August and Wonder
Fifteen years ago, I moved to New York. The joke in my family was that I’d been packed for college since the sixth grade, and there was indeed an ease with which I was ready to move away. My bedroom in my parents’ house was decorated with sunflower wallpaper, which I’d covered with pictures of Sailor Moon and other anime. The computer and printer only printed pictures as a fat square, so some of the characters were out of proportion, squashed, but still, I tiled my room with them, my best fantasy. Before I left, I took down every picture, every poster, using my fingernails to knick the yellowed scotch tape from the wall when it got stuck. I sorted all of my things into three piles: what I was taking with me, what I wanted to keep, and what I wanted to throw away.
I was eighteen. It was the last time I’d really live at home.
I remember one of the last goodbyes I had was with Angela Giaccini, the girl I’d kissed the year before. Once, when our high school was selling daffodils for some kind of fundraiser, she’d bought me one, and presented it to me in a crowded hallway, beaming. It was the first time, but not the last time, that I’d let someone down. I panicked, overwhelmed with wanting someone privately but not yet publicly, swirling with an imposed shame. We fizzled into an awkward place until there, in late August 2001, before I moved to New York. She came over and sat in my bedroom and watched me fold t-shirts from a laundry basket, pressing them into my overstuffed suitcase. We both sat on the floor, on the boring brown carpet, where a melted jolly rancher had gotten stuck under my bed during my 16th birthday party.
“New York is so big,” she said. “I don’t know if I could do it.”
Many people said this. I’d been to New York exactly three times: once with my family, once on a school trip, and once with my mother on a college tour where I pitched a fit and stalked away from her in the West Village, leaving her to worry and complete the tour by herself. I was terrible, but above all, I was ready to move away from home. It was not so much that I loved New York as I loved the idea of going somewhere as big and loud and powerful and cultured and queer and glittering as I possibly could. Angela and I later went to her sister's apartment to watch zombie movies, and when it was late, we hugged goodbye, holding on a few moments more than either of us expected to. I drove my mother's car home with the windows down, the muggy August air thick, the sound of crickets ever present when I rolled to a stop. It was the night before I left. Every August, I think about her, paused at a dark intersection in Pennsylvania, listening to the night, ready, so ready to leave.
I defined New York as everything I wanted: throngs of people, music in the streets, blinking traffic lights, exponential freedom to walk anywhere, do anything. Over the years, I’d catalog what I loved most about the city: the time I discovered a discarded Manolo Blahnik shoes in my size in the 14th Street Subway station during fashion week. The time I danced on stage with Arcade Fire in a gilt concert hall and later found photo of the event in New York magazine. The dozens of rooftops I’d gone on top of to watch the city, to kiss girls, to see friends, to dance. And after fifteen years, how easy it was to bump into friends on the street, in the subway, at the movies, like New York was a terrific village where I belonged.
On Friday, my friend Kenda and I climbed to the roof of my apartment building to watch the sunset. The ladder is so precarious that I believe in whatever grace kept me from injury all the years I trapezed up and down them, young and drunk. We looked at the skyline of Manhattan, the outline of the Williamsburg bridge, and the sky streaked in pink and deep purple, an electric glow that faded as we talked. I had started thinking about leaving New York, about what life would be like elsewhere, anywhere, where money went farther and sirens were less present, where there were less throngs of people and more sky. But I never want to disappoint that young version of myself, with bleached hair and high expectations of the greatest city in the world, who moved to New York determined to call it home.
August, as a word, is defined as respected and impressive. There it is, my first New York, rising up around my family’s Subaru fifteen years ago as we entered the city and I pressed my face to the window in the backseat. New York will always impress me, and always have my beloved respect.
But what’s more honorable than leaning into the wonder of what comes next?
xo,
c
* It's Peach Month!!! Here is my most favorite peach cobbler recipe ever, ever, ever (scroll down for recipe).
* Frank Ocean. Frank Ocean? Frank Ocean!?
* I recently went to a meeting for the New York chapter of SURJ: Showing Up for Racial Justice. It's a really impressive group, well organized, spirited and accessible. You should check out their national website and, if there's a chapter where you are, get involved. (The next New York City meeting is Thursday, August 25th - I'll be there!)
* There is a pop up Museum of Ice Cream this month [and it's sold out, but I'm gonna cross my fingers about the waitlist!]
* Gratuitous Jillian Holtzmann gif