The acupuncturist had just gotten to the part of the form I’d filled out where I’d described “any major recent life stressors.”

“So you broke up with your boyfriend of six years six months ago and moved into a new place by yourself. You have an ovarian cyst and you’re in pain a lot of the time. And on Friday you quit your job with nothing lined up.”

“Mhmm. Also I forgot to put that my grandfather’s in the hospital and it seems like he might die.”

Then I cried a little bit before hopping up on the table where the acupuncturist inserted tiny, thin needles into my feet, calves, wrist, stomach, and ears and I lay there for a while, feeling sleepy and calm.

Then I got on the train and headed to Greenpoint, to Scuttlebutt’s apartment where she lives with her boyfriend. Since the last time I was there, he’s put up a mirror in the hallway and a lot of little shelves. They also have a 48” white fiber-optic Christmas tree. We cuddled up by the tv and had a healthy dinner of tofu and rice and marinated kale salad.

Ingredients:

Some kale

A lemon

garlic

olive oil

young sweet carrots, cut into thin coins

avocado, cubed

Combine the juice of the lemon with the pressed garlic clove and the olive oil, then put the washed, cut-up kale in there and massage it with your hands for a few minutes until it gets nicely wilty. Integrate the carrot coins and avocado cubes. Season to taste with salt and pepper and serve. This salad is improbably addictive and delicious and very, very healthy for you. You get the sense that if you smoke a cigarette or eat a bag of M&Ms afterward, the kale in your stomach will be offended somehow.

I love Scuttlebutt but it made me so sad to be in her domestic, cozy apartment that she shares with her adorable boyfriend, and it made me even sadder to be in Greenpoint, which is familiar and homey to me in a way that I worry my new neighborhood will never be. The Christmas lights are strung up across Manhattan Ave. and as I walked from Scuttlebutt’s apartment back to the G train to go home, I had the wild impulse to call William and invite myself over to my old apartment to say hi. I imagined walking through the door.

And then I realized that what I was imagining going back to was our apartment a year ago, with a Christmas tree in the corner decorated with the ornaments I bought at Pearl River Mart and the ones from William’s grandmother. I remembered how happy I’d been to look in the window and see those lights every time I came home. I could almost smell the old fuggy smell of our apartment, pot and incense and pine needles and cooking.

I wanted to go there so badly. I wanted to run there. But you can’t go back to a place that no longer exists.

I stood on the platform of the G train with tears streaming down my face. It did suck living off the G train. That fucking train always takes forever to come.