I dreamt of drinking in a city that had no name, where the accents at the bar ran from silky and romantic French tones to husky, jagged Germanic syllables. I was sitting alone, straining to make out the words, when I knocked my wine glass onto the floor. The pitch of shattering glass silenced the bar–a terrible, oppressive muteness swept across the room as everyone turned to look at me. One woman clapped, and then a man joined in, until the whole bar started up. A stranger rose from his seat to kiss me on the cheek while a waiter swept the shards with dignified reserve at my feet.

The next day, I met Charlie. Charlie worked at a bookstore and lived in the makeshift library of Michael’s apartment in Ridgewood. Michael was an independent publisher; stacks of boxes towered in his living room, among which a small mattress on the floor signified Charlie’s place of living. Charlie collected paperbacks and magazines from the stacks, showing up at all the local readings to ask writers to sign their pages. He had signatures from almost every author in New York. When I fucked Michael, I imagined Charlie having trouble sleeping over the sounds of my shrieks and the creaking bed. When I tore up a magazine because my ex’s face was on the cover, Charlie kept it in his stash of publishing ephemera, the tattered pages of which would all gradually transform into relics.

I harbored something of an intense hatred toward the literary scene–a visceral disgust with hints of resentment and contempt. There were boys in their thirties acting, simultaneously, like stupid little kids and creepy old perverts. There were girls in their early twenties who were hotter and cooler than I was. I could not be cool because I cared too much. I was aging and collecting rejections from agents and publishers. I was partying and getting too fucked up because even drinking was a job that I took seriously. What Charlie saw as special in that scene, I could not see. He was like a little kid in that way, retaining a vivid curiosity and wonder that many left behind in their early childhood.

Charlie had the baby blue Bic lighter of an established author. He had an up-and-coming playwright’s used toothpick. He had a literary it girl’s Burt’s Bees lip balm. He had a renowned journalist’s broken tape recorder stained with the beer spill of a famous musician. He had a controversial Substacker’s pink hair clip. He had a wine-stained napkin with a stanza scribbled on it by a poet from Twitter.

Michael made Charlie breakfast on the weekends and let him read the books he was publishing before anyone else. When Michael talked about Charlie, it sounded like he was talking about a rescue dog he found on the street. I suspected Michael derived an obscene egotistical pleasure from letting Charlie live at his place. Michael, like too many people in the literary scene, was a Catholic, but I could tell that religion was little more than a trendy crutch for this tiring group of pseudo-intellectuals. It was a reminder to them that they could always become good, that their redemption was just in reach. They did not believe or have faith; they were bored and needed a name for their bad behavior. Sin had a poetic ring to it. The solution was just as easy, three Hail Marys.

I knew that the girls with crosses around their necks and Bible allusions in their poems were often the meanest. Catholicism was the ultimate clique here. But maybe I was just jealous and resentful of their sense of devotion, even if I could tell it was fraudulent and hollow. Unlike them, I didn’t have a front to hide behind. There was nothing tethering me to this existence. They called me nihilist like it was a slur, but the truth was I didn’t have enough interest in nihilism to even identify myself as one. I found Catholic aesthetics as alluring as they did–who could deny the beauty of crucifixes and stained glass windows?–but I’d despised organized religion since the day I was born, wondering how it was even ontologically possible to inherit beliefs, how it was possible my parents forced me to kneel and pray in pews every Sunday. The first time I went to Sunday school, I wept into my desk and telepathically begged my mom to pick me up.

One night, I was drunk and throwing up in Michael’s toilet. Michael sat on his bed and sighed. I could hear his dramatic exhales through the wall. When I was done, I stumbled over to the couch next to Charlie. I wanted to drink more. I knew Michael didn’t. Charlie was nursing a beer, reading Schopenhauer and listening to Brahms. I asked him what he’d been up to and he told me he was working on a book about the literary scene, a sort of historical documentation of our moment. As we talked, I wondered if he would transcribe our conversation later. I wondered if I was important enough to make it in. To be a major character. I thought if I wasn’t, I might as well kill myself. I wondered why I should bother to continue living if I wasn’t going to be remembered, anyway. I wondered why I even cared about being associated with a scene that I despised. I wondered if I should do something crazy like kiss him or wrap my legs around him to help make the book interesting. I wondered about the rest of my life, living this way–viewing my own actions as mere plot devices, the reader’s gasps when I did something shocking, their laughs when I was in an absurd situation.

After Michael fell asleep, I convinced Charlie to come with me to a fancy rooftop bar in Midtown even though it was near closing. On the subway, a homeless man spat on the floor, making the black surface glimmer with saliva. It was so late the bouncer almost didn’t let us in. The elevator shot upwards towards the sky and I almost lost my balance. The bartender rolled her eyes at us when we went up to the bar to take our orders. Our voices got lost in the 2 a.m. pandemonium and we had to just yell at each other across the table. All I could hear were the men in suits beside us, clamoring on about finance and stocks which made no sense. Phrases like hedge fund and investment risk grabbed my attention in between their aggressive sniffs of cocaine and thumping each other on the back. When I set my wine down on the table, my wrist twitched and the glass fell to the floor. But no one stopped talking, and no one came to clean it up. Charlie carefully picked up a single shard, wrapped it in a napkin, and put it in his pocket. He said one day we would all be gone.

Danielle Chelosky is a Brooklyn-based writer. Her debut novel, Pregaming Grief, is available now from SF/LD Books.