Night Moves

I want to tell you about how it's different, but I don't know how to explain the difference, when so much of everything is still so entirely the same. I don't have the vocabulary yet, for this new strangeness.

At night, I walk by myself, twenty-nine blocks back to my hotel. I love walking at night, I love cities at night, the bigger the buildings the better I feel. So many faces looking out of so many windows all day, but night comes and they're empty. The same person will look out a window for years, then leave, and some other face will be there. The window: 'Who cares?'

I stop at dive bars, in tourist areas: places full of people escaping the crowds they've been dragged into by loved ones. People likely to understand your desire to be left the hell alone.

I wonder what I will hang on to, and what I will leave behind.

Yesterday: "How great would the city be without all these people?" and I chided, because that's my role sometimes, but in truth -- yes.

I would walk forever. It is dark and I don't want to talk. I could walk through Central Park for hours, lamps lighting water, moon shadows making alien formations from rocky outcroppings. But I can't, I know, I shudder to think of the Post-Apocalyptic possibilities of the park at night. Even if they told me it was safe. Nothing can ever be entirely empty.

Twenty-nine blocks, back to the hotel; at the end I walk along Fifth Avenue, hugging the park, coveting the shadows of those lamps across the ponds. It looks dangerous like a fairy tale. I've always liked fairy tales the best.

Carts wait for passengers. The smell of horses will always remind me of childhood, and I walk as close to the edge of the curb as I can, trying to get in the way of their breath. Everything is dark, and shiny, and the sidewalks are crowded, and people are together, and alone.

On Commitment, Or: Why Thresholds are Kind of My Jam

Today was a bit of a ride. My birthday dresses were delivered by UPS in theory, but not in practice. Missing packages! I worked myself up into a bit of a tizzy. By the time I acknowledged there was nothing I could do right then, I was later than usual, and I had to take a cab. Wisconsin was a dead zone, and it started to rain, the kind that doesn't quite validate your umbrella. I was grouchy all over. But then I had this amazing cab driver - he knew all this history about the Circles in DC. He told me Dupont has eleven traffic lights. I opened the window a smidge and let the water sprinkle in. It was cooling things down. Later that afternoon I lost my wallet, but someone called me to give it back before I even noticed it was gone. I had to stay late at work, but a friend texted to tell me they'd taken Baylor on a walk, and dropped a present off at my house. And even that was bittersweet - that friend is moving away this weekend. 

Last night, he had a goodbye happy hour in Georgetown. I came from work, recovering-from-frazzled - I was far less sweaty-looking than I'd feared. We talked about his move, and then he asked me "So how much longer are you staying here?" It was a smirk, but a fair one. I've been talking about leaving since I got here. 

I left Boston because I panicked. That's literally all there is to it. My friends lives were changing in all these profound, mature ways, and I suddenly felt light years from everyone, pitched overboard in outerspace, watching their rocketship tail lights speed away. I'd wave, floating, in the dark. 

DC was close enough, people I loved lived there. I ran right to the edge and jumped: It was time to go, and now. Boston was All Wrong. Once you find the first reason to leave, a hundred others line up right behind it. 

How long after I got here before I decided it was time to find another place? This one wasn't perfect enough, either? Two months? Four? This happens to me a lot. 

I've always been more comfortable with one foot out the door.  I am never in a job, a class, a house, a city, a party before I start looking for the next new to jump into. I love knowing that I'm going somewhere, that whatever's next, I can't even imagine yet. I like being in control of my own surprises. 

That's the romantic take on it, anyway. There's other ways to analyze the situation: I cannot handle commitment. In the face of so many choices (what we might call 'life') I freeze. I am afraid of making the wrong decision. I'm afraid of making the right decision, and have it not feel like enough. In an earthquake, they tell you to stand in a doorway. Sometimes I feel like I've lived my life under a doorframe, I have never trusted the earth not to open up and swallow me whole. 

Except...life just happens to you anyway. The threshold is not a safety net, that framing will not protect you. And that's a good thing.

I know that those last few months were filled with fear, and dread, and anxiety. Burning everything to the ground and starting from ash is not without it's discomforts. But what I really remember are the last weeks in East Somerville, those enchanted nights before spring rolls over for summer, sitting out on the stoop with cheap booze, staying up too late making each other laugh, watching cop car lights flash across Broadway, playing rock-paper-scissors in our socks for no prize at all. 

I remember summer in Quincy, every night on the back porch with the dogs, walking home from someone's house down the middle of an empty street, night bugs humming, feeling more like 16 than I maybe ever had - that sense that the world is giant, but can wrap itself so small around you, that there are a million ways to be protected. 

I was saying goodbye to people I loved more than anything, and I know I cried, and took long walks by myself through places I'd want to remember: Goodbye Beacon Hill, Goodbye Bay Village, Goodbye Fort Point, goodbye to all of these spaces, these buildings that had never failed to calm me down, that had always been there when I needed them. 

I was so sad, but that's not the place I go to first. I go to Maine, the beach at night, us all deciding that the sky looked like velvet shot through with stars. I go to the Common, on Friday evening, a little circle of us spread out on sweaters and suitcoats, buzzed after Sweetwater, watching the sun go down behind the Hancock Building, the sky turning purple, then indigo. 

Was it because I was leaving, because I was already straddling the threshold...did I appreciate it more? These memories come easy, a tide of love I can feel in my chest. Because I've had one foot out the door on DC for so long, will I remember it like that, too? The nights on stoops, up too late with too much wine, talking about boys and playing with lighters. Blackout parties, (legitimate!) happy hours, the sweet strangeness of living in a neighborhood, a place where I stop and talk to people I know on the street, the oddity of living in a place I feel safe walking the dog late at night. 

This is not to justify my fear of commitment. I recognize there is tremendous value in regularity, responsibility, attachment. Maybe this is just to say: there's a silver lining to everything. Even structurally compromised door frames.