1. Have a night out by yourself.
Have a night out by yourself. Sit at the bar. Feel really stupid and alone for a bit. Wonder if everyone is looking at you thinking you’re really stupid and alone. Stare at the group of people sitting around a table drinking laughing whispering touching feeling alive on one of those impossibly perfect nights in New York. Feel deeply depressed. Look at the bartender and smile. They’ll smile back. Feel hopeful again. The bartender will pour you a free shot and take one with you. You’ll chat and realise you grew up three towns away from each other in your home state that’s not New York because who’s from New York anymore? Become friends as a person from that table you were staring at comes up to order shots. They’ll look at you and ask if you want one. Of course you do. They’ll invite you back to their table and you’ll make new friends for life. New things to do on the weekend and for lunch brunch dinner vacation. Well done.
2. Help an old woman cross the road.
Help an old woman cross the road. Take her groceries and follow her home. She’ll invite you upstairs into her rent-controlled apartment on St Marks Place and make you a coffee. She’ll have a photo on the wall of her standing next to Janis Joplin or Allen Ginsberg. You’ll start to cry and she’ll give you a handkerchief. She’ll tell you she never had kids and ask you to be hers. Accept gratefully. She’ll ask you to get a chair and pull out the box from the top of her closet. It’s filled with letters from New York beat poets like Frank O’hara - poems never read. She’ll let you take the box home and lend you her favourite book. You’ll meet every Wednesday at the dinner on Houston street and when she dies which she will so peacefully and with a full life she’ll write you into her will and you’ll have a new apartment on St Marks Place.
3. Stop shaving your legs.
Stop shaving your legs and feel really hideous for a while. Look at your legs constantly in disgust. Wonder why your legs should be so ugly. Sit on the subway too long staring at other people’s leg hair. Miss your stop wondering why their leg hairs are so ugly. And if you don’t find other people’s leg hairs ugly. Wonder why you think yours are ugly. Have an existential crisis. Look at your leg hairs and ask them why you should find them so disgusting like dirt. They won’t talk back. Feel really rude speaking to them like that. Apologise. Bend upside down and look at them from a different angle. It’s just hair. The same hair that you may or may not have on your head, eyelids, eyebrows. Look in the mirror naked and second guess all the other things you thought were ugly on you. Because after a while, your legs won’t feel hideous to you. You won’t look at your legs in disgust. You won’t find them ugly. You’ll find it’s just hair and your body is just your body and it’s you and all you can be is you and you can be happy with you.
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