In twenty-two days I will be in another city entirely but right now I am typing this on my lap, on my street corner in London, which happens to be an exceptional cheese shop, which happens to also be a restaurant, where you can order things like ‘risotto of girolles’ and 'tondini bean broth’ and ‘too much wine.’ It was meant to rain today but instead the weather is continental and smug: a perfect elongated bare-armed dusk where all you can do is throw your hands up and accept the recommendation from your friend, the waiter, to order the oysters, there’s no alternative, Jenn-eefair, order them, the last nine Maldon oysters, I’ve set them aside Jenn-eefair, you must.
This isn’t a food blog—food newsletter—though how nice would that be. I just like to eat because it’s a required way of remaining in contact with the physical world. Also I have committed to spending all of my residual income on this street, my street, the street I’ve lived on for three years, the street I can’t believe I’m leaving. A street you set Google alerts for, just to catch the listings. God, I finally had a stroke of luck. Why, and how, and what, exactly, am I leaving?
This feeling is new to me, after twenty-nine years of never feeling it. The feeling of not wanting to go anywhere at all. The feeling of just wanting to stay.
I’m sure, for many of you, well-adjusted individuals you surely are, this idea — that one could go nearly three decades without ever wanting to stay just where you are — is pitiful, dysfunctional, dramatic. Maybe a few of you can empathize, though. Maybe a few of you have also spent thirty calendars not knowing what it feels like to look at your surroundings and not have a tiny part of your brain whisper, But wouldn’t Belize be nice?
Or maybe it’s not Belize. Maybe it’s Denmark! Or Patagonia. Colorado. The nicer city. The bigger town. Whatever’s vague and romantic and possible.
I know. I know that tied up in the desire to be elsewhere is the desire to be someone else. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing! All of my forward momentum, all of my desire to Leave And Go Somewhere has stemmed from a belief in my own ability to progress: the genuine conviction that, under the right conditions, I really will become that person, whoever she is, the vague and beautiful ideal towards which I am oriented, or at least inelegantly gesturing at, knocking over someone’s water glass.
So to want to stay isn’t, as it should be, and as I pretend it is, a feeling of settled-ness. I tell everyone, “It’s because London now feels like home!” but I know that’s not really it. Clinging to this little kilometer of England isn’t about happiness or contentedness or any of that. It isn’t even about these oysters, delicious though they may be.
It’s about the part of me that’s realized a change in scenery isn’t going to do much at all.
On the other continent I will write as much as I write now—which is to say, not enough.
I will continue to forget to eat breakfast. I will continue to drink four cups of coffee and zero glasses of water and then find myself at three in the afternoon wondering why I feel like the ceiling is falling in.
I will continue to refresh my notifications too often and I will continue to not know what to do with my hair. I will continue to be moody and earnest and worried and soft. I will continue to sleep poorly. I will continue to mostly get away with it.
The good stuff, too, will stay, but it feels silly to list it out. My ability to roast a really good chicken. The way my dog rests his head on my hip, when I can’t sleep.
The bottom line here is that I’m just going to keep being myself. Moving to the city I left prematurely—the city to which I’ve spent six years brattily demanding to be returned—won’t turn me into the person I dreamed I would become. It’ll just be the part of the dream that a city can be. An element, not all four.
In one of my countless fits of self-induced torment over this upcoming move, one of my best friends and probably the sagest, A., said something I won’t forget. “What if I’ve outgrown this dream?” I typed in the group chat, but with typos and more chaotic punctuation.
“I didn’t know dreams were a thing you could outgrow,” A. wrote, always phrasing her smartest asides with the gentle pointedness of someone who lives in Paris (where she does, perfectly, happen to live).
I’ve been thinking about it ever since. On the one hand, thank god we outgrow dreams. From the ages of 4 to 7 I told everyone that my dream was to be a hot-dog-vendor-slash-ballerina, because I loved ballet and I loved hot dogs. (I still do.) (It still sounds pretty good.)
I guess that’s what children do. When you ask them what they want to do with their time, they think of what they love the most, and then they come up with a way to do that as much as possible. Then we spend our adolescence and adulthood layering requirements and caveats on top of what we want. So I wanted to be a hot dog vendor slash ballerina and then I wanted to be a lawyer and then I wanted other things and I kept on wanting them. But over the past year, I guess, a part of me stopped believing they’d come. Because come on. A writer in New York? It’s outdated! It’s ridiculous! It’s not what you think it is! Like wanting to be an astronaut and not realizing it’s all about engineering requirements and not knowing if your head is going to explode and learning weird ways of peeing.
But do people actually stop wanting to be astronauts because of that?
Or do we just go on wanting it, stupidly, beneath our better, grounded judgment. Beneath the part of ourselves that says stay. Fuck. Is that part of me—of you—still there? The one that wants to dance and eat hot dogs and call it a career. The one that still wants to live in Manhattan. To blast off, bones shaking, and float minutely closer to the stars.
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A few recommendations! To make it all better!
‘Is routinely turning myself inside out for public consumption doing anyone else any good, or doing me any good? If the answer is no, why am I doing it?’ | ‘He was walking across the Saint-Sulpice plaza, talking on the phone. He squinted when he saw me, trying to make out who I was.’ | ‘How I finally put an end to it.’ | ‘We don’t even know if he could sing.’ | ‘To admit your surprising attachments, to trace your transformation over the course of a long (life) sentence, is sentience—that’s what I’ve learned.’ | ‘It’s impossible to really capture the smell of roses.’
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Thanks for reading! xx