my manhattan | sussing out a new home in the city

home, home, home, home, home

The very first thing I hung in my new apartment was the Dear Sugar poster. At the head of my bed. Just above where I lie my head each night.

“Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”

“Every last one of us can do better than give up.”

“The fuck is your life. Answer it. “

I moved from Brooklyn back into Manhattan. Into a tiny two bedroom apartment in a tangle of streets in the heart of Greenwich Village.

After so many apartments over so many years I worry about little more than light and noise. So on a breezy day in mid-April when Lauren and I walked up the one flight of stairs at the back of the building and into a tiny apartment with large windows and quite a lot of quiet we both knew it would do just fine.

And so a few weeks later, when my new space was little more than boxes and a bed, I pulled out a single nail and hung that Dear Sugar poster above my bed, knowing immediately, that it would live there alone.

I went back to Ms. Strayed’s book, Tiny Beautiful Things, a few days ago. I was in search of a very particular essay right at the start of the book.

“My mother’s last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love. “

How often I think of these words. And the clank of my very own iron bell: home, home, home, home, home.

Love by another name.

Time keeps hurtling forward—somersaulting over itself.

And because it does, and because we cannot change this, we must move, at the same time, in the direction of our choosing—into the thick woods of what has meaning for us. Which is very often a dark and treacherous and tangled place. Where roots grow sideways out of soil and it’s a steep and slippery slope to the waters below.

The notion of home clangs around in my body, banging me up a bit. Mostly because it’s an ever-moving target that resists my desperate efforts to wrangle it into stillness.

Home is not today what it was the day before, nor what it will be tomorrow.

And I am caught in the thick underbrush of discovery.

Which, is as it turns out, a prickly place to live.

But the soil here is thick and rich and awfully fertile.

When I moved across the East River I said I’d never move back—if I could help it, I wouldn’t move back.

But sometime, in the space of those two years, the clanging of home changed.

And suddenly home became shorter subway rides and lower rents and the awareness that this phase of my life is ephemeral at best. And so instead of trying to change that, I’d dive into it. Accept that the beauty was in the impermanence. And that perhaps moving back to Manhattan would be the beginning of a long and sweet goodbye.

And that, maybe, in order to move on, I’d first need to live here in a way I never before had. Which is to say, right in the middle of everything.

Brooklyn was so good to me. The backdrop to such a magical, and deeply personal time—belonging only to me. Already it feels half-imagined. I fear I maybe found it too soon.

But I’m quite sure I had to leap-frog to a phase of my life that saw me living so totally alone, and in a place so different than Manhattan, in order to return to where I am now: still quite young, still with a bit of fight, growing roots into the air.

Still searching for the meaning of home. Still reaching for the brass ring on the moving carousel.

Not where I thought I’d be. But where I am. Nonetheless.

Home, home, home, home, home. Love, love, love, love, love.

There’s a large windowsill just next to my bed. I’ve placed five small succulents there.

I’d move back to the city and I’d get plants--that was the deal I made with myself.

I had meant to get them way back when I lived in Washington Heights.

Was absolutely sure I’d get them upon moving to Brooklyn.

But somehow I never managed to.

Until now.

Ten tiny succulents in all.

Ten succulents, and me absolutely terrified I will kill each. and every. one. of. them.

Lauren has told me to stop touching them.

But I fuss. Because each one is helping, in its own small way, to answer the hanging question of home—and what it is now... and what it will be tomorrow.

When my father came to visit last weekend he asked where I would write. The apartment is small--there's not room enough for my desk. Currently I've tucked the pieces of it away beneath my bed.

Tom had asked the same question.

I don't know yet, was all I could think to say.

But here I am writing, cross-legged on my bed, looking up toward two frames with a split photo of a building in Paris.

Two photos I didn't take. Because I have yet to go to Paris.

But two photos as a window to what comes next, I like to think.

Which seems like the perfect place from which to write.

A view of home and love and its many iterations--both present and future.

I can’t wait to get to Paris.

And yet, I can. And that is now an immutable truth in my life.

Paris will wait.

For the right person. For the right time.

It too is a question in search of an answer.

And the thing is, I’m okay with the questions.  And I’m okay with the slow unfolding of answers.

I’m okay with waiting for something better—moving towards something better. For the refusal to accept anything less. And I won’t apologize for the trajectory of my life. For my many mistakes and missteps. For spending so much time in the thick woods of discovery.

Because home is the pulsing belief that there is still more to unearth. And love is the iron bell of my own heart.

And the gold ring is just an inch beyond my fingertips.

instagram

pinterest

twitter

on forgetting

 

I had nearly forgotten what it was  to feel beautiful. I knew when last it happened. It was a night early in December, looking at a man who months earlier when I saw for the first time I had but one thought, Well, fuck. Because he was handsome in that way that buckles the knees--that way that feels perpetually just-beyond-reach. No one should be that good looking. And I was dating a man who became less and less attractive each time we met. A man who in the following months would break up with me twice and then invite me to Paris only to leave me at the airport. A man who never wanted to see me naked. And I became so angry. Not with him. It wasn't really about him, he  just happened to be driving the story in a very particular way. It was that I didn’t walk away sooner. That I didn’t say no to Paris. That I didn’t say hey, you, not.good.enough.

I should have said it on so many occasions.

Because he was not good.enough.for.me.

I can’t quite forgive myself the experience of him.

Did he not think me beautiful, I would wonder. When really the question was, did he not think me worthy?

And frankly, who gives a fuck if some so-not-worth-it-guy thinks me worthy or not?

But these are the questions. And because worth is a really, really heavy question and really, really hard struggle—until of course it becomes the lightest, best thing in the world (but that takes time and I'm not there yet)—but because worth is at the heart of what-this-here-life-is-all-about and thus LARGE AND TERRIFTYING I ask instead about beauty.

Did he not think me beautiful?

Am I not beautiful?

And I began to answer that question outside of myself, searching the eyes of men everywhere—at work, on the subway, in restaurants, in past-lovers. I began to cobble together an image of what I looked like based entirely off of what I read in the eyes of mostly strangers.

Which. Let me be frank. Is a terrible, TERRIBLE idea.

Because it meant the image of myself was distorted and inverted and tenuous and totally turned-around because 1. what the hell do I know about what any man sees when he looks at me and 2. what the hell do I/should I care?

I always get a little riled up when people give me a hard time for writing about the fact that I think life is hard. Because, I do, I do think LIFE IS HARD (and what rock are they living under that they think it isn’t? or maybe they're just more skilled at it all; that's a very real possibility).

But I have never once said that I don’t think it’s worth it.

IT IS SO WORTH IT. And worth it precisely because it is so hard.

Which means you have to keep showing up. (and sometimes--very often, actually--I forget this).

You have to constantly rush headlong at the things that scare you most. Which means you have to take risk after ever-loving risk. And you have to remember that the reward is in the leap itself, not in what comes of it. Because when you take risks you add value to your life. Or when you ask for what you need and what you want—no matter how hard or painful OR TERRIFYING it may be—you learn about your worth, about your extraordinary value (damn if Tom isn’t always right).

It’s about movement. It’s about constant movement.

I had forgotten. I had really, really forgotten.

I had forgotten that I have the ability to forgive myself. I 've been so busy walking around with clouded eyes worrying about my value and beauty that I forgot that I get to forgive myself. For worrying about those things which are so not the point. For all those so-not-worth-it-guys. And for all those moments I’ve been so-not-worth-it myself. And I’d forgotten that I have a pair of polka-dotted pants that feel incredible to put on. Which is so stupid, I know. And yet, IT’S  NOT—it’s a thing. A REALLY, REALLY BIG THING. Because for more time than I care to admit I couldn’t bear to wear pants, couldn’t bear to exist in my own body. And now I can. And I do. And so yeah, I have a pair of polka-dotted pants that on a cool April night I wore out into this city that I don't often like, but occasionally do and how did I forget that? That it’s occasionally really okay. And I had forgotten that for the past few years now I have been lucky enough to live in a small studio apartment that, though way too expensive, is in a neighborhood that is almost entirely magic. Forgotten that, every night, someone in this city is making music. Good, sweet, redemptive music and that I have a body to feel it.

I think you have to live life really hard, but with great levity. You have to be okay with clomping around and making a bit of noise and doing it all totally gracelessly. And when you go down really hard you have to figure out how to get up lighter than you were before. Levity and will and strength. I’m not particularly good at any of this. I’m still working on it.

I will never know what I look like. Reading my image in other people’s face, or in the mirror, or reflected back by a camera, I will never actually see what other people see when they look at me. Which is something my mind has a hard time sitting with it. Until I back up a bit and recognize that it’s part of a divine humor and yes, actually, it is a bit funny.

I felt really beautiful riding the train to work the other day. And then I thought, well, that really doesn’t matter does it? And not in a fatalist way, but in that way that’s like well, I lost six years of my life to an eating disorder and enough of that--it really doesn’t matter. And then I thought about it a bit more and I thought, well actually, yes, it does matter. But it matters because I feel valuable.

When I feel beautiful, I feel valuable. How's that for a simple, pretty perfect equation?

Worth is the point. Always, always, always. And maybe I’m supposed to be better at all this by now, but I’m still learning and I’m okay with that.

I am really, really, REALLY okay with that. In this moment, at least. Tomorrow, who knows...

photos by Jason Baker

what i'm listening to | james vincent mcmorrow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74gVg-NZE1c

i can't stop listening to this one.

the wrong room.

image

I haven't stopped thinking about this since I came across it last week.

Sam was in town this past weekend and she's the sort of smart that's makes me want to play--her vocabulary, her zingers--it all feels like a really fun, really satisfying game.

I'm in the right room when I'm with her.

When I told her this, she said--in typical Sam fashion--I'm glad that we're in this room together. 

The thing about getting older is that things get clearer. Wants and needs and priorities and the engines in our chests solidify. But giving voice to these things isn't always easy--the thing may be clear, but how to explain it, not.

And so there's something about this notion of the wrong room that feels so spot on. Like, yeah, I want to be in the room with that person there. That person, not so much.

And it is clear in a way that doesn't make apologies.

It's a really comforting, actually, as I build my life, thinking about who I want to share that proverbial room with.