I walk without purpose or destination for I don’t know how long. When I pause for a second to text my mom, I notice I’m in front of a row of red-and-white carts lining the sidewalk, filled with books. Their quantity is like everything in this city—enormous. The edges of the carts, and the red awning of the building behind them, read STRAND BOOKSTORE in white lettering. 18 MILES OF BOOKS.

Curious, I head inside. I have an enduring love of bookstores from when Mom would take Lewis and me when we were kids. I could honestly devote hours to browsing the collection, crashing in the comfy chairs with the first chapters of whatever intrigues me, and of course, breathing in the heady scent of new pages.

I bet Juniper likes bookstores, I think, then immediately try to un-think. I can’t go through my day comparing everything to what Juniper I-don’t-even-know-her-last-name likes or dislikes.

For a bookstore fetishist, the Strand doesn’t disappoint. The stairway in the center faces tables of new releases and bookshelf upon bookshelf. There are notebooks and literary socks, bookish tote bags and T-shirts. Everything is identified in bold red-and-white signs, with “staff pick” cards on the shelves and clever thematic displays. The smell is exactly right.

I send my mom a picture and head for the fiction and literature section, noticing familiar editions from my mom’s own bookshelves. The Modern Library edition of Ethan Frome, the Norton Critical Edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Jungle. I’m really glad Mom didn’t name me Upton. I pause in the F names, finding The Great Gatsby under the marginally better name she did choose for me. My mom’s shelves hold multiple editions, one recent and two from her PhD program because her notes in each got too numerous and crowded to decipher.

I don’t know this edition, though. A Penguin Modern Classic. It’s beautiful, with gold designs and lettering on the hardcover’s pristine white jacket.

I decide I’ll buy it. It’ll thrill her even when she no longer remembers the words. Opening the cover, I find the first line, the one I’ve heard her repeat countless times under her breath and in the SNHU lectures I’d visit every now and then—even to me or Lewis without context or provocation like she just loved the sound out loud. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

Juniper incredulously asked me how I’d never read the book that inspired my name, and I dodged the question. The truth is, I’ve thought about reading it often. My mother wrote her dissertation on The Great Gatsby. She references it constantly. Besides, it’s not like I don’t enjoy classic literature. I do. I’ve read nearly all of her recommendations.

Except this one. The biggest one.

I guess part of me was holding on to it like it could be some safeguard from her disease. How could my mother really get sick, how could she forget her years spent ruminating on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words before I’d had the chance to discuss Gatsby with her?

It’s stupid. Nothing is going to stop my mom’s illness—not this week pretending I could have a different life, not enrolling in a distant school, and definitely not not reading The Great Gatsby. She will get Alzheimer’s, and I will be home for it. The end.

I resume reading the first page. Then the next and the next. Before I know it, I’m at the register, then walking out of the store, my finger holding my page.

I return to Union Square Park. The first free bench I find, I sit and open the book.

After years of waiting and avoiding, I read without intention of stopping, the constant motion of the city continuing around me.

   Juniper

I LET THREE alarms go by before I decide to wake up.

When the first went off at seven this morning, I rolled over to jostle Matt awake—he’s never been good at getting up to an alarm. But when my arm hit his empty pillow, I remembered last night and the reality that I’d never wake up next to Matt again. He was gone, and I was supposed to return to my tour without skipping a step. There were a couple of hours before my Columbia information session, enough time to shower, find breakfast, and navigate the subway to campus.

I got up to draw the curtains and returned to bed.

The thought of continuing the trip without Matt, driving in my empty car to D.C. and then Charlottesville, was too huge an undertaking. Climbing Everest in a snowstorm.

It’s not that I won’t do it. I just need time. I need to let my heart finish breaking.

Around ten, I admit I’m too hungry to stay in bed. There’s no way to make the Columbia tour. Part of me is pissed at myself for sleeping through it, for missing the chance to see a school because of a boy. But the other part of me, the bruised part that can still smell Matt on my shirt, is glad. Ending our relationship deserves a moment of pause. A moment to recognize there will be no more of Matt’s easy smiles at my locker, no more daydreams of our future together, no more hurried kisses in his car five minutes before curfew.

It hurts, and I let it. It hurts every time I think of what Matt and I used to have. The past versions of ourselves who worked perfectly together in ways we don’t now. It’s the undeniable truth, and it’s awful, and it recedes into healing with every passing hour.

I haul myself into the shower, hardly feeling the warm water against my skin.

Pulling on my parka, I head downstairs, ferociously blocking out the thought that the last time I walked down this hallway, I was following Matt. It’s funny how places can feel completely different depending on who you’re with, or who you’re not.

Downstairs, I quickly find a hole-in-the-wall bagel shop, the line spilling onto the sidewalk. It moves quickly enough I’m not convinced there isn’t magic involved, and in ten head-spinning minutes I’m standing on the street corner again holding my everything bagel with cream cheese.

I gaze up.

The Chrysler Building soars into the sky in front of me. I study the iconic spire, the way the curves cascade unconventionally into the needle point. Facts explode in my head. The building was the tallest in the world for eleven months in 1931, until the Empire State Building was finished. The thirty-first floor displays replicas of the 1929 Chrysler hood ornament. With the details comes the realization I’m in New York City.

I’m in one of the greatest cities in the country for the thing I love. The thing I want to devote my entire academic and professional life to. I grew up here, but I was too young to understand or appreciate the architecture of New York the way I do now. I resolve right here, with the curb under my feet and the titanic towers over my head, to throw myself into an architectural tour of the city. Even though I skipped Columbia, I won’t waste today. I’ll let my dreams of the future heal the wounds of the past.

It takes me twenty minutes to compile my itinerary for the day. I pick five buildings spread across Manhattan along Fifth Avenue. The architectural greatest hits of the city, from historic to modern, Gothic to art deco.