After work today I met up with an old coworker from my brief, inglorious stint at TV.com. She’s visting New York, thinking about moving here, and just wanted to talk about how that might happen. Y’know, how to look for jobs, where to live, what to do. A capital D Do, maybe. It was nice to see her — she was just out of college when we briefly worked together, and now she’s not; she’s lovely and self-assured and older in a graceful and good way — and it was nice to talk about New York, the potential of it, all the weird process of living here, the strange and difficult joy. 

I’m in a silly, wistful mood right now, yes because I’m someone prone to wistfulness, but also because I just watched the American Idol season finale and The Office’s series finale and there’s something about a hopeful but melancholy ending, synthetic as it might be, that just gets me. It was oddly perfect timing to have a drink with her tonight, to be with someone from the past, considering her future, on a really gorgeous day in Soho. The world offers funny, perfect context sometimes.

On my way into the office this afternoon I stopped to pick up lunch and ended up walking down Crosby Street, right past the old storefront we used to work out of in older Gawker days. And I don’t know, maybe I just had that, well, sense of an ending, but I found myself thinking about the day, years ago, when I took a long lunch from my midtown ticket-selling job and went down there to interview for a job. Standing inside by the door for an awkward while before I walked out to make sure I had the right building. I stood on the sidewalk for a few minutes, unsure what to do, before deciding to go back in and just be brave and introduce myself.

As I walked down that street today I tried to picture myself, six years ago, standing out there, debating with myself, nervous and expectant and wanting things to move forward. The street’s different now, there’s a big hotel there now and the storefront is some Australian boutique. In the corniest of ways I wanted to feel myself back there, still in that thrilling, liminal place of not knowing, scared of both possibility and past. I wished for a second that I could feel myself passing through myself like a ghost, waving hello to an old me. I didn’t feel that, though. I just walked past the old building, past the new hotel, and turned the corner and headed into work. 

It’s probably good that I didn’t see my ghost. That I don’t haunt streets, that I just remember what they used to be. That I still get sad at the end of silly TV shows despite an acquired impulse that tells me to find it all suspect. And that I still have hopeful and happy things to say about this place where I live, saying to someone, yes, all this, all this wild and wonderful stuff, it could be yours, too.