It must be hard to have a baby

with an insipid man-child who

while still being the best boyfriend of all your friends’ boyfriends

is a bad lover and dad. Oh Miranda—

it must be hard to have a baby and an insipid man-child

boyfriend and a law career, which is why I always thought I would be Carrie

even though she is a bitch on the show and in real life

even though she only ever wears $1,500 shoes and dates

badly, even though her boyfriend is probably named after the size

of his penis I thought I would be her—

it must be hard. But now that I’m older

Sex And The City is a very old dog that has been taken

to the vet and put, gently, to sleep

and is remembered fondly, like this cat whose picture and dates of birth and

death are displayed in a frame in a front window I walk past sometimes

but instead it’s marathons of episodes and when you watch them

you realise that nobody really cared about representational politics

on television in the late 90s, not even in New York and you,

if you are me, also realise

that maybe you are not Carrie

or even Samantha, who doesn’t love anybody and beat cancer

and worked at a Dairy Queen once

when she was a teenager even though all her friends came from money—no

you realise that you are Charlotte

or perhaps aspire to be Charlotte

who married her divorce lawyer and adopted a baby

and who lives on Park Avenue, and the only thing she wants from life

is a nice set of plates from which to eat her Chinese takeout