Personal Day

I woke on my personal day feeling impersonal. I'd slept long and late, so much I barely recognized the time of day in my bedroom, dust made obvious in the hard light, no job or appointment or interview to rush toward. I needed nothing and was needed nowhere. I almost doubted I was alive. In fists I fingernailed my palms, to make sure I was still in there. Hands above eyes, I watched the skin flush and release the dimples.

I walked to that restaurant in my neighborhood where a bare piece of toast cost seven dollars and came with a marble of hand-churned butter and salt from a far-off sea. It had been years since I'd been there, a place I went with Paul, back when I spent money as if I had everything I'd ever need, as if I were debtless and immortal. The walls were painted this frosty, pale green and the silverware and china felt like art in the mouth. They served omelettes stingy with filling and magnificently complicated fruits—soaked mulberries, candied lemon, papaya crescents, cubes of heirloom melon, a black grape sliced into a bloom. A little dish of it cost sixteen dollars to account for carbon offsets and living wages, which made it more than organic, they said—this fruit salad was ethical. People swore it was the only place in New York where the produce tasted as good as it did in California. Tourists would approach the windows, look in at this diorama of people in expensive clothes, then move on.

Before I lived here the only place I'd ever heard of in New York was the Metropolitan Museum because it was in so many captions in one of my history books. I went there every free day or afternoon I had my freshman year, until I'd been in each room, looked at every piece. I was methodical, reading all the cards, taking notes.

Once a security guard asked me if I was a student and I said I was and he said to study hard and I said I would and I turned a corner, sat down, and wept quietly for five minutes. I wasn't entirely sure why. I became accustomed to these unexplainable moments, emotional things. It was just a part of living in the world, I told myself, of not having an obvious god.

Maybe spending so much time at the Met had something to do with why the city also seemed like an exhibit, or maybe that's just what Manhattan is—a bunch of shrines and reenactments. I'd overhear conversations about what this building used to be or who used to live in that place or what it was before it was whatever it was. (It always used to be something better.) Restaurants listed the origin and history of every ingredient they served, archaeology of a salad, a stew. And the people, the characters in the streets, they were always so arranged, layered with clues about who they were and where they were in their history. Leather purses carried hieroglyphic messages about the carrier's taste and socioeconomic status. The young wore their tribes overtly, with messages on T-shirts, brands or bands. The rich looked out their cab windows the way painted eyes looked out of a frame.

I ordered forty-seven dollars of breakfast with a whole pot of tea because I was going to spend as much of my personal day right here, trying to reenact my history, pretend Paul was here, pretend I was younger and in less debt and in less trouble. Maybe I somehow knew it would be one of the last calm days before my new second job or whatever it was began—that I needed to spend a little time looking back before I could go forward.

I watched the people eating or barely eating, eavesdropping on them as Paul and I used to—that her spring collection was horrendous, embarrassing, and someone else was just going...