How I Spent My Thanksgiving Vacation.

The subway pulled into the station, the windows changing from black to a wide scene of white and green tile. It came to a stop with a hiss and the everpresent g-g flat bell, singing over the warbling voice of the conductor. "This is Greenpoint Avenue, Nassau Avenue next, stand clear the closing doors, please."

I stepped off gingerly, taking slow, careful breaths, simultaneously nauseated and comforted by the smell of stale piss and stagnant water in the trenches of the tracks. The cold air from the street couldn’t stop me from sweating as I climbed out of the station and onto the sidewalk. I blinked into the sun for a moment before opening my eyes.

There was the Polonaise, the McDonald’s, the Catholic church. Christina’s Restaurant and the fruit market. Men in cherry-pickers were hoisting Christmas decorations onto lampposts and shouting to each other in Polish. I heard them even after I turned the corner onto Manhattan Avenue, following it north, past the dentist’s office, the liquor store.

As I headed towards India Street, I made mental notes of the businesses. There’s the beauty shop where I got a manicure the day of commencement." "There’s the market where I went foodshopping on September 11th. They had the radio on." "There’s the wine shop where Sean and I would buy Romanian pinot noir."

I got to India Street, but couldn’t steel my stomach enough to turn right. I headed further on Manhattan, to my old laundromat. The old Hispanic woman and her daughter with Downs Syndrome were still holding court over the top loaders and rusty carts. The mother looked right through me, but the young woman gave me her usual knowing smile, the one that said, "It may have been awhile but I know you’re up to something." I smiled back before walking out onto the street, back to the shady corner of India and Manhattan. I took a deep breath and started walking slowly towards my old apartment.

It was a familiar route, as was the sinking feeling in my stomach. I continued to make mental notes of the locations. "That’s the building that was being remodeled. It turned out nice." "There’s the parking lot where I tried to slit my wrists, hiding behind a Jetta." "There’s the building where the woman who caught me lived."

"There’s my building."

And there it was, tall, beige, with a brick stoop and front door painted a thick shade of shit brown. The shutterless windows. The flat roof. "The plainer the building, the more secrets inside," I thought.

I looked up at the third-story windows, the ones on the right-hand side. I kept making my matter-of-fact mental notes to keep from breaking down. "There are the windows to the living room where Sean would hit me. Behind that wall is where he would lecture me about what a stupid, horrible person I was. That’s the wall he would throw me against. Those are the windows I would look out to make sure no one saw."

I caught a dusky glimpse of my reflection in the window of a parked station wagon. A bit fuller in the face – "probably because I’m able to keep food down now" – and with a slight collection of lines under my eyes. I looked almost haggard, frowning, remembering the pain. I tried smiling. Years lifted.

I wasn’t the dewy collegiate fitness model with the superstar actor boyfriend. Not anymore. The dewy was long gone. The fitness was gone as well, months of living on the road having taken its toll. But I was happy. So much happier than when I was such naive arm candy for the superstar boyfriend, secretly violent, who was definitely gone.

But Sean haunted every nook of that block. He was in the chain-link fence he punched me into on the corner. Staring out the window of the apartment neither of us had been in for four years.
Hiding on the roof of our building where we had filmed funny movies, and watched the Towers burn. Staring up, into the sun, I swore I could see him glaring down at me. "How can I make you go away?" I asked his ghost, that ghost I had wrestled with all this time, the ghost that had sabotaged every relationship since then using my mind and my mouth.

It was simple. I looked up at that window, at the ugly specter of my past. Then I looked back at my reflection. And smiled.

And he was gone.