The Last Phone Booth in Manhattan

by Beth Merlin

And remember, no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused.”

I checked to see how many people caught the embarrassing spectacle, but as usual, the city bustled around me without even the slightest display of interest.

My father used to say rock bottom will teach you the lessons the mountaintops never could.

I questioned the loss of so many things: my home, my relationship, my career, but most of all, myself.

I blended into the crowd of tourists and commuters and let myself be carried along with them down the packed sidewalks, appreciating the shops, sights, and smells.

If I could be that foolish once, was it out of the realm of possibility to think I could be that oblivious again?

It was refreshing to talk with someone who really understood how the desire to create lived like a supercharged layer just beneath your skin.

“Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions,”

she was confident and sometimes brash. She told it like it was and never made apologies, honest and loyal almost to a fault.

a tattoo of a Tolstoy quote she’d recently gotten across her back that read, “Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is a great matter.”

Sometimes you don’t realize the weight of what you’ve been carrying until you finally lay it down.

That’s the thing—the thing people don’t talk about enough. How it’s possible to love someone and want everything good for that person, but despite that, also know it still isn’t meant to be.”

On May 23, 2022, the last phone booth in New York City was removed from its post on Seventh Avenue and West Fiftieth Street, just south of Times Square, and moved to the Museum of the City of New York.