“I just want to live in the time travel delight that is the Bowery Hotel in lower Manhattan,” I told Chris. Real keys not made of plastic. Windows that open. Books in a bookcase in the lounge. Dead tree newspapers hanging outside your hotel door in the morning. Great views. An Italian restaurant that serves the best cacio e pepe pasta outside of Trastevere. I just know there is a portal here somewhere. Chris and I discuss. He feels it’s hidden in a phrase, a la Beetlejuice. We never found the phrase or the portal. But I’m never leaving. Staying here, a gothic crone Eloise. You’ll find me in the restaurant scarfing down pasta, reading a book from the lounge.

We sit, stupefied by the cold outside, in front of the giant television, gratified by the nearby burrowing rescues, awaiting the weather decree. It’s almost single digits outside and my doomy self pities the foxes and turkeys, the only neighbors I love with abandon. Then an ad for Midnight Run flashes by, a movie from the nineties, and I realize that I have played girlfriend to both Joe Pantoliano and Robert DeNiro and that fact just makes me laugh and the song from Follies bangs into my head and I’m still here. Somehow.