A junkie was screaming outside my apartment the day New York State stopped me from buying vape juice online. I was surprised. Not by the screaming, of course. I’d lived in New York for two months by that point, and the racket had started almost immediately, when we were unpacking our lives out of cardboard boxes to a soundtrack of a man screaming “Faggot” outside of our window. My husband and I were surprised that someone had clocked us from outside the building (even though we were wearing tank tops), but apparently it was just some kind of bum fight. It went on for nearly an hour. The State of New York hadn’t stopped that. Nor had it stopped my husband from buying weed gummies online the week earlier. So I was surprised when the State of New York stopped me, a law-abiding taxpayer, from getting my perfectly legal nicotine fix online—something I’d done in Florida for years.
I’m a social democrat who campaigned for Bernie Sanders. You might think I’d feel more at home in a blue state like New York than in the Southern red states I lived in for my entire life until seven months ago. But I don’t. I hate it here—and I want to go back.
