The first thing I did after signing the lease for my Brooklyn apartment was sprint up the Philadelphia Art Museum steps. I had a one-bedroom apartment in Fairmount at the time, but I liked to think I really lived on the Steps.
I loved those Steps, I loved flinging my body up and down them, feeling my stress and tension spill over them, watching others do the same (just, I told myself, at a slower pace). I ran there rain or shine, snow, ice, or unbearable heat.
I did things other than run, too. I took videos of tourists throwing ‘Rocky’ punches, followed a neighborhood kid up the insides of a dried-up fountain (he wouldn’t take no for an answer, despite my warning that “only your-sized people get away with stuff like this”), and glared at anyone (one man) who told me I needed to widen my stride on my runs. Once, I intervened in a police altercation in which a man was apprehended for taking photos, which, to this day, I’m not sure was the right thing to do. (“Thanks for being there,” he told me when I ran into him later, back on the steps. “Keep me out of the news from now on, though.”)
Spring at the Steps was the liveliest. Now; then. Everyone came out: the tourists, the toddlers, the teens, the bikers, the brides, the grooms.
They were all there that evening, after I signed the lease on my Brooklyn apartment, as I sprinted up down, up down, up down, up down. My people, my Steps, my skyline, my city.
After I completed ten up-downs (the usual), I took them all in. But it was hard not to focus on the things I couldn’t take, too. Like wasted time.
The wasted time swarmed all around me, busier and fussier than the tourists and the toddlers and the brides. And it billowed through not just my current perch on the Steps, but my entire residence in Philly. Wasting away in that one-bedroom apartment in Fairmount, attempting to “make it” on my own.
I let it close in on me, the waste, and I let myself judge myself for not handling it all differently, for not sweeping it in a pile, bagging it up, and taking it out to the curb. And then I let myself remember it, too.
The wasted time spent typing alone in my sunlit kitchen.
Waiting for coffee shops to reopen from pandemic shutdowns.
Driving to vaccine appointments.
Swimming in the public pool.
The wasted time spent in that (moonlit) bedroom.
Reading books in bed.
Covering the 2020 election: polling mask-wearing residents on their votes after I cast my own.
The wasted time spent interviewing for jobs and getting rejected from jobs and landing jobs and finally working at those jobs (virtually) as those coffee shops opened back up.
Buying golden tulips for my sunlit kitchen, more to place by my golden couch.
The wasted time spent on that couch, next to those flowers.
Feeling the sun.
Hearing those birds.
The wasted time spent sitting on the stoop with my neighbor Janet, listening to her stories and her laughter, the pop of a lighter on her cigarette as she told me: “You’re so young,” and I wasted away.
Face-timing friends in other cities.
Running around the Schuylkill River.
Watching Janet throw pebbles at those birds to make them “shut up.”
The wasted time spent sprinting up and down and up and down and up and down and up those art museum Steps.
I recently signed a lease for a new apartment in Brooklyn, but this time, I didn’t sprint up any steps. (I did, however, embark on a tempo run through Prospect Park) I didn’t have as many regrets, either. Not because I wasted less time—I did, I am, I’ve got more to lose—but because it's not really wasted, is it? These changes, these trials, these redos, these try-agains.
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