Aughts

Greenpoint Terminal Market. Photograph: Jasmine Dreame Wagner.

In the ’90s I knew a young woman who was assaulted on the steps of a university library. She was walking home late at night, carrying a bundle of sunflowers. Fifty sunflowers, maybe sixty, with heads as wide as salad plates. A man snuck up behind her and pressed a pistol into her back. He raped her there, on the library stairs. He spat on her neck. And then, as if the violence weren’t enough, he stole her flowers.

I watched my back when walking home late at night.

The aughts were plagued with security.

I never hung blinds or curtains in my windows. Not until I moved into an apartment with someone I mistakenly loved. He hated the sodium streetlights, how they yellowed our bodies when we undressed. He didn’t know what they were called, I had to tell him. It was then he began to use my language, my “sodium streetlights,” in his stories. He adopted my “nine o’clock blue.” My favorite color of sky. He hung it over the women in his fictions. Kidnapped women, women stuck with pins, women so mannish they were mistaken for Thomas Pynchon.

A shared language won’t save you. The pastoral won’t save you. Security won’t save you. The aughts taught me this.

At the end of the aughts, I met a woman who’d known a woman who’d rented a studio at 5 Pointz in Long Island City in the ’90s. What the building lacked in structural integrity and reliable lighting in public spaces, it made up for in cost and community. Its façade was alive with graffiti. Wildstyle, they call it. Piece for masterpiece. Her rent was cheap because the room lacked heat, the windows lacked locks, the freight elevator permanently jammed in its shaft.

When she wasn’t painting, she was kickboxing. After training, she’d hoist her bike onto one ripped shoulder and climb five floors of rusted scaffolding into her studio window. Every day until the day the scaffolding collapsed.

Have you ever been afraid of a stairwell?

I deboned myself.

My favorite color of frosting

was red, yellow, orange.

The man I mistakenly loved interviewed artists for glossy magazines. I read every Q&A transcription. I scanned for difference; I wanted to discern where unrehearsed sentiments and unguarded gestures popped out of the PR-mediated copy: moments when a question hit a nerve, where the text seized on an artist’s authentic voice. Afterwards, I’d ride my bike over the Pulaski Bridge, pumping the pedals in a sprint from Long Island City to Maspeth. I’d thumb my disposable camera, framing the blank billboards and the pink and green dregs of Newtown Creek, imagining I was an artist.

Q: How is it that some places on earth, no matter how remote, are able to present themselves as the path of least resistance?

A: I purchased bulk packages of disposable cameras at my local pharmacy and kept at least one on me at all times. I wanted to remember my world the way that I had experienced it, not in the way the media or any other artist would have me remember it down the road. I wrote my own future past. The aughts were years of lost things. No, that isn’t true. They were years where anything and everything kept coming back for one last go—like an ex in a dry spell or a Labrador with a tennis ball. My photos economized my hoarding. I had a problem with hoarding in the aughts. A glass strawberry, an amethyst biscuit, a porcelain turnstile paperweight hand cast by the owner of a very important start-up.

Q: Gateways to past selves?

A: I didn’t know it then. That I was method acting.

A: I approached my body the way sculptors approach material. The narrative is alive