On the fourth morning of my visit, I clung tightly to the girl I loved while riding the C train. She had a warm Jewish face, silky brown hair, and an aura that reminded me of a coffee shop on a brisk fall day. I had spent the weekend staying in her apartment on the Upper West Side and felt proud to have her in my arms, clinging to a vestige of my college years as I tried to distinguish tourists from locals.

During our ride, I thought about the NYC subway system, that subterranean underworld supposedly reserved for vagrants, criminals, and schizoid street performers, at least according to the X feed I’d been scrolling as my plane taxied on the Newark runway. But for a midwest transplant now living in sprawling Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a city known for terrible traffic and dismal public transportation, the New York subway system was a thrilling, exotic experience. Closing my eyes, nearby conversations transported me around the world, A touch of harsh Slavic here, crisp Mandarin there, alongside Latin-American dialects, all packed into a single train car. It was a beautiful rush of possibility for someone who has never lived in a big city.

“You ever get the urge to fling yourself in front of these things,” I asked. The French call it l’appel du vide, the call of the void. It’s an impulse to suddenly jump from high places common even among people who don’t typically exhibit suicidal behavior. That day I was feeling transit systems posed similar risks.

“I’m not sure why more people don’t,” she replied, half listening.

Two days prior, she had decided to end things with me, and I spent much of that Sunday evening replaying the weekend’s events in my head, turning over the obvious facts of what went wrong as if there was a hidden revelation that would somehow absolve me.

“I try to tell myself you’re just a 22-year-old boy, but I can’t be here to watch you grow up, ” she had told me the second morning. I’d spent the first two nights of my visit drinking until the pre-dawn hours with degenerate college buddies. It was behavior my host found to be a red flag.

“I’m on vacation,” I replied, while wondering if my pre-frontal cortex would ever fully develop. On my first night out in the West Village, I had seen young men my age, fixated by their laptops in the corners of bars, their brows furrowed in mimetic seriousness. By the time I’d guzzled my third vodka Red Bull, I felt like sneering at them.

“Is that Jr. analyst Gordon Gecko? Will the markets crash if you don’t update that Excel spreadsheet?…

Still, I couldn’t quite stifle the pangs of rising jealousy. All around me it seemed were people who had found high-paying jobs, flashing credit cards and contributing healthy sums to their 401K. Meanwhile, I was asking Santa Claus for Spirit Airlines tickets to New York City.

“Are you sure you want to pay for that?” I’d asked her at every meal, knowing that if I’d been a gentleman, a few decent New York City meals would have reduced us to eating cheap ham sandwiches by the second afternoon, which wouldn’t have worked anyway because she was a vegetarian.

“Once my bestseller hits, I’ll be able to take care of you better than any finance bro.”

“I told you I don’t care about money,” she replied. Her tone always seemed genuine and innocent.

“Not yet you don’t,” I’d say back, almost seething.

But it wasn’t the money, or lack thereof, that was the weekend’s downfall. Someone with more social intelligence would have realized visiting a lover in New York around the holidays signals an intent to ramp up a relationship. But I preferred the status quo, shirking any prospect of responsibility. I was trying to be some Gonzo reporter in Louisiana and had told her more commitment would be like erecting a prison around myself.

Meanwhile, she was turning down dates from rising stars at Goldman Sachs in the hope a guy living in Baton Rouge would communicate some sliver of loyalty.

It was unfair, but I argued it didn’t rule out the fact that I loved her.

That Saturday morning, I had woken up in her bed trying to remember the conversation from the previous night. As with most relationships I’d managed to blow up, I’d been aided by blunt honesty only attainable through tremendous levels of blood alcohol content.

We lay side by side in her bed, rigid, devoid of contact. Our love had reached its final stage: rigor mortis.

“Did we end things last night?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

I’d be going back to Baton Rouge…cut-off. Not even an occasional love letter to help quell the stifling heat and sprawling four-lane interstates.

She was sitting at the foot of her bed, eyes downcast, wearing a tight polka-dot nightgown. Every time we spent a weekend together, I went crazy over it.

Then she’d asked rather meekly if I still wanted to stick to the itinerary.

“No. I do NOT want to go ice skating still,” I huffed, throwing unfolded clothes into my carry-on. “I’ll see you when I see you.”

After I made sure to slam the door at just the right strength to communicate a cold sternness, I slunk off to wander Chinatown and wolf down dumplings, planning to return and pick up my packed bags in the late afternoon.

But we both knew I had as much chance of avoiding time in her apartment as I did landing a foreign correspondent gig by asking the front desk security at the New York Times about any reporting openings. After some margaritas and a Book of Mormon show to ease the tension, I was back at her place and my clothes were once again littering her bedroom floor.

We decided to push through the weekend together, both thinking it was better to enjoy the time we had left.

Sunday afternoon rolled in, and we spent it eating take-out Thai food and watching Serendipity, one of those early 2000s holiday rom-coms that seem catered to divorced women though, in full journalistic transparency, I lobbied hard for the pick. For anyone not up to date on millennial pop culture, the movie is named after a famous Upper East Side cafe that celebrities supposedly frequented during the 1960s, but it’s more notable now as a filming location for our rom-com, where John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale’s characters find love at first sight.

“We have to go,” I said immediately after we finished watching Cusack’s character abandon his gorgeous fiancé to search for the British woman he’d briefly met there five years prior. Paying a visit seemed like a cute, perhaps ironic, way to cap off an emotionally turbulent weekend.

After our train lurched to a halt at Times Square, we ascended the stairs into a bitter December night, searching for Serendipity. Wind ricocheted against massive skyscraper windows, slapping us in the face.

“I can’t move my lips anymore,” she mumbled. She wasn’t a native New Yorker, and this was her first winter spent outside the south. I was melting at the sight of her bright red cheeks, which produced a vivid memory of her in a debutante dress from New Year’s Eve the previous year.

Before this trip, I had been planning to visit her hometown to celebrate New Year’s. Now I was grinding my teeth imagining watching the ball drop on my parents’ couch and receiving a nice wet New Year’s kiss on the cheek from mother.

Her right hand was in my coat pocket as we finally found the cafe.

Except this was more a store than café and was filled with children crawling on checkered floors, their faces made more cherubic by the reflection of the overwhelming bright neon-pink walls, plastered on one end with a row of Marilyn Monroe portraits, and the other with overpriced souvenir Teddy Bears and cake batter mix. Baggy-eyed parents plopped themselves on orange diner stools, ordering massive platters of ice cream and Belgian waffles to mainline sugar to their offspring. I tried to imagine John Cusack in a peacoat and turtleneck, sharing a latte with Kate Beckinsale, or maybe he was with a beautiful Jewish woman, reading her passages of Baudelaire. But this hyper-American scene hardly was romantic. It seemed like someone had prompted Chat-GPT to design a coffee shop for tourists, with the ending clause something along the lines of: make it an aggressively terrifying combination of Warhol and Dr. Suess.

We also weren’t even on the Upper East Side. The Times Square location was supposedly a modernized replica of the original.

“This place gives me the creeps,” I said, “Let’s get out of here.”

We walked east, traversing rows of halal street vendors and outdoor camera booths whose platforms with the rotating iPhone holder and LED light strips create wildly disorienting 360 videos of tourists, their disproportionately massive faces bearing sheepish grins.

At Rockefeller Center, NBC studios cast a blueish hue on an outdoor crowd corralled by large stanchions. They huddled in the cold, eagerly waiting to laugh on command for Jimmy Fallon.

“My dad proposed to my mom there,” she said to me, pointing up towards something called the Rainbow Room. “She says he was around 25 when he started to take things seriously.”

I held onto that ominous line until the Christmas Tree came into view. We were surrounded by thousands of tourists, herded like cattle, or rather moths fluttering towards the Christmas lights.

City officials estimate 175,000 people visit the Rockefeller Tree every day during the holiday season, and a constant rotation of couples snap pictures for other couples.

We shoved our way to the front, and someone offered to take our photo. I wasn’t awestruck, but the Tree put me in a good mood. For an instant, I felt we had a future. I could see the golden retriever, white picket fence and driving kids to soccer practice on Saturdays. I knew that in the coming months I’d make a ritual of going back into my camera roll during dopamine lows, searching again and again for a hit, like nicotine addicts sift through ashtrays.

A group of high school boys formed half-serious, masculine poses in front of the Tree, and I suddenly missed home. Then I looked at the girl I’d possibly taken my last picture with, feeling the thousands of miles separating Louisiana and New York.

“I understand. This is the last time in our lives we can truly be selfish,” she’d told me when I described the suffocating confines of serious relationships. “But do you have to be so goddamn obsessed with yourself?”

We were riding the subway back to the Upper West Side by now. I had both my arms wrapped around her like a bear.

“I have this feeling that no life experience will ever be enough for you,” she said. “It’s why I think you’re in the right line of work. But I also think no matter what, you’ll always be looking for someone better.”

I stared back at her blankly.

“I don’t think that’s true,” I finally said. “On the other hand, you could be right.”

“You know I can give you a recommendation for a really good therapist,” she replied after I refused to say anything else.

She was wearing a thrifted crop top Christmas sweater, covered by a beige overcoat lined with artificial fur because she’d never buy the real thing. Her lips were nearly blue.

“I know I’m going to see you again,” she said.

I realized she was probably right, though I am still trying to figure out if her tone was one of excited anticipation or terror.

***

Aidan McCahill is a journalist based in Louisiana. He previously worked for an NPR affiliate in Baton Rouge before taking up the crime beat for The Advocate, the state’s largest newspaper.