5/4/2014

The New York version of me that I imagined firmly in command has not yet taken control.  There are traces of him, sure--the confident navigation of the subway system, for example.  It was certainly he who made small talk with the neighbor as she tended her garden.  “It’s coming together nicely,” he said.  But he isn’t in charge yet, that much is obvious.  The boy holding back tears as he texts his mother, holding in urine to avoid a 15 step walk to the bathroom (and the interaction with roommates it might entail,) to him I feel a stronger connection than to the confident stranger I was sure I’d become.

I think I am supposed to feel shame about this.  None of my fantasies of life in New York City featured watery eyes and heartfelt text messages to my mother.  Wiping tears from my cheeks, I caught wind of an impulse to castigate myself.  I imagined myself looking in the mirror and saying, in the steeliest and most resolute voice I could muster, “Get a hold of yourself,” or at least to imagine how proud I would be if I were feeling even the slightest bit steely or resolute.  

But while these masculine tropes do enter my mind, I am content to let them float away, because I am very aware that this is not a matter of personal flaws but of timing.  I have been here twenty four hours, it’s been twenty four hours since the months of preparing for seven weeks in New York City became day one of seven weeks in New York City.  The reason I feel the way I do is that twenty four hours is more than enough time to say goodbye but it isn’t anything but the very beginning of a hello.  My parents are gone, but my roommates are strangers.  I have packed up and left my house in East Lansing but the creaky floors of my new apartment don’t feel anything like home.  These skyscrapers are the most familiar images in the world to me, but they are not real the same way the obscure, sad skyline of downtown East Lansing is.  For all its size, in spite of its great reputation for haste, New York City has only slowly begun to fill the space in my heart that my life in Michigan so rapidly exited as I headed east.

It doesn’t take much to understand that it will.  There are flashes of that in the confident navigation of the subway and the small talk with neighbors.  Starting work tomorrow, with a new social center and a way to fill time will surely help it fill in my working definition of self.  Who knows--I may even come to resemble the New York me I’d imagined.  But I am dealing with very unstable forces here.  Wanderlust and homesickness are complementary and not opposite, just as longing to grow up and drowning in the goodness of boyhood are, but they can be knocked out of balance and that is just what picking up and driving across the country tends to do.  It is only with patience that they will come back into equilibrium.