The night before "X" moved to California, I spent a Friday night in New York City staring out a tenth-story window into an old factory building across the street.I had gotten a call to do a temp job at 9 p.m. that night, and I figured I had nothing else going on and I could use the money. I did have plans for the next day, though – at noon, I was to have lunch with an about-to-become ex-boyfriend. It had ended when X decided to go back to his ex-girlfriend in California. "We’ll still be friends," I said, "right?"
Of course, it was a desperate plea, but I didn’t want to lose contact completely. I still wanted to have hope, pathetic though it was.
At the temp job, I waited for more than an hour for my first assignment. The room they had us in was wide, cold, white, and felt like a school cafeteria. It had long tables with gold flecks in them and crumbs on them. There was a mini-fridge in one corner and little else. I sat at one of the barren tables and stared into the factory building across the street.
The room I was looking into was part of a print shop, I could tell. Even at 11 p.m., there were a few young guys racing around among the copy machines, catching piles of cardboard and spiral notebooks and tossing them into piles. They frolicked among metal file cabinets and old equipment and I wondered if they felt lonely being the only dwellers of the building in the wee hours each night on Seventh Avenue South.
There was a fast food joint below, and each time I looked down there, something strange was going on. In the glow of its yellow sign, fancy cars stopped, waited, then sped off. Homeless people stubbed out cigarettes. I looked east, the direction I’d take the next morning to my favorite pastry shop on Eleventh Avenue. I intended to buy one of their signature apricot almond cakes before he left so X could taste it before he left. It had been fun introducing him to my favorite places and foods in New York.
Since I wasn’t using my freshly-sharpened pencil for temp work, I scribbled in my journal about the print shop and the people in it. I watched the clock and yawned. I thought about how unfair it was to meet someone I liked so much and have to compete with California.
The next morning, I left the temp assignment at 9 a.m. I didn’t know if it was worth it to cross the river back into Hoboken only to return to Manhattan to meet X for lunch. So I strolled in the early morning sunlight. The streets were wet and clean, and the Village was charming and quiet. I bought the cake at the pastry shop, ambled up the east and west sides, sat in a park and listened to the pigeons.
At noon, I met X uptown and he bought me a sandwich at the deli. I presented the cake, but he said his stomach had been acting up and he didn’t want anything too sweet. Still, he had a thin slice and I wrapped the rest to bring home.
He asked if I wanted to see The Tao of Steve, which was playing across the street. Something didn’t seem right about sitting in the theater with him, so I declined. We hugged, and he disappeared into the theater. I walked south with the rest of my cake and got on the bus to go home. – Anonymous