Hello/Goodbye

I never wanted to live in New York.  The thought never even crossed my mind until I spent a beautiful fall week wandering the city streets (I don't think I made it above 14th street), marveling at the beautiful light that poured into my friend's Mulberry Street apartment, admiring the cute fall jackets everyone sported (no one wore jackets of any kind in San Diego).  Further seduced by friends who knew their way around and could tuck us into the perfect dark corner bar, procure the best slice of pizza I had ever had in my life or call me a car for a drive back to Manhattan (over the Williamsburg bridge, a ride I still find breathtaking).  I went home and made a promise to myself to return.  And return I did, only a few months later, as so many before and after me, dragging two huge suitcases and a seemingly endless amount of optimism and enthusiasm. 

To think there was a time when "midtown" was a foreign word!  And to think there are still parts of this city I have never explored.  I don't have the words, or perhaps I don't yet have the space to talk clearly about NY because any writing of it creates a container, and I haven't been able to configure one big enough to do it justice.  To give the wonderful people I have met here, some of whom I am lucky enough to call friends, their due.  I know that my departure feels strange for in many ways it is as if I am already gone.  Although NY has been my home base, for the past six months I have spent much of the time either out West or inhabiting a strange underworld of job hunting, working odd jobs and internships (kitchenships?) and in general not feeling very rooted to this city.  Lately, with nowhere in particular to be and no one pressing to see, I've had the luxury of time to wander the city.  Walking down the avenues at the end of the day when everyone else seems to be making their way home from work lugging grocery bags or on their way to the gym or out to dinner, I wonder how they do it.  How have they managed to make this city their home?  I can remember a time when it was my home, when I felt part of the rhythm, when I bought groceries and had dry cleaning and knew my place.  But I no longer know my place.  And to be adrift in this sea is no fun.  

I don't doubt that I will return, I just don't know when or in what capacity.  I know that the city will change, probably in the time it takes for me to reach Vermont.  And likewise NY has changed me.  In the meantime, I left a token in Central Park.  Like a coin tossed into Trevi Fountain or flowers into the waters off the coast of Maine, a promise to return.

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. ~Joan Didion, Goodbye To All That