I moved to New York in 2011 and started hanging out in the Village, not realizing that it was, at that point, largely a fake neighborhood—NYU kids and the wealthy. Enacting the cliché in full, I would write in my journal in Washington Square and do looping walks around downtown, looking for bookstores and coffee shops, anywhere I could loiter. I discovered Caffe Reggio, one of the last holdouts of an older New York, on MacDougal Street (another cliché). My favorite movie that summer was Woody Allen’s nostalgic-for-nostalgia Midnight in Paris. During that time, I started dating Heather, a singer-songwriter who had grown up in the Village. She lived in a tiny apartment with her mom and slept in a little cubby room tucked near the kitchen.
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