In my mid-twenties, several nights a week, I would exit the 7 train at Bliss Street and begin the final stage of an interborough odyssey. I’d walk under the elevated train, down the plane-tree lined Bliss street, until a deadend, turn left, and then right, through an underpass for the LIRR and Amtrak lines, skirting along a snaking street leading me across the rail yards which sliced through the neighborhood, and passing a Korean megachurch constructed out of sheet metal, everything abandoned at night, the icy winter wind cutting through my thinning wool coat.

At the end of this journey, the artist collective where my painter girlfriend lived. A destination I was convinced was bliss. The top floor of a warehouse above a garage for an internet company’s trucks where you could forever hear the persistent beeping of their backup signals through the floor. Partitioned into a warren of rooms, a communal kitchen and living area, studios, and a gallery space with views out over the railyards to the Manhattan skyline.    

She was the first “real” girlfriend I had ever had. We had met in the fall of 2004, when I came to the collective to lead a bookbinding workshop as part of an art show she had helped organize. That fall, I still had a boyfriend. He was a mild-mannered anarchist punk who came to New York to study to be a librarian. He and I would spend Sunday mornings sitting in my compact, sunlight kitchen, reading the New York Times and drinking coffee after coffee. One morning as we politely rustled the paper and passed sections back and forth, I had a vision that this could be every Sunday for the rest of my life. I panicked. I was twenty-three and wanted excitement, a big romance.

K highlighted the possibility of a different future. After the book making workshop, I invited her to a cavernous Park Slope tea shop for an ambiguous date/not date. We talked for hours over cooling cups of Earl Grey until we could no longer ignore our hunger. I fed her dinner at my apartment, and over reheated vegan pasta I admitted I still had a boyfriend. Later, she told me the meal had given her indigestion.

 We officially got together on New Year’s Day, 2005, just before my last semester of college. The day was mild for the first day of January, and the spring-like breezes leant me a sense of bold possibility. I rode my one-speed bicycle from my apartment in deep South Brooklyn, where the streets followed orderly grids: Numbered avenues running North and South, streets running East to West. Navigable without a map. But biking that far to Queens felt like unchartered territory. Before heading out, I unfolded the New York City bike map out on my stainless steel kitchen table, tracing the route from one conflicting grid to another until I found a way to the strange street through the railyards.

When I arrived I knew exactly what I was after, but was surprised I had willed myself there. I was worried I wouldn’t follow through on what I wanted. That afternoon, we sat in her lofted bedroom above the collective’s kitchen, almost touching, anticipation crackling between us. The ceiling was low enough that at five-foot-three I had to stoop slightly, but she was shorter than me and fit in the room comfortably. I could hear various housemates shuffling around below us, fabric curtains on the windows that overlooked the kitchen our only privacy. They opened the fridge, scraped mismatched chairs away from the farmhouse table, and a visiting French woman talked about how she’d felt compelled to go to Times Square to take video of the crowds there to see the ball drop. Finally, when the hour stretched late enough, K offered to drive me home in her faded blue Honda civic hatchback. Breathlessly, I leaned in for a kiss, stunning myself at my own daring recklessness. My lips on hers, I felt a puzzle piece fall into place.

“I always get half of what I want,” she announced bitterly several days after that kiss. She received deferred admission to Hunter College’s studio art MFA program. I declared I wasn’t yet ready to let go of my boyfriend, but could have an “open relationship.”

I had wanted validation of my own queer sexuality for so long and was desperate for outward recognition of who I knew myself to be. I identified as queer. I hung out with other queer people. I edited a queer feminist art zine with my friends, but without reciprocated romantic interest from another queer person, part of me felt like I was hovering on the periphery, playacting. In her I saw the answer to who I was. Just before Valentine’s Day I let go of my boyfriend, but she was still suspicious of me. I turned my attention towards her, wanting to prove I was all in on being queer and all in on her.

“I want to spend the rest of my life with K,” I declared to a friend on a sunny spring afternoon while we ate $2 falafels between classes, perched on the side of the dry fountain in Washington Square Park. Unlike I’d felt with my boyfriend, this forever felt electric. Forever, forever, forever I repeated to myself like a spell as I walked back to class. 

Those early memories feel gauzy, like a dream whose memory is in danger of vaporizing if I think about it too hard. Under the bright green of fresh spring leaves she drove us to Bard College, her alma mater, to see an art show by her mentor. We blasted burned CDs of Ted Leo albums on her tinny car stereo, him incanting over and over “It’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright.” We saw Sonic Youth in a tiny, improbable club on the top of her Long Island City gym. We watched the sunset from the elevated Home Depot parking lot a few blocks away from the collective’s warehouse. One summer night she set up a tent on the large, flat roof that extended out from the kitchen, a makeshift urban tarpaper lawn floating over the railyards. We went to sleep watching the lights from Manhattan twinkle and I woke up limbs twisted and sweaty, the early morning sun searing the black roof.  

There were days when I couldn’t believe this wondrous creature was interested in me. She made me complicated gifts: A tiny handmade box filled with miniature paintings and an art book that was a tribute to me. Who was I to her? A fascinating bisexual, book-making bicyclist? Could I also be a wondrous creature? Did I deserve to be?

With her I felt sparkling, expansive, and unambiguously queer. I felt that the important life filled with art and artists that I craved was in reach. That she was already living it and I just had to fit in and her world would become mine. I invoked the idea of her as my forever person to ward off any doubt, in her mind and mine, that the future could be any different.

That fall she moved out of the kitchen loft and into one of the inner rooms of the collective. It was a windowless cave, midnight at all hours of the day. Without natural light to wake me up I wanted to sleep endlessly. I started a job as a museum educator at the Brooklyn Museum and on nights I slept over it took me two hours and four trains to get to work.

“I’m in a long distance relationship!” I joked to my friends.

Like my relationship with K, my new job gave me purpose, a shape to my dreams, and showed me a path to living a creative life. In it, I saw a future version of myself I wanted. But so many days I was exhausted from shepherding small children around priceless works of art and the long commute to her. Most nights after work I just wanted to read, disappearing into the diaries of Anais Nin. I was determined to read them in their entirety, hoping to find a blueprint for a romantic, creative life.

“Why do you give so much energy to your job!” K demanded. “When you’re here I want you to be present!”

“Can’t we just be quiet together?” I shot back.

One Saturday morning I met two high school friends for brunch in Greenpoint. Before we’d even sat down my phone started to buzz with text after text. It was K and she was having a panic attack. I hurried through our meal and scurried away as soon as we paid, rushing up to the fringes of Long Island City to find her curled in the corner of her bed, hyperventilating.

I started to do the math. When I met up with my art zine friends, panic attack. When we were at my parent’s house for Thanksgiving and I went to play Scrabble with my sister, panic attack. After work happy hour and $5 beers with my coworkers? Panic attack.

Her burning fascination began to look like something else: Possession.

Bliss Street felt like a dead end.

I retreated. I disassociated when we were together. When we made out, I closed my eyes and counted to 100, wanting the moment to pass, hoping I gave enough to satisfy her. On New Years 2006 I lied and said I was staying in and then went to a friend’s house to make dumplings. I finally broke up with her barely a year after we’d first kissed. I left her curled on her bed in the permanent night of her windowless room.

Leaving the warehouse, I let the winter air crackle into my lungs. On my headphones, Ladytron’s “Destroy Everything You Touch,” a CD that had been K’s gift to me that Christmas. As soon as I had opened the wrapping paper I knew: She had given me the soundtrack to our breakup.

“I feel like I’m walking away from a burning building,” I texted a friend, my bare hands shaking on the empty street in the January night.

The warehouse is gone now, bulldozed to make more room for the Long Island Railroad. Just a weed filled lot remains. A two-story Food Bazaar, seemingly constructed of cinderblocks, stands next door, a new H Mart nearby. The Home Depot is still there, along with the hulking sheetmetal Korean Presbyterian Church.

The warehouse was marooned between neighborhoods, an island all to itself, exactly how the relationship felt at the end.

Bliss Street wasn’t named for the feeling of ecstasy and joyful oblivion that I so badly wanted to find there. Instead, it was named for Neziah Bliss, a ship builder and property developer who owned much of the land around Newtown Creek in the mid-1800s. Before colonization by the Dutch and English, one of the Lenape names for the creek was mech-pe-is~it or “bad-water place.” Once a brackish tidal estuary filled with fish and oysters, industrialists and developers like Bliss turned it into one of the most polluted waterways in the United States.

Bliss played a key role in the development of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He also created ”Blissville,” a small village on the Queens side of the creek, squeezed against the new-at-the-time Calvary Cemetery. Bliss built a drawbridge to extend Greenpoint Avenue and shuttle people over Newtown Creek to the cemetery and to Blissville. K and I would cross the descendent of that bridge, in full view of the wastewater treatment plant, on the long, meandering, traffic choked drive between the artist collective and my apartment.

Blissville is gone too, folded into Long Island City, the residential blocks squeezed by heavy industry and the expanding cemetery. The Queens streets were renamed in the early 1900s, names and histories dissolved into a tangled and often contradictory nest of numbers.

I still have difficulty understanding how the streets of Queens connect, but my mental and emotional map of the borough has expanded since those lonely walks down Bliss street, and my smartphone has rendered the borough nearly navigable.

I understand K’s constant anger at me now as the clash of our creative ambitions. When you want a creative life so badly, you want to have already fully arrived. You want others to see your work as a way of fully seeing you. K and I recognized this ambition in each other, but we couldn’t see each other fully – just how we wanted to see ourselves reflected back in the other. 

When I’m passing through on the Amtrak, I crane my neck as we emerge from the East River tunnel to catch a glimpse of the Presbyterian Church and the Home Depot. I squint and try to see the warehouse, even though I know it’s gone. Space subsumed to memory.

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Eleanor Whitney is a writer, educator, and musician based in California’s high desert. She is the author of four books of nonfiction, including Riot Woman, a celebratory but critical look at the Riot Grrrl movement, and Promote Your Book, a guide to book marketing. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from CUNY Queens College and is currently the Promotions Editor at MAYDAY magazine.