Story Time — Dispatches From My Early Morning Mind
On growth longed for + iPhones lost and found
“you’re in my dms, he got me back my iphone 14 at the last stop in queens after i left it in a taxi cab at 2 a.m. without find my iphone turned on.”
—
This is not a piece I intend to promote, but a story I know I’d regret not immortalizing, even if only dispatched from the catacombs of my sick and twisted Monday morning brain. I’m starting to think about Substack in the same ways that I regard Twitter. The more people that subscribe, the less shame I experience in publishing my raw and unedited thoughts. My earliest memories of feeling like this began when I started public speaking. I once recited a ten minute long Gloria Steinem speech at a national forensics competition to hundreds of people with no hesitation, but in my living room, to a crowd comprising approximately three family members, I faltered in an instant. It’s possible this is just a universal experience — comfort through depersonalization. I’d never classify myself as shy, but I think I’m easy to embarrass. I tell myself that’s an innately female quality. I don’t know that there’s strength in recognizing this and in turn, using it to my advantage, or if this is just another way of self-infantilizing. I actually think about this question constantly.
This is my Roman Empire.
—
Last night I attended a small gathering in Chinatown that turned to somewhat of an awkward time at Treasure Club, where I proceeded to have my usual five sips of clear liquor and text my whereabouts to Saltychat. I’m about to start name dropping and then inevitably backpedal like I’m Mike Crumplar; therefore, I digress.
Anyways, a girl like me loves to end her night in Brooklyn and then tweet something the next morning that goes like: “hmm wearing yesterday’s same sweet little dress to have a silly little *insert pastry* in greenpoint.”
So there I was, hunched over the table eating pineapple sorbet and thinking to myself, “Wow…we are actually so cute together” and also, “I hope he has bird food for me in the cabinet,” when I realized that I didn’t have my phone.
—
A dear friend once told me that I die a thousand deaths a day and that it’s so Italian of me and while he was completely right, I like to think that I respond better now than I used to in situations of stress. I knew it was lost almost instantly, but I put on a bit of a show, opening nonsensical things like the refrigerator and the bathroom cabinet when I figured it had likely fallen, caseless and to its death, on the ground of the taxi.
I signed into his iCloud as I thought to myself — you definitely don’t have Find My iPhone set up you fucking dumb bitch.
“I was robbed in Chicago last year,” I exclaimed, not helping my case in the slightest.
I thought about how I begrudgingly shared my location with my mother indefinitely before I moved back to New York and how waking her in the middle of the night to ask her to track my phone from a different city was not exactly giving responsible adult, but I knew she’d get over it and I — imagining eating the cost of a new phone, lost photos (of course my storage is full and I haven’t backed up to iCloud in months) and draft tweets long since mulled over, now gone — I put pride aside. I also knew she’d be worried sick if she checked my location while getting up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night and it revealed me to be halfway across the city in an unfamiliar place. If it wasn’t obvious enough, I can be extremely flippant but also, much like my mother, am incapable of not thinking about things ten times over.
—
“Mom, I’m at —”
“Your mom knows about me? Does she like me?”
Fuck.
My words drag on like an old rug that emits dust when you step on it. I instantly feel overcome with embarrassment.
“My mom knows everything.”
—
The next couple of hours were mostly a blur. Me on his shoulders at 3 a.m. and waddling in his Birkenstocks to the bodega on the first few hours of our shared birthday month. I began thinking less about my lost iPhone and more about how good he looked, my limitedness in his hands, his actual hands on my head and on a series of devices, texting my mother, laying out our game plan to show up at the taxi’s location early in the morning.
This is actually so me to romanticize a misstep like this.
Anyways, he took charge, my head in his lap as he made a series of 311 calls (it’s not easy to retrieve a lost item from a taxi) but luckily he used Curbed to pay and so with what little information we had, the taxi medallion number and my iPhone’s mysterious location — which remained stagnant just under JFK Airport — I held out hope that we’d find my phone in the morning.
—
We arrived back at my apartment groggily, the sun shone through my old wooden kitchen as we ate everything bagels with scallion cream cheese and fed the cats breakfast, both of our plans now seemingly shot for the day.
“I’ll do anything you want to make it up to you,” I tease in the Uber as we journey to the unforeseen location of my lost phone. Worst case scenario, we leave a note on the dash and return home.
—
We’re dropped off in Jamaica. The sounds of church choirs fill the streets as our Uber drives in and I do that thing where I start to get cold feet now that we’ve reached the destination. I begin to doubt ever coming all this way, assessing the ridiculousness of it all. What if my phone’s in a home with someone by now and not on the floor of a parked cab? Unlikely though, I thought — we’d called it ten times by this hour and each time it rang all the way through. I really believe we were his last ride of the night, but everything we think we know is hinged on speculation.
He orients us to the right side of the street and in the distance, a near perfect sky on a residential block reveals itself, and in the middle of the block — the taxi van, and on the floor of its backseat, a white iPhone 14 with a Sporty & Rich sticker on it shown through the tinted windows.
I sit on the curb and begin to text my mother from my laptop that’s connected to his hotspot — a move I would’ve never thought to make myself. The chips continue to fall in his favor.
“Oh my god,” I text her. “We see the phone. Now we just need to get the cab unlocked.”
He makes another series of 311 calls only to be met with a closed on Sundays notice. Then there was the NYPD, who rejected his requests almost instantly.
“The driver didn’t steal the phone from her, so we can’t just open the car door,” they argued as I wandered into the nearest corner store and asked if anyone knew who drove the cab parked outside.
At this point, I start ringing doorbells of apartments in close proximity to the taxi — an idea he’s clearly deemed foolish.
“Wow…you really are a quirked up girl for real,” he says. On multiple instances, I imagine him dropping me indefinitely after this.
I’m beginning to lose steam as our options run dry. I consider writing the note, accepting that someone could very well remove it, or that the taxi driver’s next rider might find my phone and inevitably keep it.
That’s when he began to squint with his face pressed to the cab’s window. In extremely fine print over the head of the driver’s seat is an LLC name, but no number. I pace the perimeter of the cab once more as he begins googling and soon, smiling on the phone.
“He’s going to put me in touch with the driver,” he says. “Finally.”
—
We’re told our guy’s potentially still asleep and begin to kill time as we wait for a call-back. A brief walk and a cursory scroll for a local cafe lead us hopeful at the eleventh hour.
Within 15 minutes, the driver emerges, grinning and on foot to unlock the taxi doors. I clutch my phone, untouched and at 40% still.
I think mostly of my 18,000 photos. “We’re not going to have any of the pictures from when we met,” I dramatically exclaimed the night before. “El Pinguino and –”
Last night we reflected on our reactions to situations like this. The only way we both thought to describe how we want to be in emergencies can be summarized as simply as: not like our parents.
“Wherever you two need to go,” the cab driver said warmly, “I’ll take you.”
—
I think about how I moved here almost two months ago and how much I yearn to feel and to be actually put together, beyond Instagram and my curated bedroom windowsill and in the online persona I’ve put far too much stock into cultivating. I spent the remainder of the day studying the features of my stupid little cellular device. It’s occurred to me more in the past month, than in years, that I’ve gotten by — a little too well — on being a little too helpless.
I keep seeing tweets from teenage girls asking why any grown woman in her twenties would want to identify with their still developing age group. I could write endlessly about the wonder and limitlessness of being a girl. Could it be that my fascination with girlhood, and the subsequent following that arose from it, is garnered upon a desire for endless uncomfortable growth or simply, my own selfish refusal to grow up?
—
“What would Joan Didion do in this situation?” I asked him in the morning, hair in my face, mascara crusted in the corners of my inner eyes.
“Probably pop a benzo,” he said laughing.