At 7:30 I woke up, as if that was a natural thing. I bumbled into the shower, plaited my hair into braids (this will be perfect for helmet hair I thought deliriously) and biked to Tony and Caroline’s apartment; from there we biked to the station to meet up with some of their friends and catch a 9am LIRR to Greenport.

“Technically we want to get off at North Fork,” Tony said, showing us the map of vineyards “. . . although really technically it should be called North Tine. Eh? Eh?”

We biked around a couple vineyards, picnicked and swam in the delicious ocean, biked to some more vineyards (the last was notable for its CSNY cover band and puppies playing with sundress-clad babies in the grass), stopped by a bar for a quick lobster bake, and finally biked to the station to just barely catch the last train home.

What was it about Long Island? The trees everywhere, the old, small towns off the tracks? It felt like upstate. It felt like those trips to the grocery store in college, it felt like Connecticut, it felt like Western Massachusetts; the LIRR was the Amtrak I rode with my mom and sister so many times as a kid. The whole day wound up feeling immediately nostalgic, as if I were already remembering it, impossibly wishing I could return.

I stumbled into the apartment around midnight looking like a pummeled animal, hair snarled with ocean water and mushed under styrofoam, legs smeared with chain grease, my baggy summer dress still damp from all the times I’d used parts of it as a towel. There was not an atom in me that didn’t want to give up and faceplant into the hardwood floor at that moment, not a single electron that felt like taking one more spin around its nucleus.

My roommate Bianca was just getting into the shower, the air in the apartment cool and soapy. I stood there staring at the bathroom door like the village idiot. “A plum,” I thought to myself stupidly, “you have a plum. Maybe you should eat it.” A woman in scarlet lipstick and a long black dress waltzed from the living room. She held her hand out like a doily. “So nice to meet you!” she smiled.

Full album from Long Island here.

How to fight loneliness: midnight run for a wheel of cheese and rice crackers from the Duane Reade, sexual postcards to friends, favorite pen.

Earlier tonight I borrowed a bike, messenger bag, helmet and lights from Tony and Caroline, and biked from their Greenpoint apartment back to my own. The feasibility of this was encouraging. Distances and directions make much more sense to me on a bicycle; the subway, on the other hand, is a black box I incorrectly and bewilderedly emerge from at least once per round trip.

Where the fuuuuuck am I, says the expression on my face, what is that smell, what liquid just dripped on my face, where is that woman with the stroller going, did the liquid just enter my eyes, why is that child screaming, how did I get so hungry, where the fuuuuuuuuuck am I?

I was supposed to meet friends in the Brooklyn Bridge park for a screening of Wet Hot American Summer, homemade tonic to mix with gin, and caprese salad. And I made it there, eventually. But first, I made the unregrettable mistake of getting off at the Brooklyn Bridge stop from the 6.

Seemed logical at the time.

“You’re in the wrong borough,” Tony projected into my ear. I could hear Janeane Garofalo in the background, someone laughing. “Cross the bridge!”

It was a long walk. Other tourists bustled around, always, I’d noticed in particular today, always so many other people, making noise, unpredictably swooping like schools of fish, elbowing in. What’s with all these people all the time, anyway? I’d thought just hours before, attempting to exit a train, Can’t they just leave me alone for a goddamn minute? But over the water, it felt different. The eyes had space to settle.

Bicycles swept past, bringing the soft thudding chime of rubber against wood. The Watchtower sign glowed against the darkening horizon like a vestige from some imagined past, couples reached for each others’ hands, and groups of teenage boys posed on the bridge beams for another’s iPhone, their arms crossed, chins out. It felt, for a moment, that all anyone needed was here, that it existed now.

I know, I know; this kind of thing is all over the internet already. On the cab ride from LaGuardia, I joked to myself: should I also write a novel while I’m here? On what it’s like to be a twenty-something, relocating from the friendly, barren coal dust of the Midwest to the hard cold diamond of NYC? Haha, I said to myself, haha.

The cab driver did not care that I was laughing to myself, nor that I also found his jokes funny. (To his boss as we left the terminal: “Shut up you asshole! Fucking moron.”)

Pictures of New York aren’t new. Pictures a day aren’t new. But it all feels so new, every minute, already. I can’t help myself.

Welcome to: August, New York City, before I turned 30.

Above: minutes after arrival in my sublet, midnight. There was a cool breeze, laughter from the bar downstairs, the smell of curry.