Member-only story
This Is Us
The Yo-Yo Boys of NYC
Lazy pick-up lines, poser rockstars, and other things I miss
On peut chercher l’amour dans les yeux que l’on croise
Dans les peaux que l’on touche
Au creux des nuits soyeuses, à pleine bouche
— Carla Bruni
Last night, while I was taking a bath and eating a popsicle (I just figured out you could do such a thing as an adult), Carla Bruni’s song “Un grand amour” came on, and I drifted to another time when I lived in NYC and sat on the balcony in my Upper West Side apartment.
I lived there with a series of German roommates (they kept leaving and sending their beautiful German friends to replace them), and then a guy roommate from Brazil who seemed to live off tuna.
Sitting on my balcony, pretending to smoke cigarettes while listening to Carla Bruni, I pined mercilessly after a guy who was too busy studying at Columbia University to pay me much attention. As an aspiring actress with very little on my plate, minus a few acting classes where we honed our “repetition skills” and tremored on the floor for hours on end, I had way too much free time for the self-indulgent, extra-curricular activity of pining.
