Before the Wire Went Dead
My twenties were a hallway with no exits. Wrong doors, wrong hours, wrong men. New York rewired me on blackout nights. This is the story of the version of me who didn’t survive, and the one who did.
My twenties were a hallway with no exits.
Wrong doors. Wrong men. Wrong hours. I kept walking like the floor owed me nothing.
If you slipped out quietly, good.
Some rooms rot.
Some rooms bite whoever stays too long.
New York rewired me on blackout nights and empty platforms.
Something snapped and never came back.
Some nights the glitch arrives before I do.
Some nights it’s the only real thing.
Some nights I miss the girl from before the wire went dead.
Rotting Clean
There’s a version of me still stranded on a Ridgewood platform at 4am. Pretty on the outside. Rotting clean. A micro-essay about the nights that refuse to stay dead.
There’s a version of me still stranded on a Ridgewood platform at 4am.
She won’t stay dead.
The city noticed when I vanished.
I didn’t.
I was too busy falling apart with perfect nails.
Pretty on the outside.
Rotting clean.
A Love Letter Written Between Two and Four (micro excerpt)
A love letter written in the hours when the city goes quiet and the truth gets loud. A fragment about tenderness, distance, and the moment that stayed long after everything else fell apart.
This is the loneliest I have ever been. Not the loneliness of being alone, but the loneliness of standing beside someone who cannot hold what you carry. I moved to a country where I knew no one. I crossed an ocean for a man who does not understand the cost of that decision. The cats breathe evenly. Their steadiness embarrasses me with its simplicity. It also saves me in ways I cannot name.
Ridgewood, 3:14AM
Ridgewood at 3:14am was its own kind of truth. Empty platforms, cold air, and a version of me who kept walking through the dark because she didn’t know how to stop. This is the memory that still flickers.
The radiator hissed like it was warning me about something I already knew. Outside, a man dragged a crate across the pavement and it echoed through the whole street, like someone trying to scrape the night wide open. The cats were asleep in their corners, breathing softly like they belonged to a gentler world. I sat on the floor and watched the red light from the deli flicker against my window, the glow pulsing like a heart I was supposed to match.
Everything in New York felt alive at that hour.
Even the loneliness had a shape.
Even the silence had weight.
Sometimes I think the only place I ever felt truly awake was in that apartment, staring at the cracked paint, listening to the radiator talk to me like an old friend.