I went to a deli to buy some nuts, a protein bar, and a pitless avocado that was possible only through genetic modification. The cashier ignored my request for no bag. Outside, I peeled off the avocado skin and bit into the fruit, passing through the hole where the pit once lived.

It killed me that my days were spent maintaining: food, serotonin, laundry card balance, low-key social vocabulary. Whatever happened to genius visionaries floating above the city, untouched by the banal, rich in obliviousness?

I had to catch the white ferry from Pier 11. I never went into the huge navy-and-yellow store in Red Hook, tho, because it brought up intense cravings for clean rooms with curtains and floor lamps that would be thrown away after 2.5 years.

I lined up behind a whole group of Hasidic Jews. As we walked up the pier, the pressures of the city dropped away. A young woman counted everyone who stepped on board, no longer delighted by the movement of the boat away from the skyscrapers at the base of the city. Counting people on a boat was just her job.

On the top deck, French people and Hasidim gathered in distinct groups, taking photos, and we pulled back, leaving the dead and glinting steel of the city. The Hasidic men’s hats were swirled with fox-tip furs that lifted up in the blowing wind. The boat engine carried us toward the barracks of Governor’s Island.

Out in the distance, the Statue of Liberty stood, an empty symbol.

A little boy had a hard time holding on to his yarmulke, and the dad, with grace, put it in his pocket and pulled up the kid’s hood.

Maybe these people are more chill than I thought, I mused.

I thought about my sexual entanglement. Yes, I wanted more than a hookup. I wanted a lover I could share my whispered commentary with, all the eye rolls, art-feasts, pizza-eating, and hidden knolls of softness beneath them, but as a trans person, the pieces came together in a different order. I was adult and undersexed at eighteen, without a trustworthy body, and so, at thirty, I had to run around playing sex games in a guest apartment.

As soon as the boat slowed near the old shipping warehouses, the yarmulke was pulled out and put straight back on the child’s head.

Off the ferry gangplank, down some cobblestones, and in through the silent lobby. My dick was hard. In the haze of my desires, I barely noticed details, like the row of tiny desert-ready succulents on the front desk. I nodded at the doorman, who picked up the phone.

He spoke too softly for me to hear, but said something like “Your fuck buddy is here, miss.”