I moved to New York last week. There were ten thousand reasons I wouldn’t. I whinged for eons beforehand: What about the cost and the rats and the guns? What about the American healthcare system? What about— I struggle now to remember all the excuses I had. I was convinced I wanted to buy a rambling house in rural Cornwall with a fireplace mantel covered in giant seashells and three to five feral children and a natural source of fresh running water, for when the apocalypse came. I wanted to make heaping pots of rice and beans and serve scoops out with a wooden ladle while the crickets cricket-ed in the garden and our distant neighbors waved over the lettuce patch, and I was convinced — hand on heart CERTAIN — that to avoid this path was to court ruin. I was obsessed with getting a mortgage and terrified that I wouldn’t: I felt this clarion call to procreate and finance and re-finance, to possess what was around and in me, to pull together my 20s with a neat and tidy narrative turn: the restless girl becomes a grounded woman. The wandering American lives happily ever after in England. The ingenue grows up.
But I got dragged here, kicking and screaming, really. I weeped incessantly and threw fits. Even when our flat was all packed up I still wouldn’t believe it. Jonathan perservered, somehow firm. How, I can’t say: If the tables were turned I’d have taken the free pass and run with it, not hauled ass to get my chaotic wife and our shared possessions safely into their respective containers and on or over the sea. My London friends were generous and encouraging and kind. The day before we flew, C. met me for breakfast and told me about a bike crash she’d had, how she’d remembered to go limp as she fell, remembered not to resist or brace for impact, so she wound up with only bruises, no breaks. I thought about this the whole morning after. As we walked around our neighborhood in the cool July morning air. As the barista at Tutti’s comped my last Americano and told me how he’d like to come to America sometime, too, when the borders open. As I walked the rooms of our flat one last time, touching each wall, shutting each door. As we sat in the taxi on the way to Heathrow and the light was fucking perfect and the cabbie took a detour that wound up all along the Thames — saving time in traffic, sure, but really just unintentionally giving us the Grand Farewell, the Look-At-This-City-You’re-Leaving-You-Idiots, the There-Was-Something-Special-Here-That-You-Missed. Everything was pale yellow and dark, lush greens and the Thames looked mercuric, a word that isn’t used to describe appearances really, but that’s how it looked anyway. All through the airport and the airplane and the rise and the coast and the descent, that’s what I thought of: my body and mind limp and loose and yielding. No resistance, no control.
It was kind of nice. Meditative. I was enacting a plan I’d set seven years prior, trusting the instincts of my twenty-two-year-old self against my present derangement. I was doing something I have literally never done before: Just going with it. Even with my instincts—or were they fears? faulty programming? how do you know?—screaming, I went. I arrived. I’m here.
Well. You’d have expected some sort of epiphany, right? We saw the skyline as we drew near: like a little model village—oh, there’s the Statue of Liberty, how cute!—and then suddenly its scale came into view. I thought that would be the moment. The Big Authentic New York Moment, when my heart would leap into my throat and my sense of purpose would flash before my eyes, or whatever.
But no, I didn’t feel that, as the wheels touched down. I felt a touch of relief, a wave of exhaustion. Mostly I felt an atmospheric change.
And then we made it through customs, yada yada, and into the taxi and into Manhattan and onto our block and—don’t get me wrong, I saw the beauty. How could you not? New York is the most beautiful city in the world. You never think so when you’re away—at least, all I could think of from the outside were its shortcomings and flaws—but once you’re there, which is to say HERE, it’s very obvious. Anyway, the point is this: I saw the beauty but it didn’t make my heart soar or fall. I saw the beauty but the lightning moment never came—the sword hovered. We entered our apartment and the light danced through the trees outside our window onto the hardwood floor and I waited and waited for the moment when I’d either bawl for London or sing for New York and instead: I felt—I feel—steady and fine and calm. An anti-epiphany. An extended denouement of an essay.
I moved to New York expecting a symphony or its converse and instead I feel so completely fine. It’s almost eerie, as though I’ve just stepped seamlessly across from one universe to the next. I feel like there’s a gulf between my brain as it was two weeks ago and as it is now, but not because of some grand realization. I just can’t imagine wanting what she—what I—wanted. I can’t imagine fearing what I feared.
I have never experienced anything like this!!!! Have you? This dissolution of all resistance? This unexpected stillness after so much self-induced torment and drama and faux-certainty-of-doom? This absence of mappable narrative structure!?!
Though I guess New York has always had this effect on me, to an extent. It calms my tornado brain. It externalizes my anxiety, my neuroses, my distraction. Like how when you’re trying to balance during yoga, it helps to have a focal point; like how a mantra empties your brain. The chaos and the filth and the rats and the steam, the urgency and the arrogance and the humility and the noise—my mind rests. I’d say that I can hear my voice, amidst all of that, but it really doesn’t feel like hearing anything at all: no big message, no break. No bruise, just fall.
RECOMMENDATIONS!
“Its taste is whipped cream and kidney, beer bittered and honey, he makes it for the girl in leathers with the face like the Virgin Mary.” “I’m very drawn to thinking about how people can be saved from the logical extension of trauma — death, essentially.” “Londoners being very ungrateful about their shitty dirt mound.” <3 “All the signs were there, it wasn’t the end of my world.” “I remember thinking in italics. Is this when it happens? And then I answered myself. That’s up to you.”
I love that you read this. Thank you. I know I said I wouldn’t write tooooo much about The Move; I’m going to keep that promise, soon. See you next week <3