Packing Up New York

A spiral into a not-so-distant past life of mine.

*Author’s note: This was originally written in early 2021*

Waking up recently is all too painfully familiar. The light creeps out from my blinds and shines painfully in my eyes until I am forced to reckon with another coming day.

My geriatric Siamese cat is where he always lies, on top of my hand-me-down comforter, but nestled in a space between my legs forcing me to sleep in a sprawling starfished position every night. I pry the crusted sleep from the inner corners of my face, the only physical proof of dreams dying to escape, and sit up rolling my head from side to side. It’s hard for me to be alone.

I unplug my phone, the last tether to my old life, and check Twitter. It’s the first social thing I do lately, a concrete part of my routine. With every mindless fingered scroll I am immersed back into the conversation of my peers and friends, but watching them this way feels dirty, so fraudulent, and artificial. I try to remind myself that nobody is really seeing their people now, but the sentiment only goes so far. When all of this is over, when the sight of a stranger’s nose and lips no longer incites panic, when we can grocery shop without clorox wiping down every box, when the world learns to love again, they will all be back in New York and I will still be here. 

I keep thinking about why this move feels so different, so painful. The defining image of my childhood is a simple one: me, at various ages, packing my things up into a moving box.

As the years go on, the boxes shrink and I grow. I’m at my most natural state with a packing tape-dispenser in my hand and a sharpie in the other, scribbling my last name. There’s a distinct sound that happens when you write with a sharpie on cardboard, it perks up the ears and as soon as I start writing it, I instantly wish for it to stop. I’ve survived cuts from rogue cardboard edges and the accidental stepping of loose thumbtacks left on the floor from when I had to pull my posters off the walls of yet another bedroom. I’ve survived falling boxes and slipping on pieces of discarded bubble-wrap meant to protect the fragile things. 

I’ve lived in all kinds of houses in all kinds of places dotted along the West Coast. My family has lived in anything from tiny apartments to five-story homes. We’ve moved during the summer, when the sweat from loading up the car or moving van sticks to your spine and hangs in your socks. We’ve moved in the wintertime when that same sweat freezes the hair on the back of your neck. And again, in the fall when the leaves sweep their way into the back of the truck, and every box you unload comes out with a foliaged friend. The spring is the loneliest time to move; it always means the middle of the school year with “fresh beginnings” thrown in your face like wisps of a dandelion.

We’ve made big moves, to different towns, or bigger still, to different states. Other times we’ve moved just across the street, waving goodbye to our old home from our new front lawn.  I think what hurts the most about this move, my most recent one, is that I had to do it on my own, and in the process of doing so, I left behind the dream that kept me going through all my other relocations. Some things don’t fit in boxes, no matter how hard you try. I couldn’t wrap up my New York life and bring it with me to Bellingham, but if I could here’s what I would bring.

 If I could pack up my old life, I would line this magic ever-expanding box with the sparkling sleet that was forever crunched up on the edges of the campus sidewalk every winter. In that sleet was the pureness of snow, so fleeting, so kind, mixed directly with the city grime, those collegiate footsteps tracking lust and deceit. Sleet is grey and melty and lasts long after the initial beauty of a blizzardy Bronxville evening. When classes resume, the sleet remains. The sleet must be the foundation of what I take with me in my new life because to forget it would be to lose the strength of the little things, the ugly ones, and to forget those would be the greatest crime: misremeberance. 

    On top of all that slushy sleet, I would bring the exploding kickback awkwardness of rich liberal art student parties. People posturing as poorer than their true means, educating themselves in struggle, cosplaying as the working class, all together in one dormed roof. The real fun happened off campus though, we all knew that. 

My old peers, the ones who didn’t share my scholarshipped path, the ones who actually paid Sarah Lawrence tuition in full, were amazing actors. They complained with the rest of us about exorbitant coffee prices during the week and yet still took Ubers into manhattan every coming weekend because life outside of college for them was all glamour and bottle serviced glitter with their strappy high heels stabbing the hearts of strappy high-society men. 

I know this because I occasioned myself as a spy on some of these outings, borrowing my friend’s dresses, and sipping from the same underaged champagne flutes they did while we waited backstage at concerts, or cuddled up together in the VIP section of a club that a DJ flirting with one of us would bring us all to. 

New York taught me how to party. It taught me how to navigate the subways home when your friends leave you behind. It taught me that some people will never take no for an answer, keep pushing, always pushing, always taking what they can from you. Above all, New York taught me loneliness, something that I took along to Bellingham with me without any semblance of choice.  

I would gently wrap the naivety of my young womanhood, this flagrant cry for help, this girl doing what she could to fit in and nestle her in my moving box. I would place her patiently among the sleet, bundled up so she wouldn’t freeze. If I didn’t bring my mistakes here with me, the ghosts of Nikos past, then I would be doomed to repeat them again someday. And this time I wouldn’t have the protection of my silly spoiled rotten friends, the girls I miss so dearly. 

Filling that box up further still, I would bring the tinfoil wrapped breakfast: bagel-egg sandwiches always hot and ready from the corner bodegas. 

I would bring the empty glass whiskey bottles that my friends and I made a point of emptying with such a ferocity that strangers would wonder what we were running so recklessly from. 

I would bring the early morning kisses from my various blunders.

A boy who told me once: your lips taste like a song and then proceeded to play Stevie Wonder covers for me on his guitar.

 A boy who tried to control my spirit. 

A boy who I cannot write about without the guise of fiction, my last thin layer of protection from a love so cruel. 

A girl who shared my birthday, my love of bleaching hair, and my innate desire to be heard. We spent two years pretending not to be in love, but would always find each other at parties, our respective dates still holding our hands, and embrace each other in a drunken friendly kiss. She’d always chime aloud for whoever was there to bear witness:

I would never like Niko like that. We kiss for fun.

But that was never true. And even though it hurt every time she said it, we would still shake it off the next morning and study with our legs entangled on the carpeted library floors, our bodies buzzing from excessive caffeine trying to replace the alcohol from last night’s escapades. We’d share salted bagels and laugh at muddled recollections of the evenings before, her telling me of all the suitors she found so lukewarm, so tired. When I think of our time together, I am left feeling overwhelmingly dehydrated and comforted. I miss my best friend every day. 

I am not sure if that is something I can bear myself to bring with me to Bellingham. My twisted heart left beating on the dormitory floor. I think I would bring the kisses of my lovers, but never their love declarations nor my own. I think I will leave that all behind to freeze, to detach from their perceptions of me, to at least give myself the chance to start anew. It’s true what they all say. I am as transparent as I am needy. I’ve always hated being alone, but perhaps this time loneliness is good for me.

I’d bring my folded metro card that lived in my pocket constantly begging me for refilled funds. My copies of classic literature novels that I’d read for class on the train during my long commutes from class to work to class again. Anything and everything to remind me of the person I was when I went to the city alone. The girl who learned to walk fast. The girl with an internship at a magazine she grew up reading, who once was able to survey the city from the 22nd floor of the Hearst media building. Did they know 22 was my lucky number? I liked to pretend so. 

(The author on the last day of her internship. Despite appearances, this was quite a miserable venture.)

I used to feel so claustrophobic on the subways. I was nothing but a tiny speck of dust dancing across the ballroom floor of Grand Central Station. The gum underneath a stranger’s recently-polished shoe. I remember having to count myself down from panic on more than a few occasions when there would simply be too many people near me with bandaged elbows in my face, stepping onto my feet, placing their chilled hands over my own as we all grasped the subway pole rocketing us to the next pocket of frenzied life the city had to offer.

Nostalgia for claustrophobia? That’s not something I could’ve ever predicted for myself, and yet it rings true. From sensory overload to social deprivation in the course of a year is something that still hurts my brain to think about for too long. I’d bring this new knowledge of myself. Perhaps when this is all over I will no longer be the shy girl I paint myself out to be on our old social canvases. I’ll seek out touch and talk from strangers.

I would seal this box up with the same packing tape I sealed every other worn-down box from my life, hitch into some imaginary moving van, and pray the breakables come home to me without too much damage.

I put my phone down this morning. Twitter will still be there when I need her, feigning that endless chatter I crave. Right now, I try to sit back and appreciate the solicitude, my own personal slice of silence.

I dream a lot recently about standing back in those busy streets and just letting the populace envelop me. For once, this idea isn’t nightmarish, but comforting. I aspire to be a part of the crowds to come. It’s enough to keep me going.