I Love The Concrete Beach

on living with your partner

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Part 1: The Mario Kart Lifestyle

In April 2020 I became nocturnal. I’d been laid off from my job at a lunch spot with repeated health code violations. I was living in the rural Connecticut, nearish to Wesleyan. I hated Connecticut.

I’m not sure if it was genuinely a dangerous place for me to live or if I was just 19 and stupid and completely on my own. I kept finding myself surrounded by a wall of guns, in some backwoods basement where my phone couldn’t get a signal. The beach-front towns were no better; they were barren shrines to the halcyon days of suburban ennui, propped up by the expendable income of families whose children would inevitably flee to the cities. One spot only sold rubber ducks at a heavy mark-up. It has stayed in business for eight years. Most of the houses are unfurnished money pits. It was not a place where people actually lived; it was a place where people spent money to imagine living.

The people I spent my time with were all poor -immigrants, sex workers, and former drug users. To be not just broke but stuck out in the middle of nowhere meant the world had been unkind to you a couple times over. I was one year on hormones, no family, not even two years sober. It was hard to see them, because I did not have a car and neither did they, usually. It was lonely being poor out there, way worse than it would feel a few years later being just as cash-strapped in Philly. It felt like being small.

That I did not slip through the cracks too was a product of luck and spite. Before the pandemic, I was not making enough money to pay for bus tickets, let alone to save up and move out. The padded-out unemployment wound up doubling my income. All I had to do to guarantee some kind of future for myself - where I could move back to Philadelphia, where I could find a better job, where I could start to piece together something of a life on my own - was to just twiddle my thumbs for about three months.

So I became nocturnal.