I walked for a few hours in the snow that day in those flats. I walked until my feet were fucking blue in penance for my own stupidity without thinking of what to do to help myself, in shock and anger and all the rest of the seven steps. I walked and tripped on my one day fall from grace all day in the snow until I got to the self-pitying depths of “what else could happen now?” and realized I could get my fucking feet amputated and where was a phone I could use right now?

I need to add a few things here.

I don’t want this to come off all “slick city boy two-times dumb city girl”, soundtracked for current teen tastes. You have to understand that our three years of increasing intimacy seemed headed toward marriage, or at least an advanced format of living together; we’d joked about the unconventional ways we could do our wedding day, and practised more seriously afterwards for our honeymoon. There was always real light in his face to see me, even if it had just been a couple of days- I’ll still swear it on this one.

I really thought we were on the same page.

If you’re rolling your eyes at the moment, I can assure you I was a lot worse (and then some) back in March, in fact I confess to it all, especially the “dumb” part. In fact, if it wasn’t for dumb luck, I might really have ended up in an emergency treatment room.

What happened is that I ran smack into Georgina from Fin coming out of Balthazar- and damn lucky I am, too, because that girl can diagnose a trainwreck faster than anyone I know. She had me in a cab in a couple of minutes, and after five minutes had figured out that my clothes, phone and wallet were all the one place I couldn’t quite go at the moment, and had a plan, too.

She had the cab wait around the corner with me cowering flat on the seat under both our coats, and ran into my flat saying she had just left her coat and scarf the night before and a quick “Jesus, what the fuck happened here?”, returning with a bunch of my basics, even the phone charger, and got me back to her place and into a hot bath with some strong vodka drink like a bloody mary, but with Red Bull or something instead– anyway after three of them I was warm and dressed and Georgina sat and listened to everything, letting my remaining marbles run wild all over her living room until they stopped bouncing and rolling and came, finally, to rest.

More effective triage, I’ve never seen. And reliable advice, which though somewhat cowardly, was exactly the right thing to do, at the time, and in hindsight, too, I’d do it again. I never meant to stay so long, but the idea of being somewhere warm and sunny, and leaving the whole co-op fiasco to my mom’s imminent NYC arrival from 2500 miles away seemed a bold, empowering and independent solution– my feet were still blue, for fuck’s sake.

Which is how I came to be standing alone outside the San Diego International Airport the next evening, a warm spring night with the purple glitter of the bay right there, cars zipping by with their lights just on, the palm tree silhouettes black against the dusky sunset. The last warmth of a desert-warm day settled its arm across my shoulders, both overly familiar and greatly appreciated as my broken heart burst like a pomegranate into the picture perfect night.

I get to make dumb Beatles allusions this time of year because I share my birthday with John Lennon, and while I’m not a big Beatles’ fan, I confess there was a time where the eternal piano notes of “Imagine” soundtracked every lonely cigarette drag and disappointed stare into the distance. Besides, I love it here, and John Lennon in that “New York City” t-shirt is as big a religious icon as I’ve personally got.

So, yeah, today IS my birthday– I made full confession on my Facebook page– and I love New York and am so glad to be back (despite the mess) that I took a break from the clean-up and went walking. The autumn sky was once a year autumn blue today, so crisp and deep against the hard lines of New York. The upper stories are still drenched in end-of-year sun, so gold that the cold stone several stories up glows warm, inviting, as if it would yield gently to the touch, for a few passing moments, anyway.

Like I said, its so poignantly beautiful today that I aimed for an unfettered walk uptown to MOMA and the Park, an escape to the century old concerns of my Cubist heroes and the magic palette of the most recent fallen leaves against still-green grass–
God, I love NewYork, and despite my recent dalliances, I always will.

I love New York even though today she guided my carefree wander subversively back to the blocks I walked that day in the snow back in March when all this shit started. Always subtle and karmically exacting, the city today subconsciously enabled me in retracing the route that led me eventually to the other end of the country and back in six months time.

I suppose I should be grateful for the encouragement, but I was just trying to enjoy myself for an afternoon in the company of the familiar and unwavering. You could back off a little when it comes to one of your most ardent fans, yeah?

Seeing it typed out like that, the answer to that one is obvious, and so I’m back at the desk on my birthday Saturday night, sorting out a little bit more. That’s instead of finding a new cure for loneliness over a perfect pint glinting with last sunlight of the day, which had been this year’s answer to the age old birthday question, “What do you want to do today?”

I’m telling the next part of the story, now, okay? But I’m not fucking publishing it until tomorrow.

Back when I started this project for Fin and started writing this blog, I kept my boyfriend at the time out of it because he wasn’t wild about being the subject of published commentary like the various characters chronicled coupling with Georgina on her blog, and at the time I had a great deal of respect for him: patient, loyal and chivalrous to a fault with me, the struggles of my new consulting business, whack job mother, all of it.

I kept him out of it, taking great comfort in our Friday night dinners and Saturday morning lie-ins, his text-messages when we were apart, the fabulous unperfumed smell of his arm around my shoulders, his animal teeth and appreciative tongue everywhere else when we were together.

So it was a natural path to safety that morning, as I beat a shivery retreat from the Co-op that Sunday morning in one of his shirts, the first jeans I could find, and a pair of poorly chosen dance flats (nearest the door), to head to his place, even though Sundays for us had always been catch-up-on-work and text-me-later day.

Of course I ran out fast enough to leave my phone, scarf and gloves behind– fortunately there was cash in my coat for the cab and a half hour later with icy feet and burning hands I was knocking unannounced on the door of the nearest safe haven I could think of in Manhattan.

Unfortunately, he wouldn’t let me in.

Through the chained cracked door, he stuttered and dissembled. A sleepy girl’s voice approached form behind him in a blur of raven hair and a sliver of elaborately tattooed pale arm crossed his golden chest, asking “Who is it, baby?”

And out I raced again.

Everyone seemed to have a good laugh over the kitchen sink incident, so I’m going to pick up there with a typical push back: its not really my fault everyone on my whole floor lost their water service for several days over the next few weeks, or that the family below me ended up with a heap of sopping lathe and plaster all over their kitchen– the “Upper East Side’s Finest Co-op” should have had a licensed plumber do my fucking kitchen right the first time.

Anyway, what matters is that that one extra turn of my wrench set in motion a chain of events far beyond my personal responsibility in this matter, and that the Co-op’s resulting legal troubles would have happened at some future point anyway because they were truly negligent in who they hired to remodel several units in the building, not just mine, and someone was bound to (unintentionally) fuck something up, expecting that what they were working on was done to code.

Regardless, all that wasn’t going to get found out until later, and when I turned to the angry mob in the hallway, all I could think was, “Thank god they don’t have pitchforks and torches.”

You have to understand that this was a building full of the indignantly rich, most of whom couldn’t understand why the rest of the world didn’t have the resources to live like they did and seemed to hold it against them. The only reason I even had that apartment was because the board thought my celebrity Mom was going to hang around the building more and maybe some of her fame and good looks might rub off the less attractive amongst them; it certainly wasn’t because I had the money or career to put me in their league.

To be honest, I would have been a lot happier in a little Brooklyn flat with a few designers and college professors for Friday night neighbor cocktails on the roof, but when you’re young, stupid and stuck in the “fake it ’till you make it” mode (and Mom’s paying), you make these sorts of choices not really thinking about the potential future negative repercussions or the prevailing lack of sense of humour.

So there I am with scalded red hands and thighs, wearing just an abandoned dress shirt of my boyfriend’s and panties with snow coming down again outside and water all over the floor, without a chivalrous neighbor in sight to help or defend me from the mob of the seriously inconvenienced and my Mom’s visit to “all she’s done for me” just a few days away.

Well you can guess I did the only sensible thing there was to do:
 
I bailed.