Le Bain

The line wasn’t as long as they said it was going to be.

My youthful apprehension was masterfully absconded in the face of cheap black shades and a

cheaper scarf. These items remained glued to me. My saving grace, my ticket to the show- and it was all encompassing. The evening held firmly and though I am now here, seated, taking in the leak from this loft of concern, one nostril is itching to close and wrap around another state of deliciously foreign energy. One mind is itching to be clouded in tones of chartreuse and capricious companions of the night. I was fickle at best, embraced on a whim. Certainly the evening isn’t over?

Inevitably, the agony struck in the morning. Whisked across the bridge on seventy dollars and a prayer, I was awoken by the cabby with nausea in my flesh. A stretched mind and sore stomach, bearing the weight of a new line of contacts- desperation already pressing the tongue.

Though It was an evening which could have been an end, it became a beginning. Precipitous, better yet, productive. Courage was up my nose and in my stomach, drenching my lungs and reigning tranquility victorious. Still I recall the peace, the lack of barrier, even through the muddle in my skull. Syllables spilled from my tongue into the ears of creatures who beneath sunlight, would be possessing yet unapproachable. Wrapped in the night, they were only the former.

There is an unspoken rule within these connections. Association comes only with symbiosis. These initial encounters were frivolous and intoxicating, and though a temporary headrush warped commonalities to signs from god, ever fleeting. A young writer with a Richard Hell look is a gem of the evening and a stone of the day. Possibilities are compounded into a pulsing brain desperate to remember, opportunities a dime a dozen.

The morning after entailed scrolling through digits on my phone and recognizing the labor. The foreign nature of it all, the fact that frankly, though I look up to her, I don’t recognize who I was that evening two weeks ago. Even so, she’s infested me. She aches in the morning and nags beneath the moon. Longing long crushed reassembled by a new experience. I can’t ever go back.

It’s not a way I can always live, teetering between devastation and a breakthrough. I fear my articulations have grown weary. I fear I’m growing dull in this shining landscape as I think more and talk less, more surrounded than ever. Concocting this experience has made me tired. These days, rest is a step from death.

My name is Elise Uhlar, and I’m a freshman at Marymount Manhattan College as of January 2023. If I wasn’t so horribly money driven, I would have pursued poetry. This being said, I live something of a frivolous lifestyle, so I’m presently majoring in journalism- a slightly more lucrative option. As likely discerned in this piece, I am a person who needs my thrills. Experiences such as the discussed evening at Le Bain form the basis of all of the literature I create. It’s here that I seek out the romanticism, the passion, and most importantly, the melancholy and irony of the everyday. Upon becoming old, and hopefully rich, my goal is to publish a book of the various pieces I have, and will create in my lifetime. I’m not an academic in the least, but for now, I suppose one could say I’m playing the game. In many ways, I see my degree as a right of passage- a way to gain the stability to pursue the things I truly love.