Joseph Fink - The First Ten Years

2009 STILL FEELS LIKE present tense. A decade passes so quickly.

We met in the East Village, selling tickets for a downtown performance art collective called the New York Neo-Futurists, working in a tiny cubicle of a box office where the inner wall was a corkboard littered with programs for shows that had closed years before. Meg was interning with the Neo-Futurists, and I had recently auditioned for them and not been cast. Having nowhere else to go in New York, I subsequently showed up every weekend to their show, volunteering at their box office so that I wouldnt have to pay for tickets. The crash of 2008 had left me with few savings and no job.

We were twenty-two and full of the posturing performance that substitutes for personality at that age. In a persons early twenties, the human being who eventually will form naturally with time has to be hastily scraped together from the shaky models of movies and social media. Meg was a constant smoker then, and so my first impression of her was a rolling wave of cigarette smell. My sense of smell is sensitive, and neither I nor anyone in my family ever smoked, so it set that first meeting on edge. But she also was clearly smart and determined and so entirely different from most people I had ever known, a slice of Jersey in myuntil thenentirely Californian life. I didnt quite know what to make of her. But then I was such an uncertain mess at that age that I didnt know what to make of myself, either. I dont remember us getting along well the first night we met, but I think we both knew that the conflict was as fake as the version of ourselves we were performing. There were deeper, quieter versions of us waiting to unfurl, and it was in those silent places that the heat between us lingered.

The night we met, we went with the cast of the performance we had been selling tickets for to a restaurant in the East Village that doesnt exist anymore. Most restaurants in the East Village dont exist anymore. During the evening, it somehow came up that Meg loved seafood and I hate even the smell of seafood. Kevin R. Free, a member of the Neo-Futurists and a future member of the Welcome to Night Vale cast, laughed and said, Well, you two will never have sex.

We would tell that story many times in the future, and Meg would always end it the same way.

And he was right.

New York in 2009 was teetering over the gap between the mythology of a thriving city for dreamers and the reality of the worst economic collapse in eighty years. I had no job and no prospect of one for six months after moving to the city. There were job fairs in Herald Square where the line to even get into the building was an hour or two long, all for the privilege of being the one thousandth resume deposited on one of the eight tables inside. It was clear to all of us that the future of our generation had been gambled away by the previous generations, and now there was nothing left for us. After several months, I found a minimum-wage temp job at a refrigeration chemical company a ninety-minute subway commute from Windsor Terrace, the quiet, quasi-suburban neighborhood in Brooklyn that was the most central area I could afford. I remember being ecstatic that I found that job. I was let go after two weeks. There were few companies hiring, not when they could grab temps, throw a few tasks at them, and discard them as easily as the trash bags full of resumes going out to the curb every day. It was in the wake of this disaster that Meg and I met. It didnt feel like an unhappy time, exactly. I remember it fondly. But we were survivors of a shipwreck floating on adjacent debris, and that must have defined how we related to each other.

Meg and I were only friends. I was in the messy process of ending the relationship I had been in since I was fourteen. I had never been an adult outside of that relationship and didnt know what that even looked like, but I knew that I definitely needed to be single for a while. So, I resisted any feeling that might have been there with Meg. But that feeling in retrospect was undeniable.

Looking back at Facebook posts, at a time when people our age used Facebook, before it became primarily a place to radicalize boomers, there is an almost aggressive internet flirtation between the two of us. Like many people, we were doing online what we hadnt found a way to do in real life. Meg went through and liked every Facebook status I had ever posted, which is a form of flirtation that would be difficult to explain to previous generations. What new forms of flirtation will young people invent in the future? Truly bold frontiers of science await.

I would regularly publicly proclaim my interest in being single, as a defense mechanism for how badly that was going for me. The truth was I had no understanding of how to be single, and no model in my life for how that worked. My parents met on the first day of their freshman year of college, sitting at the same table in the dining hall. My aunt and uncle had been together since they were thirteen years old. There was a reason I had been in the same relationship from fourteen years old until I attempted a clean break by moving across the country: my natural state was monogamy. Still is, I guess.

One night, in May of 2009, Meg and I ate at a fancy-ish Mexican restaurant off Houston Street that I think since closed and had its space filled by a Chipotle. I was eating a lot of Mexican food at the time because I missed the West Coast. And I was always disappointed because it is nearly impossible to get decent Mexican food in New York City. (Longtime residents of New York will always insist that this isnt true, and to prove it theyll give you the name of their go-to place, and youll go there and the food will be bad to mediocre. My theory is that New York has a reputation for great food not because its food is noticeably better, but because the people that live there have shrunk their expectations and dont eat outside the city much. But I get away from the romance.) Meg considered me from across the table, between us our little lava stone bowl of guacamole that is for some reason a mandatory element of every New York City Mexican meal. There was a fission there, but when youre twenty-two there is a fission everywhere. Your body has more energy than it will ever have from that point forward, and you project that energy out onto the world. That is why, in retrospect, the world feels brighter, more vivid, and more real when we are young. The world fades as we fade. So, my experience of the city that rainy spring was a crackling, humming one.

Meg eyed me from across the table. We were just friends, after all. Just friends who spent most of our time together and regularly ate meals together, but just friends. She was quiet for a moment, holding my gaze, and then she said, I just realized something about you.

What?

I cant tell you.

She had realized she liked me, of course. I knew that, of course. She knew I knew that. We both pretended we didnt know it. We finished our food. I went to my new apartment in Chelsea, the one I moved to because living in Windsor Terrace did not feel enough like the city life. I slept in the only bedroom, and my roommate, an unemployed photographer a few decades my senior, slept in the living room. Meg and I were sliding down a slope toward an ending we both knew was coming, but both pretended we didnt. Or maybe at the time I truly didnt know. It is impossible to consider the past divorced from my knowledge of how it turned out.