the senator’s son

It was one of those weeks where everything was too much.
Too many birthdays, too many late nights, too many half-finished martinis and full-body eye rolls.
By the third day of celebrating the same friend, I was already downtown, already dressed up, already exhausted by my own reflection.

I figured I might as well make the outfit count.

So I texted the senator’s son.
We’d been circling each other for weeks—me being vague, him being persistent—and in a moment of laziness disguised as spontaneity, I told him to call me a car to the West Village.
If he wanted me in his neighborhood, he could pay for the privilege.

The Uber drops me off in front of a run-down gay bar.
I look around.
A figure in a doorway a few feet away says my name.

It’s him.

More disheveled than his Raya photos, less senator’s son and more…guy whos house i shouldnt go into.
Turns out he sent the Uber to his apartment, not the bar.

He says he just “wanted to get himself together before we went out.”
How he’s been out all day. How his friend had a set somewhere.
It’s a lot of words for a man who can’t stand up straight.

I follow him inside anyway.
The apartment’s small but trying.
Stacks of cash on the couch. Books on the floor. A sea of empty cups.
He’s six-four, but somehow the mess is taller.

I sit.
He paces.
I realize very quickly this isn’t a date—it’s a live performance of a man unraveling in real time.

After thirty minutes (which felt like hours), I say I’m going back to LES.
He says he’ll come.
Normally I’d say no, but I was broke and tired and figured if I’m already stuck in this fever dream, I might as well get a free Uber and free drinks out of it. Plus it’d be something to write about.
So I let him tag along.

In the car, he tries to kiss me, calls me “exotic”-- which was basically code for I have no idea what your name is, but I’m hoping you’ll still make out with me.

We get to Clandestino.

We walk in and my friends look at me like I’ve brought a rescue project into the bar.
I tell him to get me a mezcal on the rocks with an orange peel.
He comes back with tequila. Says, “I forgot what you said.”

Right then, one of my friends leans over and whispers, “Kaia…you know Mr. I’m married” is here, right?”
And I realized I’d invited him earlier in the night. Then completely forgot.

Important to note that Mr. I’m married was technically, legally married—though separated and mid-divorce, which I did not learn until three months in, at 4 a.m., in his dining room.
He was wasted. I was mostly sober.
He told me like it was a punchline. Literally blurted out “I’m married” and laughed harder than I’ve ever seen him laugh before.
We’re seeing a pattern here.

Anyway,

Now I’m standing there with a drunk senator’s son calling me exotic and a married man scanning the room for me.

The bartender—a guy who’s never once pretended to like me—starts hovering nearby, eyebrows raised like, you good?
I nod.
He lingers anyway. I want to see how far down this can go.

Eventually, I tell the senator’s son he should go home.
He says, “Finally. Let’s go.”
I say, “No. Just you.”

He doesn’t get it.
So I take his phone, call him an Uber, and while it’s loading, he tells me he’s “never hooked up with a Latina before.”
Cool. Still hasn’t.

When the car arrives, I walk him out.
Open the door like the gentleman I apparently am, and say, “Hope you get home fine or whatever.”
Then I shut the door. Hard.

I sneak back into the bar, find Mr. I’m married, and pretend none of it happened.

By the time I get home better known as Mr I’m married home, my phone’s lighting up like a slot machine.
Thirty-six texts.
“Yu were a hot gal indeed.”
“Do com back.”
“Whee are you.”

Poetry.

Months later, in December, he texts again. Said he felt bad about that night. Said he was sober and relapsed the day that we met and remembers nothing but has me saved in his phone as “really hot gal” and that’s all he remembered about me besides the fact that I lived uptown.

Then adds that he’s “in my hood” — the Upper West Side — for an AA meeting.
I remind him I live on the Upper East Side.
I tell him that’s great, that I’m happy he’s getting help.

He says, “Oh no, I wasn’t attending. I was speaking.”

As if he’d just been flown in to save a room full of broken people.
As if he wasn’t one of them.
As if we’d both forgotten the night he couldn’t remember.

He wanted to see me again.
Suggested I come to his place at 10 p.m.
I said, “What about an actual date?”
He said, “I’ll get back to you on that.”
He didn’t.

Which was fine. I didn’t want a date. I just wanted the story.

Now it’s October and almost a whole year later.
I’ve dated everyone in New York and somehow Miami and Los Angeles too.
Cleared the roster. Ended two pseudo-relationships. Achieved emotional bankruptcy.

My Instagram ads are starting to mock me: egg donation, femdom recruitment, Uber assault settlements, archival fashion I can’t afford.

And then—one night, I get an ad for a dating app.
Not unusual. Except this one says,

“A matchmaking club. For intentional daters only.”

And right there, looking back at me like divine punishment, is him.

The senator’s son.

Underneath his photo:

“We introduce you to the right person.”

Maybe.
But if that’s the right person, then I’ve been the wrong one all along.

haunting

I pray every night that when I wake, I’ll be more hauntingly beautiful than I was the day before. Not for vanity, but for impact. I whisper the prayer to God first. Then I send it into the universe like smoke from a burnt offering. Beauty and warfare.

I’m a nonbeliever. Sharpened by doubt. But you’re a god to me. And against all odds, I believe in you. In your silences. In the shape of your rage. In the quiet way you love without saying it. I believe, and that belief is both my peace and my undoing.

I pray for peace, because I crave stillness. I pray for war, because I crave meaning. Some days I want the world to be gentle. Other days I want it to burn down and start over. Maybe that's love too—a war dressed in soft robes.

We’ll name our daughter Paloma. A dove, born of blood and beauty. She’ll have your eyes and your grit. She’ll think that I am overbearing. That I suffocate her and am too intense. She’ll be just like you. And still, she’ll pray to look like me. She’ll want to be haunting too.

I pray every night that I’ll haunt your dreams. That when sleep takes you, I’ll be there. Neither angel nor demon, but something in between. A specter of beauty, a scripture written in flesh. A reminder that love, like war, leaves marks.

I pray to haunt. And I pray to be remembered.

You're in his dis, I'm in Brooklyn

A year ago today, I left my apartment for the first time in two weeks.

I’d been sick with the flu, but honestly, that wasn’t the real illness. The real problem was that I’d spent the better part of a month drinking mezcal like it was medicine and trying not to think about all the ways heartbreak rearranges a person. By then, my apartment smelled faintly of eucalyptus, takeout containers, and self-destruction. It was 6 p.m., that strange hour when summer light starts turning gold and heavy. I remember staring at the ceiling and thinking: you have to become a person again eventually.

So I changed out of one set of pajamas and into another, stepped into a pair of ballet flats that had long since given up on supporting me, and walked down Montrose toward Beyond Natural Market looking like a woman recently exhumed. I was half-listening to my mother on the phone when I saw him.

The French guy.

The one I’d started seeing because I thought maybe he could distract me from my ex. Or help me get over him. Instead, he’d become his own separate problem — another man capable of making me feel insane in slightly more sophisticated ways.

He was sitting outside a bar a block from my apartment with another girl.

I don’t even remember what she looked like exactly — only that she seemed light in a way I no longer felt. Laughing easily. Leaning forward. Entirely unaware that she’d been cast as a minor character in the psychological collapse of a stranger.

I stopped walking so abruptly I almost lost my balance. Then I did what any emotionally stable woman would do: hung up on my mother mid-sentence, crouched behind a parked car, and called Emma.

There are some friends you call for advice. Emma was the kind you call when your life turns cinematic against your will.

Five minutes later she was in a cab heading to Williamsburg and I was back in my apartment trying to pull myself together fast enough to pretend I still had dignity. I showered, threw on a sheer cashmere dress, rubbed concealer under my eyes, reapplied lipstick with shaky hands. The whole thing felt humiliating immediately, but not going felt worse.

We walked into the bar pretending we hadn’t come for exactly one reason.

Ordered mezcal. Sat too casually. Acted like girls who had somewhere better to be after this.

Then he saw me.

I watched his face change instantly. That tiny moment of panic people can’t hide no matter how composed they think they are. He stood up too fast, came over smiling, kissing me hello like this was all perfectly normal.

“You look amazing,” he kept saying.

Over and over.

Like if he said it enough times maybe it would blur the reality of what was happening.

He introduced me to the girl, who looked deeply uncomfortable in the way only innocent bystanders in someone else’s emotional mess can look. Then he told me he’d text me later.

Which somehow felt worse than if he’d said nothing at all.

Emma and I made it around the corner before we started laughing. Not real laughter. The kind that comes out sharp and exhausted when something hurts too much to process in real time.

We stayed out for a few more drinks, and somewhere in the middle of me talking too loudly and pretending to be detached, the feeling hit me again. Not jealousy exactly. Just emptiness.

Because the truth was, none of this was really about him.

He was just the latest person I’d handed my self-worth to while trying not to feel the damage my ex left behind. And the worst part was knowing I could see the pattern while still participating in it. Going for men who felt unavailable enough to keep me anxious but interested. Men who blurred sincerity and performance so completely you started questioning your own instincts.

By the time I got on the L train, I felt completely hollowed out.

I cried quietly the whole ride home Not because I wanted either of them back. I didn’t. It was more the realization that somewhere along the way, I had stopped liking myself very much.

Stopped trusting myself too.

The next morning, I woke up weirdly clear-headed. No fever. No hangover. Just this cold sort of awareness.

I got dressed and went to work. Helped women into wedding gowns. Smiled. Took photos. Posted things online that made my life look softer and prettier than it felt. Everyone around me seemed to be performing some polished version of happiness — relationships, engagement rings, carefully curated love stories — while I felt like I was standing just outside of it all, watching it happen through glass.

And I think that was the first time I realized heartbreak isn’t always about losing another person.

Sometimes it’s realizing how much of yourself you abandoned trying to be loved correctly by the wrong people.

directed by no one

I woke up at 3 a.m. from a dream that felt like a visitation.
You told me you loved me. Said the last time you said it, you meant it. Said the love hadn’t gone anywhere, it just got quiet.
You said you left because you were afraid.
But it was love.
I woke up. 3:00 a.m. on the dot. I stared at the ceiling for what felt like an hour, maybe more.

That day, I was supposed to see the guy I went out with earlier this year. The one who disappeared to Germany without saying goodbye.
He bailed. Said he was seeing a friend instead.
I didn’t respond.

So I stayed in the studio and worked. Lost myself in it, because that’s the only way I know how to make a day feel like it mattered.
By the time I looked up, it was 9 p.m. I hadn’t eaten. My phone was dying. I’d hardly spoken to anyone all day.

I got on the train headed home. Realized two stops in I was going the wrong direction. Downtown. Eventually ended up on the Upper East Side. No charger. No food.
I walked to the grocery store. It had closed five minutes before I got there.

On 83rd and Lex, a doorman looked at me and said,
“You look so divine. I hope your night is as beautiful as you are.”
His voice had that old New York edge…tired but sincere.
I nodded.
I thanked him. Kept walking.
Lightning cracked above me.
“Even God agrees,” he said.
I didn’t answer, but I looked over my shoulder and smiled at him. Just for a second.
I bet I looked unreal from the doormans point of view at that moment. Clean. Composed. Still untouched by the storm. White tank, flowy skirt, bare shoulders under a sky about to open. For a moment, that interaction pulled me out of it.
But I only ever think about myself and you.
So of course, I thought about how easily you would’ve melted if you’d seen me just then.

I kept walking. I’d decided on matzah ball soup from Gracie’s. A walk. The rain started somewhere near 3rd Avenue. First a mist, then a storm.

I was wearing $1200 heels, a wool mini skirt, no umbrella, white tank top, no bra. A designer bag worth more than the rent I still hadn’t paid (and it was already the 3nd).
I ran.

Gracie’s was packed. Everyone turned to stare as I walked in soaking wet, mascara probably halfway down my cheeks.
I sat at the counter. Ordered the soup. Looked at myself in the mirror.
The tank top was see-through. Fully. The man behind the counter gave me an extra soup for free. I wonder why… 

I walked home, still soaked, carrying the soup like it was medicine.
Every guy on Second Avenue saw my tits.
I didn’t care. I just wanted to eat and sleep.

I showered when I got home. Cried in the water.
Not the desperate kind. The kind that just leaks out of you when there’s no room left inside.

I got in bed with my soup and turned on The Sopranos.
No one texted. My phone barely turned on.

I checked the photo I’d posted earlier. The one from before all this.
Only a few people had liked it.
But my phone glitched, and only one name showed up.
Yours.