Drinks with Kim at Rudy’s in midtown with Chipotle chips and guacamole (which is such a luxury) and queso. Tyler introduced me to this place. The beers are cheap and the bouncer, Tim, is friendly. He saw my ID and told me he loves Arizona sunsets.

Then to see Company. I don’t know what anyone told you but I was certainly not crying the moment I heard Patti Lupone sing. That is fictitious and libelous and I shall…ok ok I cried. And all I could think of was my Misha, who is never far from me and invoked at the slightest sensation of beauty.

Watching Company feels too intimate. It feels like Sondheim stripped me naked and paraded me around to strangers in Times Square. There’s this line that goes something like, “Anybody else would be put in prison for doing the things you do to yourself.”

Yeah, I know.

The show has been updated. The lyrics changed to suit the time. Wife became prime. Life became Time. Still witty. It’s been reimagined as a fever dream of grey encapsulated in neon lined rectangles.

I’m never just in the present. Past me thought about Mary Ellen who went with me to see Anastasia in 2018. And that time a well-known NYC storyteller recognized me in Times Square in 2020 and I felt like a local. Or the first time I sat in this very Five Guys with a milkshake I couldn’t afford, experiencing free air conditioning after a night at Upright Citizens’ Brigade texting back and forth with Tyler about his show because I was too broke to pay the door fee.

I know it might seem like I know what I’m doing here and I’m a like a duck to water in NYC. It’s become easier. But there are days when I feel so defeated and turned around and lonely and wounded and…and…and…

And then I get dressed in spite of it all and I go out and I live. And questions aren’t so scary without answers. The answers won’t come sitting in my room. They come in the living part.

In being alive.