Page 4 of Sunny Side Up

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Living in New York can sometimes feel like running with weights on.

Daily tasks like laundry become feats of heroism.

In-unit washer/dryer? Unless you’re a Russian oligarch, get ready to haul your dirty underwear six blocks away to be laundered.

Fingers crossed you get more of your own clothes back than someone else’s.

If there’s anything you can do to make your life easier in the city, you do it.

For me, that meant moving to Chelsea the minute I could. My new commute to my office was now only six blocks. No more subway squeeze. No expensive taxi. Instead, my mornings began with my favorite city ritual: walking to get coffee.

I’d always wanted to live in this part of town.

Thirteen years ago, when I was a bright-eyed and fresh-faced transplant to New York, before Zack was even a blip on my horizon, this was the first neighborhood that felt like it could be my future home.

I could just see myself: walking the High Line, grazing on food samples at Chelsea Market, enjoying brunch on Sundays at my favorite restaurant, Cookshop.

The energy was sophisticated yet relaxed, trendy yet historic.

I loved it all. So, when I decided to branch out on my own and launch Le Ballon Rouge at age thirty, Chelsea was my immediate choice for where to set up shop.

Growing up, I dreamed of being a New Yorker.

A real one. I wasn’t interested in the common trajectory of those who stayed for five years before moving back home, swapping skyscrapers for suburbia and a gaggle of kids.

No, at six years into my city experience I was hoping—because I was a dumb-ass romantic—to meet the love of my life.

And as if following a script, Zack waltzed into my life that same year.

I was living in Nolita at the time (back when Nolita was mostly NYU seniors).

We met through mutual friends of friends during a night out at Spring Lounge.

He was handsome and charismatic and hilarious.

He made me laugh harder than anyone I’d ever met.

He planned the most elaborate, outrageous dates for us, intent on helping me check off my New York City bucket list. He brought me coffee in bed every morning and hid notes for me in my totes, in the bathroom, in the freezer.

He was an Upper East Side native, raised by a nanny in a brownstone with views of Central Park and a generationally wealthy future, who’d moved downtown as an adult in search of “a more authentic scene” (his words).

Despite his bubble-wrapped upbringing, he had a natural city savviness and a downtown edge with extensive knowledge of where to eat, drink, and party throughout all five boroughs.

Everywhere we went, he was somehow “buddies with” the owner/bartender/chef/bouncer.

It was like being with the mayor of a city I very much wanted the keys to.

It’s honestly a miracle that Zack and I ever moved past the point of hooking up and into an actual committed relationship.

He was always so distracted by Manhattan’s many shiny things—the parties and hot new spots, the E-list celebrities who happened to run in concentric friend circles with his friend circles. And then ours.

But it happened, and I felt lucky. He told me he felt lucky, too, and so of course, I ignored the many red flags that were flying even before we’d made it official, and the many that followed.

He loved my sense of humor, how I’d always find a way to put a room at ease and set the crowd up for his jokes.

He loved my commitment to rescue animals, surprising me with a bichon frise brood mom rescued from a puppy mill for my birthday.

We named her Sophia after Estelle Getty’s character on Golden Girls for their shared crowns of white poufy curls.

Never mind the fact that I had told him I wasn’t ready for a dog because I worked so much.

(We both got lucky there: She turned out to be a perfect angel who is happiest curled up by my feet, and as such makes for an amazing office mascot.) He was supportive when I started Lbr and was genuinely turned on by my success, especially when he saw the direct pipeline between the connections I was making and the access they granted him.

He said he thought it was “hot” when I answered clients’ calls after hours.

He took it as a challenge to get me in the mood while I tried my hardest to keep my voice professional.

At the time, Zack was working as a production assistant at ESPN.

The long hours and back-of-the-pack status, plus a postgrad financial cut-off from his parents to teach him “the value of hard work,” made him eager to chart his own path to success in the sports world.

He loved that we both had big career dreams, even if he was still basically at the starting line.

He especially loved the strategy I helped him build out to take his career to the next level.

Within months, I was helping him create a side-hustle sports website, connecting him with my media contacts, teaching him how to master Instagram, and pitching him to potential brand partners around town.

He could barely take his hands off me in the early part of our relationship.

He devoured every inch. I’d never felt more cherished, more wanted, more showered with affection.

It was hard to believe how perfectly we fit together: while watching Law and Order reruns on my couch; in his car, his hand on my thigh, while driving up the West Side Highway to visit friends who’d moved out to the Hudson Valley.

We sparkled at group dinners and birthday parties—Zack had this natural knack for shining before an audience—but I loved him most alone, in our own private world. Our own secret society of two.

So when Zack suggested moving in together after a year and a half of dating, I was thrilled.

It was practically a marriage proposal. Also, both of our leases were up.

I suggested closer to my office; he pushed hard for the Lower East Side.

It was a cooler neighborhood, he said. Better for his future brand.

A better investment, too, when we were ready to buy.

Trust me , he said. I’m the one who grew up here.

Trust him I did. Except, I’m not even sure it was trust. I was so in love with him, and so grateful that he loved me back—always a little worried that he was going to trade me in for someone smaller, thinner, more mysterious, less loud in public—that I started deferring to him on large decisions like this in order to keep him happy.

So that he’d keep me.

It sounds pathetic, I know.

We rented an apartment on a narrow block above an incredibly buzzy restaurant in the Lower East Side.

The apartment had minimal light and zero charm, and though it faced the graffitied back of another building rather than the street, it managed to be extremely loud, especially at night.

But when people found out where we lived, they nodded in approval.

We were right in the center of it all. I put a warm, sunrise-pink DIY stick-on wallpaper all over our bedroom to trick myself into feeling like we had some actual sunshine.

He hated it. Then he decided it was “ironic in a funny-ugly way,” so he agreed to keep it.

We lived there for almost five years. Then we got divorced, and “we” ripped in half: Suddenly there was Zack, and there was me.

One of the best parts of our divorce so far is that I finally moved to my dream neighborhood. My quiet, brownstone-lined block dotted with trees and families and smiling dogs on colorful leashes assured me that this was the way forward.

It was the first day of work in the new calendar year.

After my Bergdorf breakdown over the weekend, I was determined to start anew.

Everyone knows resolutions start on Monday, anyway.

I was walking through my favorite neighborhood at my favorite time of day with my newest rescue dog, Blanche (a senior Cavalier King Charles spaniel puppy mill rescue with similar coloring to Rue McClanahan’s Golden Girls character), and my loyal Sophia in tow (I got to keep her in the divorce; I’m not sure Zack cared).

I called them the Golden Girls. That made me either Dorothy or Rose. Unclear.

It was one of those perfectly crisp, bright, only-in-New-York January days.

The air smelled like a rom-com, and my hair had that perfect two-days-after-a-wash wave to it.

Every morning now, on my way to the office, I stopped at Intelligentsia, the coffee bar at the High Line Hotel.

Walking through the hotel’s hedge-lined courtyard, past the red London bus parked next to wrought iron café tables and shiny black benches, and through the heavy wooden doors that led into the hotel lobby made me feel like I was walking into another country for coffee.

The lobby itself was an escape from reality, with velvet couches, dark walls, terrariums filled with moss-covered branches, antique typewriters, fake—I think?—taxidermic pheasants, and giant glass doors that opened up to a secret garden in the backyard.

“Morning Sunny, Happy New Year!” Harrison, the barista, greeted me with a grin when he saw our ensemble arrive. “The usual?” He was already packing a giant scoop of espresso for my coffee.

I nodded. An angel among us. Then I remembered my manners and smacked both hands on the bar. “I can’t believe I haven’t asked you yet! How was Christmas? Did those bracelets work out for your sisters?”

“Sunny. They were over the freaking moon. They’ve been sold out everywhere, no clue how you managed that. And I know you said they were free, but I wish you’d let me Venmo you something.”

“Oh, please.” I swatted away his nonsense. “My pleasure. It was no big deal.”