I spent most of my sophomore year having an affair with Brooklyn. Like most great affairs, it was passionate and secret—late at night, after my last class and dinner with my Barnard friends, I’d lock my dorm room and ride the A to the G and exit into my other life, breathing in the leafy trees and stoops and brownstones. I’d walk down Clinton Avenue to my friend’s apartment, hip youth flying past me on their vintage bicycles, Clinton Hill’s original inhabitants hollering out over their boomboxes, and I’d breath a sigh of relief—I was home.
I spent almost every weekend of my second semester crashing on a friend from high school’s couch, soaking up her exposed brick, the fraying sketches on the walls, her large kitchen.
