I am out with a bunch of writers. And they ask each other about writing, but they don't ask me about writing, they ask me about running. I don't tell them that last night I was running, running, ecstatic until there I was bent, with the palm of my hand against a wet rough trunk, vomiting into the tree pit there next to the road. I turn my head and the light of the bodega comes into focus in the muzzy night, the man sitting out front on a milk crate watches me, taciturn.

Leaning over I can feel the lump of my celphone, pressing into my spine, zippered into the back of my shorts. I have come to a wary truce with my phone after a spate of inappropriateness, the last annoyance being merely a buzzing text message at midnight from a skinny blond writer, but this one is not beautiful or not beautiful enough to me, to get my attention, and he is young, too young, and I have had enough of boys.

One of the writers, a small plain woman with a flat chest, flat affect, flat hair, says "I don't go out. I live alone. With my cat. In Bushwick. It's not as glamorous as it sounds." I search her face for irony, for humor, but I find none and this makes me sad.