I’ll say it was five years, but it wasn’t really. Four years, ten and a half months. Is that all?
On August 15, 2003, I climbed into a rented van with all my worldly possesssions - mostly clothes, some books and a futon made from leftover mill pulp - and drove 339 miles southwest, to a room in an apartment on the fifth floor of a building on 122nd Street in Manhattan. I was maybe the greenest thing that ever was. For years I’d been squirreled away in my corner of Maine, with a brief interlude in the woods of western Massachusetts, where I worked as an electrician’s assistant and spent most of my time thinking about cables and wires. I’m not entirely sure what prompted me to send an application to this graduate school in New York City, submitting a cobbled-together portfolio of repurposed zine articles and stories I’d written in margins during an exceptionally bad December in Chicago. I’m not entirely sure that it wasn’t a mistake, but the repurposed zine articles got me a ticket to New York, and although was a bloody expensive ticket, I didn’t have any idea how else I’d get there. I can’t undo what I did, and I don’t know what would have become of me if I hadn’t done it, anyway.
Not long after I arrived, while I was still carrying subway maps in my pocket, a well-meaning person said she hoped I’d never “end up in the trap, you know, writing the one about the small-town girl who moves to New York.” I promised I wouldn’t, and for the most part I’ve kept that promise (this doesn’t count). I think I’m exempt from the order now, since I’ve become the small-town girl who moved to New York and left.
(New York made me distrust well-meaning people, although I was always polite and thanked them for their advice.)
I went to New York with a set of ideas that were, I see now, based more on fantasies and Woody Allen movies than reality. It took me a long time to understand the reality of New York, and of the things I wanted to do and find there, and - well, if you do that, you wind up learning a lot more than you bargained for.
I went to New York to work my way down from 122nd Street to the Upper West Side proper, to attend parties laden with Authors and Wine and Erudite Conversation, to reshape myself into something more polished, more sophisticated, more literary, more sure, more knowing, more successful. I figured it’d take a month, maybe two. I’d wake up one day, brand new, with a shelf full of first-edition Nabokovs and a proper pair of shoes, which I would wear to participate in that night’s Erudite Conversation. I figured I’d wake up knowing how to pronounce ‘Nabokov.’ It’s not an easy thing to admit now, but the truth is I was ready and willing to erase myself completely, to scrub all the dirt from my skin and let the city have its way with me.
Which it did, of course, except it didn’t take me to the Upper West Side. It took me to Brooklyn. It only took me to a few parties laden with Authors and Wine and Erudite Conversation, and I couldn’t wait to leave. I never did buy any first-edition Nabokovs. I never did stop wearing sneakers, but I did stop wearing flannel shirts and men’s pants from the Goodwill, so I suppose that’s progress.
I didn’t find what I was looking for in New York. There’s a grief that comes with that, especially as I type from 317 miles away. Did I miss my chance? Should I have done things differently? Should I have said no to that, yes to the other? You can spend hours, days, chewing these questions to no avail. And meanwhile the city spins on, its busy self, oblivious of your absence. There’s a grief that comes with that, too.
Perhaps the only answer is this: I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for, but I found something else. Perhaps it was the thing I needed to find.
* * *
I’m always afraid I’ll forget the details. Not important details like your name or the time we spent together, but smaller things like the particular smell of deli carnations at night and the feel of a metal MTA turnstile on my hip. I wanted to write some of these things down somewhere so I could hold on to them a bit longer, and I wanted to share them with you so you could keep them too, and then we’ll have something to remember together.
And, of course, there’s a soundtrack. There always is.