A Sunday in New York City

The chaos and beauty of my deeply uncertain life.

9.00: 10 hours since I clocked out of work. Leo’s alarm goes off. I pretend not to hear it. He puts the vibrating phone right next to my ear. “All right, Jesus Christ, I’m awake” are the first words I utter on Sunday June 15th 2025.

A moment later I turn to Leo and half yell ‘good morning,’ in the same way that another person might fall over a chair.

I fuckin need a coffee, I think to myself. Putting the fuck before the verb because its how my new friend Alex talks and I think its cool.

It's Father’s Day. I call my dad. We talk for longer than I have time for but what can I do? He wants to know where I’ll live in six months, he wants to know how I’m going to make money. My stepmom keeps saying, “We’re not telling you what to do. Live your life!” My dad tells me to become a teacher. After we hang up, I am in a good mood. His endless enthusiasm for Doing Things is infectious and it makes me want to break a made up rule.

Instead, I make a smoothie knowing it will be the only thing that comes from the earth I’ll consume all day.

Two politicians have been shot. It feels like the end of the world. I tell Leo I don’t give a fuck, I’m tired. I still haven’t had time to make a coffee. Then my eyes fill with tears. “I do care actually.” I tell Leo, he blinks back at me and takes a small pebble out of his mouth.

“I don’t know how that got in there,” he says.

I think about Palestine. I think about how America feels like a dream. For the first time today I wonder what the fuck am I doing with my life and how the fuck do we fix this?

“They want us to feel so overwhelmed and helpless so that we stop thinking we can change things. We have to remember that things can be different.” I tell Leo. He nods.

I wear my yellow raincoat to work.

10.20: We are running for the subway. I have not had a coffee.

“Hey can you tap me?” I ask Leo as we march down the stairs (which are dripping with human urine). He taps me on the shoulder.

I laugh out loud. In a subway station. Like a crazy person.

He taps his card, I go through the turnstile.

“Ugh, I’m such a Libra!” I say, seemingly out of nowhere. I grab Leo by the shoulders, look at him dead in the eye and beg him, “what do I want?!”

“You want to be a writer.” he says

“Ugh” I say. I walk off for a minute.

10.39: “Wait! I need my wallet.” I say to Leo as we leave the subway station. We have to be at work in six minutes. Leo is going to buy a birthday card for one of our co-workers. I am going to fucking get a coffee. I’m getting for Alex too because last wednesday I got way too drunk in Queens and he paid for me to get an Uber home. There’s a massive dog in the upscale coffee shop one block away from where I work. I brave it anyway. The woman ahead of me orders a large iced matcha with half water, half almond milk. The barista chargers her eight dollars. I roll my eyes. I order a large iced chai latte with a double shot of Colombian espresso and a flat white with oat milk. I can feel the guy behind me roll his eyes. I try to pay with a fifty dollar note. The nice, non-judgemental barista shakes his head sadly. We don’t take that here?

“What? Money?” I feel like asking. But instead, I smile sadly and say “oh okay, I’ll go get something smaller and come back.”
I decide to quickly run to work, clock in, ask Leo for twenty dollars (no, ten dollars is not enough for two coffees and a tip in New York City, fuck you), go grab the coffee and surprise Alex with his coffee. Perfect. Before I get to work - ONE STREET AWAY. I bump into Alex.

“I need twenty dollars!” I blurt out.

“No problem baby” he hands me twenty dollars, no questions asked.

“I’ll pay you back!” I shout as I run away.
“Cállate” he shouts back.

12.15: It’s Father’s Day and a bunch of gay men and old ladies are all having lunch together. There is also one trans woman sitting at the table but she’s not eating anything, just drinking black coffee. Are they all related? Is it a support group for people who don’t have dads? Some of them are drinking bloody marys (the old ladies), others martini’s (the gay men). I ask the owner of the restaurant what the deal with table 35 is.

“Oh it’s the gay church group” he says, like he forgot to remind me that we ran out of cheesecake or something. I nod casually.

Inside I’m euphoric! God! I forgot about God! I can just wait and let God decide what I should do for the rest of my life.

Alex asks me if I think that being trans is a mental illness. I tell him they used to think being gay was a mental illness.

“I know” he says, “Do you think I’m mentally ill?” he asks.

“Yes, very” I say seriously “But not because you’re gay.”

The church group really looks out for one another and it makes me feel better. Apparently they all go for brunch at the restaurant every Sunday. I wish I had a group of people to go to brunch with every Sunday.

1.30: We’re all in the waiters corridor negotiating.

“If you take my Wednesday, I’ll take this afternoon.” I say to Leo.

“It’s probably gonna be a half cut,” says Andrew.

Alex watches silently.

“Fuck’s sake.” Leo says. Alex punches the air.

“Thank you so much!” he says, hugging me and kissing me on the cheek.

I’m not getting off work at four pm anymore. I’m getting off at nine. Alex is hungover and I want to do him a solid. He was partying until four in the morning in Long Island. He needs sleep.

“So” Alex says, turning to Leo, “Wanna get a Guinness after work?”

3.07: I Facetime my mam. She’s drinking a gluten free beer. Her hair is down. I’m supposed to be wishing my stepdad a happy father’s day but me, my mam, my stepdad and my brother are mostly just interrupting each other. The call takes longer than I have time for. I drink an iced chai. I read like four pages of a solarpunk novel for an article that’s taking me three weeks to write.

4.00: Back at work, Andrew sidles up to me and in his polite, Catholic, Texan way, he asks me if I like pickles.

“I fuckin love em” I reply, my mouth is filled with hashbrowns leftover from brunch.

Five minutes later, I’m eating spicy pickles and drinking leftover ten dollar orange juice from brunch. The owner of the restaurant seems oddly proud of my opportunistic ravaging of his kitchen.

I tell the kitchen to cook the wrong steak which means that six Mexicans, one New Yorker and one guy from Napa Valley all shout at each other in Spanglish for thirty seconds before turning to me and throwing their heads up in the air in unison. I hold back tears and hope my cheeks haven’t gone red.

I serve a lady from the Caribbean and she gets annoyed with me when I tell her the fried chicken doesn’t come with anything.

“But it’s twenty seven dollars.” she says

“It’s really good.” I lie

Her grandson doesn’t act embarrassed or upset that she’s causing a minor scene about how expensive New York city is and I’m glad. She’s not being unreasonable but I can’t let her know that.

Twenty minutes later, I apologise to the head chef for messing up the steak order.

“Why are you saying sorry?” he asks me.

“Because I made your job harder than it has to be.” I reply.

He shakes his head, and tells me to shush. We hug it out. The rest of the kitchen claps briefly.

6.45: I get to go home.

7.15: Leo meets me at the bus stop. We walk home together. He runs away as soon as we get back to the apartment. He is going to Brooklyn to a monthly screening of a bad movie. He will return in four hours, slightly drunk, telling me about the cool stoner guy he met there. As soon as he leaves, I order from Indian Summer. I spend thirty dollars on food and meditate for like one second on how I will regret this purchase tomorrow. I watch Pineapple Express for the very first time, stone cold sober. On cable.

9.45: During the ad break I google Zoe Kravitz summer street style. It is the first time I have been on the internet all day. Somehow I end up on LinkedIn. The Irish Times has posted an article about how to gift 400,000 euros to your children and avoid paying tax. Twelve US corporations have backed out of sponsoring Dublin Pride because they’re worried they’ll get in trouble with Trump. I’m almost happy that these massive resource-sucking leeches on our society have finally admitted that they don’t give a fuck about queer people. That’s not the point of them. Their only goal is to expand until the world is nothing but Panera, Starbucks, CapitalOne and Amazon. Still though, it's nice when they think it's lucrative to give money to people who will never buy from them. Too bad.

11.30: Leo gets home. He eats the rest of my takeaway, spilling half of it on the kitchen floor. We argue about how many episodes of The Bear we’ve seen. A trailer for the new season starts playing on the tv, we both say aloud that we don’t want to watch it because it will spoil it. We watch the entire thing. It looks like its going to be really good. We watch the last half of the Barbie movie and I realise that the plot makes no fucking sense. It is a simulacra, AI-esque feminism, where great monologues and funny, catchy tunes and beautiful people cover up the fact that there is ‘no message’. Leo reminds me that “maybe the message is the medium.” I snort.

1.00: We watch the first thirty minutes of ‘We’re The Millers’ before we realise that we would much prefer to do literally anything else. Leo falls asleep instantly. I read the Solarpunk novel. To help me fall asleep, I try to imagine living in a small cottage next to the sea but find I am unable to conjure an image of a beach that is completely wild and untouched by humanity. I enjoy the challenge. Eventually, I land on an image. A small white box perched among some flat rocks, at the base of a slope. I can hear the Atlantic gently washing over the rocks as I fall asleep, I imagine how bright the sky is, full of stars, how quiet the world is there. I am probably stealing this utopia from Eileen Grey but I don’t care. It’s 2 am and I want to believe places like that still exist and I can go there. Although in the middle of New York City, it seems almost impossible.