march 27 / burn baby burn

trigger warning: blood, guts, and cocktail bars in Dimes Square

Helena and I were sitting on my couch on a Friday night and staring at a familiar fork in the road: She was gearing up to go out and meet friends in the West Village, and I was gearing up to get into bed with a book. It had been a long week and I just didn’t have it in me to put on a pair of low rise leather pants and dance. Luckily we managed to converge over take-out dinner at my apartment for a couple hours first.

I had poured us some tea and was sitting back down with my cup when I tilted the mug by mistake and spilled boiling hot water on my stomach. It slipped around my sweater and onto the skin of my bare right hip and low back, through the gaps created by the inevitable folds of fabric. “Shit,” I said and jumped up. The water was much hotter than seemed possible and my skin was already searing. Next to my rapidly forming tears, Helena jumped into crisis mode, adopting a no-nonsense expression and checking on me every two minutes like the world’s most attentive nurse. I laid on top of my roommate’s bag of frozen edamame and then removed it when we found out that icing a burn was a big mistake. After I took a stinging lukewarm shower, Helena said, for the umpteenth time, “Let me see it,” looking very business-like in her take-charge manner. I showed her the festering burn. “Okay,” she said, without a hint of panic. “Next question - do we know any doctors?”

By now it was nearing 10 pm. I was standing in my kitchen crying in my ex-boyfriend’s basketball shorts, which were soaked from the wet towel I was holding just above them to soothe the blisters on my back. My best friend from high school was nearly in her fourth school of med school, but she was all the way in Pittsburgh, and the whole latitude of Pennsylvania between us had removed an immediacy that allowed me to FaceTime her late and unannounced on a Friday night. The episode started to reek of 2020, when I had been walking into my apartment building in West Philadelphia one day in August and opened the door on top of my foot, the metal slicing into my right big toe. I limped upstairs wordlessly with a blood-filled Birkenstock, where Jill met me with a queasy expression and started running the sink for me to wash the deep cut. The problem with the random bodily ailment of 2020 was that it existed within half a dozen other mental, physical, existential, and political crises, and I was terrified that those would happen, or might be happening, or were, in the case of politics, inarguably happening, again. “It’s all happening again,” I winced and blubbered.

“I think this is your anxiety talking,” Helena responded calmly. “Like Hannah Horvath with the Q-tip in Girls.”

We both paused for a moment to admire how similar our lives were to Girls. Also, I paused to admire how Helena had handled my anxiety attack in the exact way my college therapist had advised me to instruct my college boyfriend to handle them: call out the mental gymnastics at play to stop the cycle of validate, need-more-validation, validate, need-more-validation. I don’t think I ever relayed that instruction to my college boyfriend, though, because the validation from him had felt so good. Whoops.

“You need to go to the doctor,” Helena said firmly but gently. “Based on the size of the burns.” She opened my laptop to make an appointment for the next morning at a nearby urgent care. “Go out,” I urged my Marnie, pushing her in the direction of Playhouse. Then I took the highest dose of magnesium detailed on the back of the package and fell asleep on my left side.

In the morning, I walked to the nearby urgent care, still groggy from the artificial calm of bottled minerals. My appointment was at 10, but I arrived at 8:45 and spent fifteen minutes at the sign-in screen trying to move the meeting earlier. Around 9, I made a slightly teary-eyed verbal plea to an urgent care employee for help. The nurse practitioner, who was wearing an Aime Leon Dore shirt and baggy jeans, admitted me into his examination room. He drew a picture of my burns on a sticky note and then started to dress them with ointment and gauze, which he instructed me to change once a day. “Do you have someone who can do this for you?” He asked. “Um,” I replied. Not that this was the central issue of the week, but it didn’t help that I’d been broken up with via voice memo on Wednesday by the first person I went on a few dates with following a breakup. My ego was also wounded, because I had planned to end it, but he’d beat me to it, postulating aloud for a minute about the many reasons why he might not want to date me before getting to the “bottom line,” which was that we shouldn’t continue to see each other romantically.

“Are you doing okay… emotionally?” the trendy nurse asked. “Yes,” I replied tersely, mostly to avoid crying again. He patched me up and left me with a few more burn care instructions and a pile of gauze, medical tape, and triple antibiotic cream. I paid my $25 copay and that was that. When I met my friend Maggie for coffee an hour later, I told her about the burn and the streetwear-clad nurse and the diagram of my back he made on a sticky note. “Maybe he does a sticky note drawing for all his patients, and then he takes them home to have a record of what he did that day,” Maggie said. Maybe. The longer I live in Union Square, the more convinced I am that it’s a cursed place where people draw your maladies and take them home like leftovers.

I moved through the rest of my weekend somewhat lachrymose. When I told my friends and family about the incident, no one understood how I wound up with huge second-degree burns on my back from a cup of tea. “Through gaps created by the inevitable folds of fabric!” I kept insisting. I had to avoid sweating for the foreseeable future, so my plans for running and going to yoga were canceled. What could I do? I laid facedown on my bed and listened to “So Long London” by Taylor Swift, but that strategy proved inept at passing time and improving my mood. On Saturday afternoon, I took a walk to the Financial District, meeting up with Alex, Amelia, and Helena, to visit Printemps, the new department store imported from Paris to Wall Street. Helena and I love department stores and marched south to the beat of a “Printemps! Printemps!” drum. When we arrived, though, the line stretched down the block, and onto the next block, and onto the next block, and after that we stopped trying to find its end. This is life in New York, where one is quickly corrected for having the audacity to want to shop. As consolation, the Printemps line greeters gave us bags of seeds that said “Grow with us!” and promised to fill our non-existent gardens with wildflowers. A garden - what a European sentiment.

The weekend was looking pretty bleak. But this is life in New York, where there is always another department store close by. Just a little further up Broadway, we found shockingly affordable designer boots at Century 21 and then took our good luck to the Tin Building, gathered some pricey, gourmet provisions blessed by Jean-George, and ate them in front of the water. Amelia and Alex boarded the bus to 14th Street (“Bisou bisou!” we said, crossing our thumbs and index fingers to make tiny hearts), and Helena and I walked to Chinatown to find a new bar we’d stumbled upon during a warm Tuesday walk a week prior called Time Again.

Time Again sat on the fringe of Dimes Square, made up of a collection of Crayola red plastic stools in a parking lot and a red-lit interior housing a perfectly decorated bar, a menu of surprisingly cheap house wines and cocktails, and a clientele that looked straight out of a Rohmer film, particularly one of his Comedies and Proverbs. “This is all I want in life, you know?” the comedian Eric Wareheim told GQ about the bar over the summer while sipping a martini next to the Canal Street Citi Bike stand, and I knew exactly what he meant. Helena and I nursed drinks next to a parked SUV and a collection of ironic suit wearers, watching as a man with long hair, a black beret, and a slight diastema biked onto the sidewalk and set his kickstand down to hang out with the group. ‘Celebrity lookalike: Che Guevara!’ I thought and then wondered if a negroni was a bad idea for my burn healing. But recently I’ve felt increasing pressure to have and enact bad ideas before my quickly-fleeting third decade comes to a close. I always want the month to end in order to decapitate my credit card bill, but then I feel so blue when the year passes by faster than I meant it to. Suddenly I’ve been in New York for four years, out of school for the same time I was in it, and am well versed in Rohmer and Roth IRAs.

We left Time Again, our glasses empty, our besuited friends gone, and walked to Grand Street to our favorite pizza spot, tucked behind the Seward Park tennis courts. While we ate our slices at the bar, a man named Carmelo slid in next to us, ordered a negroni of his own, and started waxing about living in the Lower East Side and how New York had lost all its artists. “But they’re coming back now,” he said with a very nature-is-healing timbre. The Lower East Side was proving to be a very resilient place. I guess the lesson of the weekend was that sometimes you get burnt, you get broken up with by voice message, you get patched up by a nurse in streetwear, and then you score big time at Century 21 and at Time Again. This is life in the city, where things move quickly and are just like Girls, and there’s always another line and negroni just around the corner.