In the parlor, I meet Bill, who begins by asking me where I got my chicken salad and ends by assuring me Untermeyer is worth the trip. His son was a lobsterman, he tells me, when I mention being in Pembroke learning about seaweed harvesting. I thought about it myself, says Bill, but you’ve gotta be out there on the boat in the freezing winter so I gave it up. He works at UPenn instead, director of the arboretum.

They have a house in Boothbay, along the Damariscotta River which he calls the Napa Valley of oysters. I tell him I know it, I’ve had all kinds of Damariscotta oysters at the Shuck Station, I was just talking to someone about Norumbegas earlier. Garett, actually, at the oyster roast. You can lobster beginning at 10 years old in Maine, Bill tells me. They’ll give you 50 of your own traps and sign you up as an apprentice. By 14, you can have 150, and by 21 with the allotted hours, up to 800 depending on zoning.

I think it’s insane that my parents don’t live here. I remember being 11 and wanting so badly to work and my dad said my best bet was to volunteer at the library. When I went into Northside, they wouldn’t take me, and back in the car, my dad was so irritated, and encouraging. He sent my siblings to community college at 11 and 13, genuinely believing an 11 year-old can learn the same thing as an 18 year-old if the expectation is set—while I was busy learning Kenny Ortega’s choreography to “We’re All In This Together.” I started a dog biscuit business instead at the farmer’s market, and still my dad applauds me on my “entrepreneurial spirit” when we’re on the phone.

The boat leaves early because of an approaching storm. No one on the bow, announced Captain Scott. The boat tosses and my Lexapro withdrawal feels sloshier than ever. I obviously didn’t pack extra for the trip and obviously ran out on day one of three on an island without a pharmacy. I’m dizzy, unaware, I can feel the size of my pupils being disparate because my eyes are pulsing warmly. I feel sick, and clock the barf bags. Everyone around me is hot and sweating, I can smell them, and they’re speaking loudly over the sound of the storm and waves sloshing against the side of the boat. It’s meant to rock, that’s why it floats, says the captain on the overhead. My forehead is burning. I don’t mean to but I can’t stop imagining the girls from that summer camp drowning in their cabins. Every time I get one bar of service a slew of Slack messages appears on my screen of the changes we need made on my article about Prime Day deals under $100. My peripheral vision is blurring out and a man three seats down is trying to speak to me: What are you reading? I forgot I have a book in front of me: How To Do Nothing. I’m a friendly guy, he says to a little boy who doesn’t want to sit next to him. The boy buries his face in his mother’s quarter zip. A reminder about your life jackets, says Captain Scott. A text from Molly: the river rose 20 feet in 2 hours. From my boss: the superlatives you’ve listed as bestsellers aren’t Amazon bestsellers.

I remember a bench in silhouette against the grey shingles of a house with white columns and the sea gulls were black against the sunset, static in the wind blowing east against their feathers.

I cried on the ferry, from Lexapro withdrawal, I guess, but really because I got the sense, as I always do in Maine, that I had come to the end of my searching—to hear talk of approximate knots, to see teenagers jump from the dock into the wharf and children throw lupine from the stern of the ferry in old Monhegan tradition, to learn the history of an island which is always, by necessity, so ripe and insular, dramatic, fundamentally exaggerated, a culture of chosen enclosure. I felt with real, unadulterated certainty that I belonged here.

On Route 1, a flock of chickens has gotten loose outside Rockport, and there’s something like a 15-car pile-up as they wait for the whole flock to cross. In Wiscasset, a single person crossing the street can hold up over 40 miles of vacation traffic, the long tick-tick-tick of those “from away,” crossing over to Red’s.

I guess it’s impossible to realize how much of your life is being lost around you as it happens. I’ve wept walking home from my friends’ houses before, just because I’m so grateful to feel welcomed and known and at home somewhere. Sober, I’ve done that.

I wake up in Chebeague to the screech of a catbird directly outside my window, the gardener administering new hydrangeas, and someone mowing the golf course. I dreamed of a dog eating a mouse on basement stairs—bits of the mouse fell from its mouth looking like pulled chicken, and fell on my foot. I’d worn flip flops so I could feel it—stringy and lukewarm.

I get off work at 2pm, walk down to the boatyard to watch whatever happens at a boatyard. I walk around the island, yank dogwood flowers off trees, visit the historical society only to find this island has been tracking how many chicken eggs they’ve harvested every year between 1831-1858, help some kid reattach a wheel to his cooler. I’m feeling moved by everything again—the purple clovers in each yard, the wild roses and lilies growing all over each other, the way each person waves to me as they pass.

An old, mustached man in a durag and sports sunglasses cycles past me, the bike squeaking and a bent cigarette hanging from his mouth, a fishing pole limping out the back—“How you doin’” he yells out. I’m swirling a dogwood flower and trying tactfully to dodge a slew of 13 year-olds headed for my tranquility on their bikes.

At the inn that evening, a man is drunk at the bar and follows me into “The Great Room” as they call it, asking me repeatedly how many glasses of wine I’ve had, do I want another? He’s here for a wedding, where a trove of blonde girls are having espresso martinis in the fog behind the inn, shivering in their strapless dresses and taking group photos. I’m a college buddy of the groom, he says. American University. I’m extremely tight-lipped, and after about 5 minutes I’m not kind at all. When he touches the top of my foot, I leave my half-finished glass of wine on the side table and go upstairs. He calls after me, calling me Julie. I watch Hypernormalisation, write, and fall asleep at 9:30.

I write a short, apologetic email to an ex-boyfriend. I don’t know why, I just feel it. I’ve been thinking about doing it for weeks. I'm sorry for how things played out and that we ran into each other in life at the time we did, and that things got so sour and prideful between us.

When I was a teenager, I used to drink boxed red wine and stay up until 2:30am and write on Google Docs about being in love, without ever calling it that. The boy I wrote about just got engaged this week, and he seems so happy, and he tells me I have to come to the reception. For a long time I thought he was the love of my life, before I met Malcolm. I think Gus was much closer to it, actually, maybe closer than others will be. None of that’s up to me, I think—it’s sort of up to time and geography and circumstance. That feels really bad approaching 30. You start to backtrack and wonder if you should’ve tried harder or been more honest, followed some different thread. The multiplicity of everything starts to feel really agitating, especially when your ex-boyfriends start getting married. It’s hard not to take that personally, like concrete signs of failure. Anyone with two therapy sessions under their belt would cringe reading that. It’s not a person’s fault, of course, but then you start to wonder where fault begins and ends—surely, some of it is my fault. Much of it was my choice.

Two men chat me up for several days on Hinge, and both ask me out. Before I respond 48 hours later, they’ve both unmatched me. I read once that having a fear of being tabloided is narcissism, and I’m always nervous about that when the thought creeps in that maybe I’ve been cancelled without my knowledge, and how would I look that up? The narcissism is, I guess, having the delusion that anyone cares enough to cancel you.

We spend the weekend in Cape Cod. The whole thing feels like high school. There’s cornhole and kayaking and sunburning on the beach. The boys drink Bud Light all day and we drink water. Eleanor’s parents are gone and we drain their Botanist. We swim naked every night—I see my first asteroid, and try to track the stars as best I can with a guy from Boston. We kiss on the beach for hours and stay up with our friends until sunrise, watch the pink and orange light rise over Washburn, where two men are cleaning fish. At trivia, when I’m running from the yacht club back to the house for more wine, a man gestures over to Eleanor and says to her, “Are y’all hazing him?” The following afternoon, we pick flowers at a nearby farm, deeply silent and hungover and so depressed we have to return to the city. We text about the weekend for days afterwards, our crushes, our trivia win, our hangovers, the way life feels like empty, dry hell when you’ve left the beach.

I waited for the last of my things to be picked up from the apartment: three shelves still boxed because before I’d installed them I realized I was so uncomfortable in my apartment I had to leave it. “I’m being perfectly peaceable,” she said, knitting on the couch, when I confronted her about three weeks of the silent treatment, something she exercised intermittently but never so long as this. The last go at it with any intensity was when she’d overheard my boyfriend and I having sex in the middle of the day. We’d thought she was out. She texts me while we’re at the MoMA to be more respectful, for both our sakes, she says. She doesn’t speak to me for two weeks after that. She doesn’t acknowledge my boyfriend, either.

“What stitch is that?” He says to her while she’s knitting. Without looking up, she says “You wouldn’t know it.” I grew up with brothers, she tells me later, so I don’t have any tolerance for men. He’s uncomfortable in the house, he tells me, and I tell him too bad, she’s my roommate, she’ll warm up to you—you can be combative, too, you know.

There was a total absence of sex in the apartment except for myself, even which was irregular, but stifling, just the hang of it—not in anything explicitly expressed but in the skirting and silences and the way any response to a forced inquiry was met with a comment like “Haha, you bitch.” I started to keep to myself, especially after I got the job, and the boyfriend. There were too many scrunchies in that house for the three of us.

The apartment feels empty while I’m there—they’ve moved a hutch into the kitchen to host a Colonial Williamsburg cookbook, mugs imprinted with the royal family, Snoopy, Pride and Prejudice, Quimper plates and all the sorts of things that would perfectly suit a frontier’s one-room schoolhouse. There’s so much space, I think, so little object. A basket, a shaker peg, a ceramic folk art candleholder. On the table is a book called The Girls Who Grew Big next to a knitting crock. On the pegboard I installed is a hobby broom, and new Wusthof knives they’ve bought after I took mine.

They ate dinner together, read together in the morning seated across from each other on the couch, watched a show together nearly every night. My absence was judgement enough, I suppose—that, and playing electronic music in the house, or having a boy over, or having wine on a weeknight. I was drunk, flirtatious, opinionated, I couldn’t maintain the gentile dynamics of a triad in which one person is obstinately unlike the others. My friends did not wear Doen, or volunteer, or have a lucrative Substack. They were, sometimes, men. They wanted to smoke on the roof. They wanted to go somewhere after this. I woke up at 9am and missed the farmer’s market. I felt, indelibly, like a fuck-up in the presence of eyelet.

In an egregiously branded city in and—I’ll use the word—oppressively decorated set, it felt isolating to have multiple parts, to feel untethered, to operate outside of my Instagram presence, to have friends unbound by a subscriber-base. There was no way to put that more kindly. There was just having dinner at Molly’s house, chicken cutlet from Caroline and a group screening of Farmer Wants A Wife with people who had no skin in the game, who hadn’t logged on in a year and a half. No ballet flats, no brand events, no getting coffee with a girl at Butcher’s Daughter because she wouldn’t stop dogging you about it, no birthday parties where you didn’t like anyone present but you needed to be in the pictures, no schmoozing at all, in fact. No flash photography, no singular proof of your being there at all.