In my early twenties, the first time I moved to the city, I worked as a temp in a Midtown office building, passing my days in a grim cubicle, on a floor without windows, running database searches on high-asset clients to make sure they didn’t have criminal records. At the holiday party I got sloppy drunk on cheap wine and asked everyone if the rumor was true, that we didn’t have any windows because a temp in Miami had jumped from one. Sometimes on my lunch breaks, I’d go to MoMA, just for twenty minutes, just to stand in front of a Seurat painting of the ocean and the sky at twilight. It helped me remember the size of the world—his horizon full of shimmering dust, those tiny points of paint. Those twenty minutes of beauty felt more important than all the hours around them, but they also made me crave a life whose ordinary hours I wasn’t running away from. That life wasn’t something I felt entitled to. It was just something I wanted.