first job as a fact-checker at a fitness magazine; Sarah was a junior designer at The Village Voice, and somehow both our names showed up in some media directory and garnered us invitations. It felt strange, gulping cocktails at this extravagant party while the stock market teetered and talking heads wrung their hands and both our companies implemented hiring freezes like an early winter frost. We chatted away and exchanged emails and then got lunch at a burrito place, and just like that, we were friends. I miss that about my twenties, that vastness, that sweeping sense that there’s room for everyone worthwhile, all the time and space in the world.
Sarah lived with Edie and some other girls at the time, in a different apartment within Calhoun Lofts. I’d heard the building referred to in reverential tones; it was hipster legend. Sarah had invited me to see a show there that Saturday. My outfit and hair carefully planned out and rethought, I’d taken two parting shots of whiskey, boarded the L train, and ridden deep into the bowels of Bushwick.
Sarah met me at the door with a hug and a compliment (I can still taste that tang of relief that I’d dressed acceptably) and brought me first to her apartment to pregame. Stepping into her place, I gasped at the soaring warehouse space with unfinished walls, twenty-foot ceilings, and, on the far end, a wall of dirty windows that looked straight out of a vintage elementary school.
Rap music poured from speakers and my eyes fell on Edie, standing on the couch and dancing with abandon, a red Solo cup held high in one hand. I saw her as if in slow motion: red waves skipping over a cropped gold blazer, a sliver of pale stomach above indigo shorts, all skinny limbs and outsize confidence. Sarah yelled up an introduction and Edie turned her emerald eyes to me and smiled, and suddenly nothing in life was as important as making this girl like me.
Sarah poured us drinks and we sat down with the other roommates. I remember less about them: a quiet girl named Jenna with long brown hair and a bumped nose (she worked in book publishing, maybe?) and an impressively skinny blonde named Kylie, who spoke with a California raaaaahsp. Strangers thrown together by Craigslist, but all nice girls, a group that danced and drank and lived well together. I focused my efforts on Edie, who was bright and hilarious and weirdly delighted by everything I said. I did so well. I hit that second-drink tingle of wit and found myself thinking that this Edie was everything I wanted my life in New York to be.
She didn’t ask me what I did for work; instead we gushed about our close-at-hand dreams, her imminent enrollment at Parsons, my plans to write narrative nonfiction so finely crafted it’d make readers’ chests ache. We talked about men and Bowie, how we’d both read an article revealing we’re about 40 percent stardust and 60 percent hydrogen, or Big Bang dust, and isn’t it wild our atoms are as old as life itself. We had such great energy. Even Sarah noticed it and politely faded into herself.
After a final round of shots, the girls led me to an apartment on another floor—another huge rectangular canvas, now decked out with a stage along the far windows, a bar/merch table off to its right, and an especially bizarre construction of living quarters: Over a thicket of four-by-fours, they’d built a cluster of elevated bedrooms, each claustrophobic and squat and opening into an elf-size catwalk, which lipped out into an overhang from which to watch the stage. (A resident I bumped into that night told me that during a brief run of Romeo and Juliet, they’d made literal use of it for the balcony scene.)
Our drunkenness swelled, not just from the shots but also from the frenzy: strobe lights, spilled drinks, gyrating masses, a pounding band sporting silver and gold jackets and sequins on their eyebrows. We allowed the surf to sweep us up, dancing along, a pleasant tornado. The night faded to black afterward, like so many after it, when the light of my consciousness would blink back on hours later in my own bed or on SAKE’s couch or sometimes atop the small, sweaty mattress of a male Calhoun resident. Periods snipped from my timeline, blacked out, right in the middle of the best days of my life.