Over a dozen years later, I’d played plenty of Manhattan characters. The 20-year-old student sitting on the Columbia steps, The Decameron open on her lap, not so much reading as enviously watching the couples surrounding her — the ones who looked so in love and comfortable in their own skins. I had been the 22-year-old post-grad teetering on the edge of an almost-disaster, glancing at her reflection in the window of the 1 train after a night of partying and realising there was blood trickling from her nose onto her white tank top. I'd been the 26-year-old sitting on the fire escape of an Upper East Side studio at midnight after a date, pretending I was Holly Golightly and that my life of parties and dates and occasionally waking up looking at a stranger’s ceiling was madcap and magical, not kind of depressing. I'd been the 28-year-old holding hands with strangers in a basement on Bank Street, hungover and shaky-sick, wondering what I could possibly have in common with the people surrounding me who were reciting The Lord’s Prayer, but desperate enough to find out. I'd been the 29-year-old senior editor, jaded and harsh and mastering the art of the two-second critical gaze in the corporate elevator before entering the offices, grabbing a green BluePrint Cleanse bottle from the communal refrigerator and Instagramming pictures of my view of the park from the 38th floor — as if to prove to myself that this was, in fact, what I’d always wanted.