I Totally Meant to Do That Read Online Free Page B

second floor, and sometimes even the one on the fourth. My neighbors never said anything; I was mostly a nuisance to myself.
    In this particular instance, however, after recently being burned, the pattern played out a little differently. When I yelled at myself in my head—
Geez, it’s like you’re a tourist in your own home!
—I saw that I was. The West Village wasn’t home. I realized that I didn’t even like it that much. In fact, I generally hung out in the bars andrestaurants of other neighborhoods. I’d hardly decorated my room. The apartment felt counterfeit.
    So I started thinking backward. If this seemed obvious now, but I hadn’t noticed any of it before, then my ignorance must have been willful, which means I’d had an incentive—one whose imagined worth was so great, I’d gone more than $4,000 in debt paying rent in a neighborhood I couldn’t afford.
    OK, here is where I tell you that I lied one last time. The truth is this: I do know why I moved to the West Village. I was chasing Lou. Finally,
finally
I’d reached her, and suddenly she was gone again. But in the legendary West Village, I could retrace her steps. Whenever I fancied, I could pop into Magnolia for a chocolate cupcake or go dancing at Automatic Slims. I could eat burgers at Corner Bistro and tell myself with eager eyes, “I bet Lou sat here once … in this very booth!”
    I had spent so many years imagining her before, it was easy to slip back into the habit. But I wasn’t chasing her; I was chasing her narrative, trying to consume her authentic experience—an inherently inauthentic pursuit. No two people follow the exact same path. And I couldn’t even be certain the narrative was true. I’d cobbled the account together from anecdotes apocryphal and embellished by drink. I had the right key but it was in the wrong lock. If the world is made of narratives, then it was time I write my own.
    And I may as well start from the beginning.



grandfather used to shout those words from his front porch every night. He was calling the dog inside. The dog’s name was Dammit. My mother and Aunt Jane had begged for a puppy, but my grandfather said no, until he finally relented, on the condition that he be allowed to name it, which he did with the express purpose of wailing curse words into the neighborhood.
    One night, Dammit—or, Dit, as he was known to everyone else—didn’t come home. It was an inevitability the family had anticipated since the first time their next-door neighbors fed the dog filet mignon. He liked to visit the Hermans, and one time when he did, Elise Herman had her butler prepare steak. After that, Dit began every morning by trotting next door for breakfast. Once he correctlyassumed that there might also be filet for dinner, Dit ate all of his meals with the Hermans. He liked it there. So when Elise placed a blue-satin, down-stuffed pillow next to her own bed, Dit moved in for good.
    Decades later, when I graduated from college and decided to leave North Carolina for New York, Aunt Jane exclaimed, “Don’t go! You’ll have a ball and stay. I have a friend who moved there forty years ago and never got married, and no one ever saw her again. You know that happens to a lot of girls.”
    “Wait a second,” I interjected, knowing I had her trapped. “What’s the fear, that you’ll miss me or that I’ll be an old maid?”
    She thought for a few seconds and responded, “No, I know you’ll get married because you’re not fat.” Then she announced that she was late for a bridge game and hung up the phone.
    As reluctant as I am to further expound upon an analogy that likens me to a dog, I must admit that when I first came to New York, I wandered around all wide-eyed and trusting, assuming that everyone wanted to scratch my belly. It makes sense: I’d come from the Land of Belly Scratchers, the South, where 50 percent of the vocabulary is comprised of heartwarming adages. We are a population who whistles, says good