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.

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.