South to Brooklyn.

Riding the A train downtown, I think, not much more of this. Today I will pull the money from the bank, today I will sign a lease, and in ten days I will move to Brooklyn. No more frustration at looking up in hopes of seeing  the 125^th street  station, only to be greeted by the yellow stripes of 145^th. No more inching past 135^th. No more gypsy cab drivers who stand at the mouth of subway offering rides and sidelong glances that distill my womanhood to nothing more than curves and cutouts. No more nine-flight escalators stuck behind the person too lazy or too tired or too indignant to walk down. No more of the slow and silent panic that waiting for the A train in the bunker that is 181 elicits.

And no more of the crowded elevator up to the street when riding the 1 train late at night. No more listening as men speak in a langue they wrongly assume I cannot understand.

I have lived in Manhattan for eight years now. It is a number that both alarms and amazes. Eight years.

In ten days this will change. In ten days I will fill a truck with only the furniture that will fit into a small studio apartment and I will hurtle south. To Brooklyn. The southerner in me appreciates this. Victory by degrees.

It is a quiet place—quieter, at least, abundant in trees and coffee shops, and I am undoubtedly, indubitably, indefatigably in love.

With the beer garden across the street and the Catholic church around the corner and the small restaurant that upon entering my father declared like a small pub in London.

I’ve spent eight years in New York searching for a home. Not just searching for the place, but the meaning of the thing. The meaning of the thing at this in between phase in my life when home is not the people that I’m with—no parents, no husband, no children—because it’s just me. For the time being, it’s just me. And home is…

Undefined. Or unanswerable. Or undiscovered. As of yet.

I don’t know if Brooklyn will feel like home any more than any place before it: 66^th Street, 104^th, 80^th, Washington Heights. But the word of the place—the word of the little pocket I’ve fallen in love with—the word of the neighborhood I’ll soon call my own—I’m pretty sure it’s my word.

And that’s something. 

on the things they don't teach you in school

at the age of twenty-one a famous american playwright with wide, strong hands will cup the back of your neck and in that instant illuminate sex as the space between absolute control and weak knees. let him.

and then at twenty-six when a man pushes your hair behind your ear for the first time in your life, enjoy it.

as you grow and mature the things you once valued will change and fall away. but they'll make perfect sense to the eight-year-old-version-of-yourself. and that's just as it should be.

 

as it turns out, semantics is important. words have meaning. and slight shifts and small subtleties between the things do make a difference.

 

don't trust anyone who doesn't know the meaning of doppelganger. or ellipses.

 

one day you'll live in a neighborhood where a man walks around with a cockatoo on his shoulder and a woman on the local train eats a payday candy bar by pulling the large peanuts from her mouth and flicking them beneath her train seat. you'll wonder why she bothered to buy a payday? why not a snickers or three musketeers? this will be an appropriate question.

one day you'll lose your favorite earring to the crevice of a man's couch. it'll be worth it.

you'll find that water and trees and mountains and sand will satisfy you in a way that concrete sidewalks never will. and that's okay. there is a time and a place for both.

you'll wake one morning, a product of all you've seen and done and known and you'll find yourself restored. childlike wonder in tact. the courage of your young self in tow. the deep-rooted belief in the beauty of all that's to come. and you'll continue on. because it's from there that you begin.

photo by Emma Hartvig

snow and a word

i look around me and i see where friends have paired off. long relationships, some leading to marriage. children entering the fray. successes becoming more frequent, more exciting.

and i feel...less than.

so much less than.

i'm twenty-six trying to find an apartment to live alone in for the first time in my life. less than.

a set of keys. belonging to me. to use when walking through a door, into a space, that will be mine. for a time. no one's mess but my own, no one else's nutella on the shelf tempting me, a culture for living that i dictate. no shuffle-step around other people's values or wants and needs. no toilet seat left up. no wondering which of the many shampoo bottles is mine, or which head of lettuce is mine, or how the electric bill got so high. less unknown. more comfort.

but still. less than. 

no committed relationship. no dream job. still the nagging question of what-the-hell-am-i-doing-with-my-life. 

last night i snuck away from a table of my dearest friends to use the bathroom. and as i stood there, letting the water wash over my hands, taking long and deep breaths, there came a thought: it will come in an avalanche. it'll come with such force and ferocity that you best get your survival kit ready. 

sometimes life is like that. isn't it? even the success has the potential to knock your legs out from under you and send you tumbling down the mountain.

faith.

imagination.

i can't imagine it getting better. i can't imagine feeling a love returned. or working and making money at the very things i've wanted all my life to do. i can't imagine a family in front of me. or an apartment i'll share with people i'd trek to the ends of the earth for. i suppose as you get older life gives you evidence that these things happen and that patience and small, slow steps do pay off. but in the blindness of youth i am thrashing.

i'm still just trying to find my word.

remember that great passage in eat, pray, love?

"Every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most people who live there. If you could read people's thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thought. Whatever the majority thought might be--that is the word of the city. And if your personal word does not match the word of the city, then you don't really belong there."

i had to go back to the book to look up what new york's word was. i knew it began with the letter a, but i kept coming back to greed. so avarice, then? it's actually achievement. which i think i can get behind. but in the heart of the city i think that achievement is laced on every level with a hefty dose of avarice, and that stops me short in my tracks.

there is a moment when you realize everything you ever wanted is nothing you want now. less than.

which is not entirely true, of course, you want much of the same things, but holy hell if it hasn't shifted and changed and totally turned on its head.

i don't like manhattan. i really don't. i don't like that the amount of advertisements i see in any given day is more than some people see in their life. i don't like the hustle and bustle and fast-paced rushing to some place else. always some place else. i don't like the only way to get to the A train from where i now live is to walk past a corner of men who make me feel small by the way their eyes follow and peel. and so okay, it's cultural, maybe. but why does their culture get to supersede mine? and why is new york small enough that you always run into people you don't want to see, but big enough that even when you walk several blocks out of your way you never see the people you most want to.

there are parts of this city that i adore. the west village, bits of the lower east side, tribeca right up against the water there--but these are the parts are less densely populated. where life moves with more ease. they are the corners and cracks where achievement is laced with something altogether else: peace, family, and a thing i've yet to name--something centered and whole. these, of course, are the parts of the city that i can't afford. and so the achievement i need now is laced with the need for money.

money. less than.  it'll come in an avalanche.  it just feels so darn far away. and my faith in that future, in that hefty proclamation wanes.

i want to be more than. or just enough. i want to make those i love proud, i want to live in a place where the word is my own. balance. i'm pretty sure my word is balance. ironic, since i'm a libra.

time to make it snow.

on learning to say shut up

growing up, shut-up was not allowed in our house. with good reason. it's a powerful little phrase. it packs a punch. and there wasn't a place for it in our home.

it's an expression that's overused. taken too lightly. made casual by how commonly it's tossed out.

but it's got some claws that one.

i can be far too judgmental. it's one of my worst traits. absolutely not something i'm proud of.

i'm judgmental of myself, of others (equal opportunist here), i make assumptions and take things too personally. and then, adding insult to injury, i rarely say what needs to be said, when it needs to be said.

but i'm working on it. and sometimes, shut up, as it turns out, is a great place to start.

i found myself in a situation recently with someone i barely knew and the conversation moved swiftly from global warming to scientific research to antidepressants.

ah antidepressants. why would anyone take them when they're known to increase the risk of suicidal thoughts? he asked.

a perfectly valid question. mostly posed by those who've never been in the grips of a knock-out-drag-down fight with the disease.

the thing is, that question is not terribly well informed. it's one-dimensional in nature. there are so many questions that can and must be asked. and that one is just the start. and to begin and end there is too miss the point entirely.

perhaps it was the way he asked it that pissed me off. perhaps it was his judgement that really drove me nuts. perhaps it was that after asking the question he just kept talking, with none of what he said grounded in experience.

here's the whole of my philosophy on depression: unless you've ever suffered from it, you don't get to judge those who have. unless you've gone to the mouth of the thing and managed to gather up your mangled limbs and trek back out, then shut up. because you haven't a clue. unless you've watched, helpless, as someone you've loved has lost the fight or lost years of their life to it, you do not get to stand on the sidelines and pass a judgment. and you certainly don't have the right to give voice to that judgement. so again. shut. the hell. up. because, with all due respect, you sound like an idiot.  so is my stance on love. and relationships. no love story (throughout the entire human history!) has ever repeated. yes, similarities abound, absolutely. but my love story does not, nor cannot compare to yours. but because we all have experience with love, we assume we know. and so we judge. from the outside, we judge and we assume. he's all wrong for her, one of them must be cheating, and on and on the wheel does turn. but we are not there when two people fall into bed at night, nor are we there in the morning when a small pulse passes between two hands, a signal to begin the day. we are not there. and because we are not there, on the inside of the thing, we do not get to judge.

so we best just shut up (and trust me, i include myself in this).

the love stories that have colored my life have been mostly private. i keep them as such because in my experience people attempt to make small what i hold to be most dear, most true. well i've been in love, so i know. well i have more experience, so i get to say. 

you do know? how do you know? you do have more experience? how do you know you have more experience? is it that your love stories have followed a more traditional course that you're entitled to sit there on your high horse and pass a judgement?

shut. up. 

listening is a powerful thing. and there is certainly a place for silence.

moving on. growing up. and the confidence to say it.

i'll miss the corner cafe. the short trek to it. just one half of a block. the lattes that have become both ritual and story. i'll miss hector poking his head out from the kitchen to say hello in spanish. the granite bar and tiled floor, the ever-changing art adorning the walls. the quiet familiarity of the place.

i'll miss the wine store across the street. the one so large it feels out of place in manhattan. painted in colors that bring to mind the open air, mountains, and a drier climate.

i'll miss the way the light plays off the red-bricked building across the way. the building that each saturday men and boys enter into, through an unmarked door on the first floor. i'll miss the curiosity that parade elicits.

i'll miss the river. especially on those days it's so quiet and still, the air so clear, that i feel i can reach my thumb and forefinger to the opposing bank and drag it towards me. tangible. i'll miss the way the spring air angles against the bluffs, and the trees reborn, swaddled in green.

to be honest though, i've mostly stopped noticing it. the water. the green. the very thing i first fell in love with--i've mostly stopped seeing it. i didn't mean for that to happen. it just did.

surely i'll miss the eccentricities of this very small and very specific corner of manhattan--washington heights, hudson heights. so close to water, right up against no longer used train tracks. i'll feel nostalgic for this suspended moment in time in which i stumbled into womanhood.

but it's not enough. those things i love are simply not enough anymore.

no one tells you that one of the joys of getting older is the confidence in that phrase: not. good. enough.

you know yourself better, priorities come into focus, and lies are easier to unearth.

you learn, with grace, to let some things go: friendships that were more a product of youth and need than anything else. men who diminish your worth and underestimate your intelligence.

you care less about satisfying everyone--being thought of as kind. you invest far less time in pretense because time is in fact a commodity and so you give it to those you love--your friends and your family and yourself. and you stop apologizing for that. you make decisions. and you move on. and you let go when need be.

and where need be. corners and cafes and shared apartments.

growing up, it turns out, has its perks.