The words JUST DIVORCED are scribbled in white marker on the rear windscreen of the car in front of me. To avoid the cavernous potholes we swerve onto the wrong side of the road. I follow him until he pulls into an adult video store, then I drive off. Heavy rain today and all other days. The weather reminds me of Manchester, when I visited Ian Curtis’ grave. I was young and fond of the way he ended his life, hanging himself while spinning an Iggy Pop record. If he hadn’t wanted anyone to romanticize his suicide, then why had he done it in such a romantic way?

I can go a very long time without seeing friends. If I moved to another country and never told anyone, I don’t think they’d notice, as long as I answered their texts. They’ve grown accustomed to my absences.

At the cafe, I take my coffee with milk and sugar to avoid being a stereotype. Or to see if some sweetness kills the dread. It does, for the most part. Tony, the Italian man who could be anywhere between sixty and a hundred years old, tells me I look sexy today. It must be my new fur coat. He’s doing the crossword and pouring brandy from a flask into his coffee. The last time I was here, I was smoking outside, and he told me the story of how he quit smoking: He was working at Rikers, disgusted by the way the inmates were reduced to animals, and still they fiended for cigarettes, as did he, and this similarity between him and them disturbed him enough to never buy a pack again.

I’ve never worked at Rikers, so I still smoke. I smoke on the drive to the corporate bookstore, where I slip Eve Babitz’s Sex and Rage into my fur coat. Jean Rhys wrote, almost a hundred years ago, “People thought twice before they were rude to anybody wearing a good fur coat; it was protective coloring, as it were.” Nothing rings truer. The quote comes from a book I stole, too. Around me, women browse the bookshelves, paying me no mind. If, in their peripheral vision, they see a paperback disappear into me, they assume there is a good reason for it, that I’m somehow entitled to the book, that everything is the way it’s supposed to be. As I’m walking out, an older woman asks a worker where the sketchbooks are because she wants to learn how to draw cats. 

I redownload a dating app for the first time in two years. I set my age range from twenty-one to sixty. A fifty-year-old photographer says I have a literary face. A thirty-year-old filmmaker sexts me in Invisible Ink. A forty-year-old established author says he feels lucky that he made it. I say I don’t think I’ll make it. I don’t want to seduce anymore; I want sympathy. I want him to tell me that I’ll make it, that I just have to keep writing. But what do I write about when all that’s on my mind is how I’m never going to make it as a writer? Pathetic predicament. You do something because you love to do it. And then, without your permission, you start to have hopes, desires, expectations. Then what you do becomes a means to an end, which is, always, success—though success was never something you wanted before. You had always seen yourself as an outsider, an outcast. Now you want in.

Lately my dreams always consist of shopping. Sifting through racks of dresses and tops made of black lace, grabbing the hangers, clutching the clothes to my chest, but they always vanish by the time I reach the fitting room. I never thought myself materialistic, nor the kind of woman who wears a fur coat. Thrifted bombers, stained, smelling of smoke, letting the cold air in—that is who I have always been. But the fur coat is so soft, so warm, it hugs me perfectly. I didn’t feel a difference when I turned twenty-five a few months ago. I felt no change, no shift. But in this fur coat I feel new. Older.

I match with a boy my age who’s a self-proclaimed critic (I don’t consider anyone my age a real critic, except for myself). He says he read my book. I ask what he thought of it. Like if Mary Gaitskill had Anaïs Nin’s sex life and Eve Babitz’s tits, he says, with the chic stylings of Jean Rhys and… do I sense some Annie Ernaux?

I want more, Katie says when I send her the story I wrote. She says the ending is too on-the-nose. But I have nothing more to say. I don’t tell her that. But I want to publish it tomorrow, I reply. Well then go smoke a cig and keep working bitch, she says. Jean Rhys would write in the middle of the night. Put on your fur coat and get cracking.