Work Text:
Every piece of media on the fucking screen involves New York. It’s on every underground advert for the next big Marvel film to come out in the cinema (she’s well sick of Marvel, and she’d be better off getting over that because they’re never going to stop milking this cash cow, but letting things go is not her style). It’s in the never ending repeats of episodes of fucking Friends on Comedy Central, which she’s watching again even though watching it alone makes her feel like shit. It’s Facebook photos of various uni friends, whose one common feature is apparently an obsession with visiting the USA and specifically New York during their fucking post-uni summer holidays. Middle-class cunts, the lot of them.
Most of all, it’s in all of Emily’s Facebook photos: the group pictures with aforementioned silly cunts in Times Square, the portraits of people Naomi’s never met, the selfies Emily takes for Naomi’s benefit late at night and early in the morning and in between. New York is in Emily’s contact picture (Naomi had to change it from one of the two of them, because Em just looked so cute despite the 3,459 miles between them). New York is in the background of the grainy Skype video as Emily tells her what she’s been up to all day… in the screenshots she snaps just for herself as Emily stretches her arms over her head and gets a little closer to the screen and smirks, Jesus.
At first, Emily took photos of yellow cabs, grey skyscrapers, Broadway lights. Typical tourist stuff. She uploaded them all, even though they weren’t art by a long shot. But Naomi loved them, still does. She can imagine the frustration of watching Emily take those pictures rather than just focusing on the moment, and she knows exactly how she’d tease her relentlessly for it until she’d stop and kiss her to shut her up.
As the weeks turned over, Emily uploaded fewer pictures, and when she did they were of things Naomi hadn’t seen before. Pizza places and diners, slightly obscure filming locations, the ocean—or is it the river? Could be both. Whatever. She doesn’t ask on fucking principle, because she’s sick of New York, and she definitely didn’t take it in if Em ever tried to explain where exactly the Hudson is, which she almost certainly has. She knows what Naomi’s asking even when Naomi can barely admit things to herself.
Even before Emily got the internship Naomi knew too much about New York, a city she doesn’t live in and had never intended to visit. Now… now, she finds herself hating to admit that each photo Emily takes is more artistic than the last, whatever that fucking means, because the lack of shitty filters and unintentional blur and automatic light balance makes it all feel less like something Emily can really share with her. She finds herself looking at Emily’s address on Google Street View instead, imagines herself kissing Em on the pavement after work (not the sidewalk, fucking hell), before they head out to explore the gay nightlife together. Imagines this other life where she still cares about things other than Emily, so they both have internships.
Since it’s a fantasy she imagines herself working in the Mayor’s office, driven scatty by the fact that the American political system is just as fucked up as the British one but for different reasons. She’d buy takeout coffee for two from the hipster’s favourite love-to-hate corporation, Starbucks, because she wouldn’t care about that sort of shit. She’d overtip to the extreme because she’s loaded and she hasn’t quite fixed the minimum wage issues yet. But she will.
She doesn't fact-check where the city hall is or whether they take interns from the UK. Who cares? It’s her fucking fairytale. She’d book trans-Atlantic flights on a whim instead of rolling her eyes and closing the tab because it’s actually not a fucking lie that she feels deeply guilty about flying. Instead of trying to figure out bizarre routes or whether she can sleep on the airport floor in an effort to make even the cheapest flight affordable. Christ.
She’s not even that poor, comparatively. But it’s expensive to text overseas and at first, in June, it didn’t matter, but now it does. So she lingers on her laptop on the sofa, scrolling endlessly for things that she can post on Em’s timeline and pretending to read interesting things on the side, all the while hoping Emily will snatch some time on Facebook. She stays up late just so she’s there if Emily wants to send her a message, and she lies in bed longer than she should because Emily isn’t awake yet.
Jesus fucking Christ, she’s useless without Emily. She literally doesn’t have anything better to do. Every Facebook picture she sees makes her think it over and over again. And she hates that, yeah, hates herself for not being better. And she hates being long distance.
And most of all, she fucking hates New York.