is an innocence lost if you based your narrative on the same vague, middle-class one that I did: Will I make it, or will I give up? I don’t have any plans to go anywhere quite yet, but I’m done with that storyline, with its success/failure paradigm, with New York as anything more than a place to live. As my friend Brian said in an email a few months ago, “Wherever you go, there you are.” And there I was in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

I ran through it, turning towards home at the corner of Dumbo where Grimaldi’s is, went up the hill that leads past the Watchtower and into Brooklyn Heights. As I ran across the Promenade, my stomach, which had not yet bothered me in any prohibitive way, began to make itself known. This is a familiar feeling, the bloat and the pinch coming in waves, my body reprimanding me for the wine I drank and the pastries I ate. I knew I had about 15 minutes before things would get really bad, so I picked up my pace.

I continued home down State Street, which used to be one of my favorite streets for its perfect utility, relative quiet, and charm, but I’ve since found everything below that surface to be annoying: the condos with the weird circle cut into the stucco on the top floors, the crack heads, the narrow and poorly maintained sidewalks, the stoop fixture guy who leers at me suspiciously even though I always say hello. That said, at dusk after a good sunset, State Street offers the best, most perfectly framed view of the Williamsburg Savings Bank Building, and it's worth seeking that out at least once.

I ran the last few blocks to my apartment with my key in my hand, aimed for the lock, my body as close to doubled over in the fetal position as possible while still maintaining a jog. My stomach was about to pull the trigger. I got home and rushed to the bathroom, flinging sweat everywhere, not bothering to lock the doors behind me, and I made it just in time. Some pleasures, the kinds that absolve pain so absolutely and bring an unworldly, full-scale relief—bowel movements, sex—can go take you full circle, back to where it hurts again. The pleasure is so intense it confuses your receptors and transmits it as pain. I waited a few minutes there on the toilet and let my body stabilize.

Then I returned to the street for my favorite part of every run, which is the cool-down walk. There are a lot of things I claim to practice with conviction—maintaining a good diet, meditating when I can’t sleep, remembering birthdays—but the cool-down walk is the only practice in which I’m devout. The time it takes to recalibrate is shocking. I can finish a long run completely out of breath, totally beat, focused entirely on surrender, and in the space of a few blocks, I’m ready to carry on with whatever else I have planned to do. After a ten-minute walk, I returned home, stretched for a few minutes, and showered.

I looked into my empty fridge—I’ve been waiting on a check, it was supposed to arrive the next day—and decided to spend my remaining $20 cash on an offensively simple salad and a beer at the pub near me. (This is not ever a good idea, neither the $20 for a salad and a beer nor my misuse of the last bit of my money.) I brought a book with me, but mostly as a prop: I’m content to let my eyes glaze over and to stare into an imagined abyss as I wait for my food. I ate my $9 salad efficiently and left right after I settled my bill. My stomach was still iffy, so I didn't finish my beer.

So I walked back home to my stuffy apartment. I took a quick cold shower and climbed into bed. I lay there restless for a while, due to the noise and the heat and this vague, gnawing thing that hadn’t yet loosened its grip, until sleep came.