There’s no good way to deliver bad news, but there are worse ways. I was gearing up for another brief, monthly, calendar-invited sexual encounter with my longterm boyfriend when my doctor called. I picked up the phone, grateful. The scans were in. I had a degenerative spinal disease, which would gradually ruin my body until someone discovered miracle cure, or I became eligible for assisted suicide. We didn’t have sex that day.

The first thing I did in the wake of my diagnosis was become religious. The second thing I did was break up with my boyfriend. In my eagerness to end things, I mistimed the conversation so he was heading into the bathroom at that very moment, and then I had to deliver the bad news while he sat on the toilet, shitting and crying. Afterward, I took him out for ice cream at Friendly’s.

We had to keep living together for a hundred years until our lease expired. I started sleeping on the floor because I was the bad guy, and also because I thought I could self-heal my back. I was manic with exhaustion. Anything seemed possible. I was channeling religious martyrs. I was microdosing Tao Lin tweets. When the lease expired, my back was worse than ever but still not
bad enough for me to legally kill myself. Summer was blazing through New Haven. I brought my belongings out to bake on the front lawn. I wrote on an empty shoebox: MOVING TO FRANCE.

The money was gone by the time I landed in Paris. I had to crash with internet strangers who volunteered to host me. You should always be wary of people like this. On the bright side, they were locals, so I was integrated from the start. I bought navy clothes and became a chauvinist. I even went to a French hospital once. It should’ve been twice, but for some reason I didn’t go
when I got a UTI from a sexual assault. Actually, it wasn’t an assault because I could’ve said no. Instead, I said nothing, and it went on for a hundred years, and I felt really bad for myself the whole time. The reason I contracted a UTI was that the guy lived in one of those inexplicable European apartments where there’s a sink in the bedroom, but the full bathroom with an actual
toilet is on a different floor entirely. It’s basically a UTI factory. So I fell asleep without pissing and I woke up at dawn and went to the living room and called my friend Jamie in California who was just about to go to bed, and I was like, Dude, I think I have a UTI, and she was like, Oh no, how does French healthcare work? By that point, I knew how French healthcare worked because I’d already been to the hospital for gout, which runs in my family. I didn’t know it was gout at the time though, I thought it was just regular arthritis, so I watched a Jordan Peterson video and decided to go on a red meat diet. I took it very literally and was living off steak strips and red
wine, and my foot got worse and worse, and that’s how I landed in the hospital after failing to self-treat my gout.

I also failed to self-treat my UTI. A few days after consenting to rape, when I couldn’t ignore the burning anymore, I went to an organic shop where I bought a giant glass bottle of cranberry juice. It wasn’t the ruby red kind they give to children, it was the cloudy sour kind that ruins your enamel. I sat on the cobblestones outside Theo van Gogh’s house and forced myself to chug the entire bottle, which I was convinced was equivalent to three antibiotic capsules. I stood up and crossed the road to a cafe. I ordered then went to the bathroom while my panini was pressed. This wasn’t your traditional, old-world French cafe, it was one of those ubiquitous unvarnished-wood scandi places with the giant white tiles and white lights, which is how I learned what it might be like to throw up a gallon of cranberry juice in an Apple store.

Let me tell you how I met the guy. A month into my stay in Paris, my mom flew over and rented us an AirBnB. I was grateful to not be crashing with internet people for once. My mom had this thing where ever since she married a rich guy, she couldn’t stand middle class people. Poor people were fine because they weren’t people. But the middle class was a fresh memory. Now she was retired and sleeping in a French AirBnB that, she claimed, seemed unsafe. Unsafety was not something you could quantify nor contradict, especially if a woman was diagnosing it. On our first morning together, we went out for breakfast. I was still limping because of the gout. When we got to the cafe, my mom wrinkled her nose and said the floor was sticky. But I couldn’t
walk any further. I ordered a cheeseboard, and my mom ordered a vodka. Behind her I could see this guy marking his way through a stack of printed papers. There is nothing more attractive than a man who works with his hands. We kept making eye contact. He was attractive in that French
way where it literally didn’t matter what he looked like, he was going to be hot anyway. His worst features were assets, and his assets were also assets. When my mom got up to pay, I wrote my number on a scrap of notebook paper and handed it to the guy like an act of charity, even though my mom had just paid for my cornichons.

Later that day, he texted. We made a plan. Then I had to wait a hundred years for my mom to leave the country. When she finally left, I checked out of the AirBnB and went to go crash with an internet acquaintance who really liked my art. The price for crashing with this type of person is looking at their drawings and pretending they’ve got potential. I dropped off my bags and she
handed me her sketchbook. It was a bunch of depressing, flat drawings of hands and fruit. This one’s really cool, I said, pointing at a random page. Then I went out to meet the cafe guy, whose name was Yves.

We’d decided to meet at the same cafe. I got there early and ordered a glass of white wine. I started writing in my notebook so I would seem papery like him. After half an hour, I was nearing the end of the wine and the notebook. I was writing in tiny letters on the inside of the back cover. I needed Yves to see me writing. It was essential. I was freaking the fuck out. I realized I couldn’t feel the lower half of my body. I stood up to check if my legs still worked.
They did. I went outside to call New Haven Rheumatology. I asked the receptionist for Dr. DiSabatino. For the first time in recorded history, the doctor was available and could take my call immediately. The call was transferred.

“Should I be worried about paralysis at this point?” I asked.

The doctor considered it for a moment then said, “I shouldn’t think so.”

I said, “But should I think so?”

He paused then said, “I don’t think so.”

I hung up. It was a really expensive call.

I spotted Yves walking up the street toward me. He was a hundred years late. He didn’t apologize and never would, it was not in his arsenal. When I mentioned our earlier flirtation, he clarified that he hadn’t been intentionally making eye contact. He hadn’t even been aware of me until I gave him the note. This was objectively humiliating but I talked myself out of it. We went back to his apartment, the one with the disambiguated bathroom, and had the weird sex and fell asleep then I woke up and made the phone call to my friend at dawn and then I remembered, fuck, I was supposed to spend the night at the internet girl’s place. I hadn’t even texted her to say I was staying out. She seemed really into my art. You can’t mistreat a fan, not in this day and age. I left Yves’s apartment in the early morning and decided to buy flowers for the girl by way of apology. I got on the commuter train with a bouquet of red roses, clearly the wrong choice. It was only a few stations, but between the second and third station, the train fully stopped and didn’t start up
again. It stayed there for a hundred years.

At first, I tried looking straight ahead at the seatback in front of me, pretending I was a passenger on a moving train. Then I gave up and decided to settle in a bit. I looked around. Everyone else was also looking around, raising their eyebrows at each other in congenial exasperation like, It’s
always something! Then they started saying French things I didn’t understand, but slowly I learned. This is how my French got really good. We started volleying French colloquialisms up and down the carriage. We all could’ve easily switched seats or even moved into a different carriage, but everyone stayed put. We were a family. I had a bank of three seats to myself, which was great for sleeping. The seats were made of textured blue polyester. After a few months the fabric began to stink. There was no way to clean it. The bathroom was excellent though. A year in, the tap still worked. It was probably just the same water being recycled over and over again.
We’d taken to hanging our wet clothes from the luggage racks. Most people only had the clothes they’d been wearing when they boarded, so we all had to get comfy with nudity, especially once our clothes wore out and there was nothing to cover ourselves with. We also had to get comfy with the smell. When we had our first death 10 years in, we passed the body out through the
narrow safety gap at the top of the window like a piece of mail. It was Laurence. He fit through the slot pretty easily because he was so skinny, we were all starving, but then he just flopped down right next to the train. Talk about smell. Around year 20, I stopped thinking about Yves. Half a century in, I stopped being stressed about showing up late to the internet girl’s house. The red roses had dried to a dusty pink, and they hung above my seat like mistletoe. I never kissed anyone or had sex, it wasn’t that kind of train. 75 years in, my UTI cleared up, and in the absence of social media, my gout cleared up too. My spine still hurt but I no longer wanted to kill myself.
I was healthy. I nurtured my friendships. I slept well. I stayed put. I lived this way for a hundred years until I realized what I was missing.