view from here

I hear a knock on my door—quiet at first, then growing louder. The doorknob twists, but I had locked it to prevent any unwanted intrusions.

Three days before boarding a flight from Edinburgh to Los Angeles, I joined 30 strangers on a bus carrying snow equipment. We sat on pleather orange seats inside of what can only be described as a blue metal tin that carried us toward the snowy mountains. My friends and I readied ourselves for a day of skiing and snowboarding in the Scottish Highlands.

Senior spring was never supposed to be like this. I had 14 experiences left on my senior bucket list, like dining at a professor’s home, modeling nude for an art class, and sneaking onto the roof of Mudd Hall to watch the sunrise. And then there’s Commencement. I would have walked proudly across a stage to receive my diploma: Jordan Allyn, Barnard College of Columbia University, class of 2020, majoring in american studies with a concentration in visual and performing arts.

When I was younger, I treated our kitchen like a small museum. The room itself was unexceptional: old and creaky and always full of either too much or too little sunlight. But framed clippings from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Bon Appetit covered the walls like an exhibit. This was where I took my friends, serving as the temporary docent for my mother’s former life as a pastry chef.

February 2020

I woke up on a hospital gurney three days after Christmas. This was 2018: I was younger (a given) and dumber (another given). I had worn a black dress and heavy eye makeup to go out the night before, which was now horrifically smudged, and the state of my face suggested that I’d taken a narrow strip of sandpaper to it. I came to slowly, with a growing awareness of the heaviness of my limbs, in a ward full of people older and sicker than me. Eyes open, I didn’t move for the next hour or so. I wanted to fade back into oblivion. I knew full well what I, in my lightly blood-spattered black dress, looked like to the elderly man with the fractured arm in the bed next to me.

“Oh, my God, that’s a Rembrandt!” my mom half-shouted, waving her hand close enough to the portrait of Nicolaes Ruts to get a stern look from museum security. “I love Rembrandt.”

If I’m going to order a Lyft in this city, I better have a damn good excuse, because my conscience is a tough crowd. “Really, asshole?” I’ll challenge myself. Maybe it’s a steamy August day, and I’m due across town. “You’re not willing to stand on a bus for, like, an hour? You think you’re too good for the MTA? Maybe you’re not up for New York. Maybe some place like Boston is more your speed.”