New York In A Bottle

• Francesca Bavaro, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2021

It was an electric, suffocating summer, the summer that I ruled, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. Live every other high school graduate, the thought of New York encompassed me, rattled me to the core. It was special and I was special in it, alive, chaotic, and seductive. I spent nights in a blur of city lights, stumbling and laughing with people I didn’t know, music forever pounding in my ears. I was on top, I always was, but this was different, I wasn’t known, yet I was adored. I was the new kid in the centre of a crowd that knew each other for years. I was enticing, something different, a deeply poetic quarterback from Kansas, an enigma, but not really, they didn’t want to know me, they wanted me to know them. I was arm candy for rich kids, where my soul dissolved and I quickly become pliant to the idea of being used. How long would it take until I finally snapped?

In truth, I came to the Big Apple to become a writer or at least a journalist. I always seemed to both disturb and enrapture others with my words. It was a gentle power that I relished, the potential to contort reality. Alas, that dreamed died with the old me. It died when girls clung to me, when I started floating on the streets, when endless subway rides seemed to have an end. Whatever it was in me, the part that craved chaos was thriving. I was free, living hard. I didn’t want it to end. I simultaneously had no order but yet lived a monotonous life.

When the day turned pale, and the sky was covered by a thick grey mist, the sun a glimmering oyster, I sat down to write, and every day was the same. I would picture myself inside a white coffin. My pride and joy, 'A girl in a bottle,' which was a story I wrote loosely based on my sister, clutched in my right hand. It somehow always startled me that this was something I cherished, it became my one-way ticket to NYU, my one-way ticket to New York, my one-way ticket to self-destruction. I picture myself scrunching, 'A girl in a bottle,' in a perfect little ball, and then shoving it in my mouth. Then, somehow, once my story successfully dissolved, it would reappear in my hand. I would reach for my lighter, which everyone cool New Yorkian had, and set, 'A girl in a bottle,' alight. That didn’t really make any sense, the girl would still survive, for she was in water, immune to the fire. The congregation, tear-eyed, seemed to miss the smoke rising from the seams of my coffin. After I would write this down I would ponder: Is it okay to hate New York because it destroyed me? Quickly, I would become bored, the reality of the question strained me unimaginably. I would shove my notebook, notoriously filled with the same thing, to the side, grab my letterman jacket (a remnant of the highs and lows of high school football) and rush into the city. I was trapped in a cycle that wore me down and I adored it.