We are upstate at a giant reservoir in New York, and we have a motorboat. Calvin, after 18 years of cohabitation, has revealed himself to be an avid fisherman. It’s rainy but wonderful. We do not see or hear Maggie—except when we check the security footage—and her absence is glorious.

Not that she isn’t up to tricks. Yesterday she let her hose run full blast from 6 AM until 10 AM, when our cat sitter arrived and told us the basement was flooded. Thus we learned how to call the NYC 911 from afar and that our cat sitter is a beautiful human.

We have decided not to drive to western Colorado this summer but to go to Vermont and stay with my many-times-removed cousins for a few weeks. I told my mom yesterday. I may mute all the Paonia, Colorado, posts on Instagram for a while because the photos of Mt. Lamborn and Lands End pierce me with longing. Sometimes here, in this upstate New York damp foggy forest the smell of rain and pine needles hits and I remember the West Elk mountains above my home town. I will never accept these humid New York woods as an actual wild place. Humidity and wildness, for me, are incompatible.

My mom had a recurring question: who is Maggie? What does she look like? What is her story? I try not to take these queries personally because the subtext is, what on earth did you do to this woman so that she tortures you? I can be a highly combative, paranoid, defensive person but even my powers of unpleasantness are not enough to warrant what we are going through.

I know we need more information on Maggie and I have considered researching her through the various ways one can track someone else’s life via social media. But I’m resisting that impulse. I live inside her maddened brain for much of my waking hours anyway, and when, for example, her sister explained to me the Maggie-approved origin story of her first breakdown, it pissed me off. The story reeked of sentimental bullshit. I’ll tell it soon, but it feels untrue.

Mostly what I feel from Maggie is a sense of college cool. I felt it when we first met Maggie and her husband thirteen years ago and I feel it now through her Twitter and Instagram. She’s living in the late 1980s/early 1990s in her mind and that is how I connect to her.

The NYC college vibe: early 1990s edition

Maggie grew up in Connecticut. She came to New York City as an undergraduate at New York University (NYU, where she met her husband Ricky. Ricky was and probably is a talented guitarist and singer. He was in a band and that band achieved a local renown, according to Maggie. The band played with Laura Cantrell, a musician I vaguely heard of when I was an undergraduate at Columbia College.

Maggie is a few years older than I am, and we both came to NYC for college. In my college days I felt inferior and superior to NYU students, superior because Columbia was way harder to get into than NYU, and it was in the Ivy League, and inferior because they were more urban and had no campus and they lived downtown.

Undergraduate me was petrified of downtown New York. I have a fairly terrible sense of direction and at age 18, going downtown was like being dropped on the Mongolian steppes with no map. Where was the grid? Why did street names just vanish? Where was the 1/2/3 subway line? But those NYU students were just crawling around all over below 14th Street without a care in the world while I mastered the area of 116th Street to 110th Street.

The college music scene in NYC was particularly airless, full of moneyed white boys determined to play CBGBS and get a record deal ASAP. It was all about proximity and connections, with the golden ticket at Columbia being the son of Bill Graham, the guy who booked the Grateful Dead for years and years and years in San Francisco. The white boys weren’t wrong about Bill Graham’s son. Blues Traveler (lots of harmonica playing) and the Spin Doctors played at Delta Phi, a Columbia fraternity, and each had a few hits in the 90s. Without Bill Graham’s son that might not, perchance, have happened.

The flip side of that scene was KCR, the college radio station. I tried to penetrate that scene. I’d done shows on my town’s public radio station (KVNF) and after two years in boarding school, I thought I had very sophisticated taste in music. I liked Hot Tuna (but not the name) and Taj Mahal and Jimmy Cliff and Bob Dylan! I had heart! I had depth! I had confidence I would be warmly greeted by KCR.

It was a rude awakening when KCR was not interested, unless I wanted to intern in the middle of the night on shows of music I’d never heard of. Everything, I was beginning to understand, was competitive in NYC, and whereas only sports, skiing, and being pretty was competitive in Colorado.

The lovely thing was I realized I didn’t care about cool music, a learning that I’ve held on fast to for the rest of my life.

But Maggie and her then boyfriend were cool music people, and I have just run out of steam.

She was a cool person who married another cool person and then cracked up, got mean and is now alone, and boy is she pissed.