After our Friday workday in Union Square, Renee and I headed off to the Lower East Side. We’d been talking about teaching and professional development all day, and the topic slightly shifted. We began to examine self-development, what we’re thinking right now about next week, next year, several years from now when we will have long forgotten the comment one of us made to the other about the ghoulish Halloween mask stuck high in the branches of a tree. 
We talked about relationships. How a woman never seems to feel good enough if she’s not dating someone, if a man does not find her so beautiful and good that he is content to be with just her indefinitely. She talked about her days since she’s been alone, how they haven’t been lonely, and I wonder if I should miss the days when I was dizzy with meeting new people and making people laugh with very polished, seemingly spontaneous jokes. I don’t miss them, but I can admit they were sometimes easier than being in this state, sucking on this sticky toffee of “us,” trying to be happy and make happy.
I got to see what a studio on the Lower East Side looks like. Renee’s is more expensive than mine with less space, everything I expected with an unnecessary full kitchen and modern bath. The latter of my abode blocks and blocks above hers may have once been a small walk-in closet. Renee is afraid her apartment looks like a college dorm, as most of her furniture is that cheeky plastic purveyed at Urban Outfitters and Ikea. Not to mention that she lives in a box. Her posters are stuck to the wall without frames, her kitchen cabinets stuffed with books and handbags. My apartment actually looks a bit more grown up, decor wise, though the post-it strata of the desk and the random parked shoes and periodicals reveal a scatterbrained packrat. I said it looked like the apartment of someone out of graduate school, which she is. She relaxed but said she wants to work on it, though she’ll only be there eight more months before she can’t afford it anymore.
We walked for blocks, stopping at a fish market, a playground, a pet store full of fish and bubbles. I laughed as she recounted a painful story of bikini waxing, and I asked if she would ever want to be young again. She said no. (Readers over 25, proceed to roll your eyes. I know I’m still young, but not what I consider shiny, expansive world young).
I wouldn’t, either. Not now, not Friday. I felt content being 23 and knowing my way around enough to see this city, to take pictures, to talk about what else might happen later.
I’m Amanda. I’ve got wide eyes, a smart mouth, and a MetroCard. And I’m not afraid to use them.
I wrote this. You didn't.