A few days after I arrived in New York, my Minneapolis friend Deb sent me an email. She had a friend who lives in NYC: did I want to meet him, just to have someone fun and cool to connect with? “I would love to meet anyone,” I replied.

What followed was a series of some of the more hilarious logistical emails I’d ever received. “If you wanna grab a drink with me and others at some point this weekend, let me know. I will probably be drowning in liquor and death and confetti.” But I was in Long Island then. Did I want to go to a poetry reading on Tuesday, 7pm? Sure. “Look for an idiot rolling around on the ground. That won’t be me, but look anyway.”

We met at the Brooklyn Assembly, a convenient 3 blocks from the apartment I’m staying in, for the reading. “Cheers. Welcome to New York,” Dolan said, handing me a gin and tonic. “Whee!” I said, raising a very full (and soon I would discover very potent) tumbler. I turned my head, and just like that, two of my friends from Minneapolis — people whom I tended to run into at nearly every event I went to in the twin cities, and also friends of Deb’s — were standing right there, smiling at me.

“Jeff! MC!”

That homey feeling, of just running into someone you know, without planning it, hasn’t worn off since. Countless times I’ve visited New York, and even the whole week I’d stayed here up until that evening, it had always felt more like a sociological experiment than a place I belonged. Moon landing, maybe, something that involved gearing up, storing oxygen. Or like Clarice venturing into the prison hallways to visit Hannibal; I kept my eyes open, I took notes. And I wondered if the month here would feel like the years I lived in Boston, technically connected but held at arm’s length, somehow. Always translating. Never native.

But so few people are native here. There’s a kind of camaraderie in it. That night, I thought to myself for the first time: You know, I could live here.

A hand in the bushes, lit by a nearby softball game. New condo developments and in the distance, the Manhattan Bridge. Day 6, part 2! (Enjoying it larger, also.)

Rooftop of an unmarked building along Wythe Avenue — a failed escape.

It was almost dusk when I set out, determined to get a shot of the skyline at a magical hour. But it was strangely dark for 7pm. When I got to the riverside park just a couple blocks away, a bunch of teenagers were clustered at its edge, pointing and yelping as lightning scattered over the top of Manhattan.

“Park’s closing!” a security guard yelled. “Everyone out of the park!”

Nobody wanted to leave. Shit looked exciting over there, beautiful. Cameras were poised at arm’s length, eyes squinted into the distance. I’d hidden behind some tall grasses. The guard peeked over.

“Park’s closing, ma’am, you need to get out now,” he said.

“Oh, I heard you . . . I was just leaving.”

Fifteen minutes later he’d be chasing me and the last belligerent teenagers on his riding lawnmower, screaming at the top of his lungs. What part of getting out of here did you not understand?

The minute they locked the gate behind us, the wind began, whipping dirt and small rocks into our faces. We all hollered, running. “Shelter,” some dude hollered, “take shelter!” “You better run faster!” The bottoms of girls’ dresses blew straight up into their faces: the streets were all chaos and underpants. It began to rain.

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.