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10.20.2003a really long time ago, at a place with a girl i do not even recognize today, i was leaving. I knew i was going and i walked around with it written all over my body and my brain and my actions and with the path that i cut through the world. no one wanted to talk about it except this man that i barely knew. he lived down stairs and had a life that broke my heart because i wanted it. he and his wife were our age, but they had a three year old son and a jack russell terrier and he stayed home and took care of their son and wrote. She went to work and came home to a hopping puppy and a happy baby and a husband who, it seemed to me was perfectly adept at balancing himself, and i don't mean that sort of false show that lots of men do these days because they are told that they should be able to be graceful at being a stay at home dad and maybe they will do it for a little while because they have been laid off and that is what there is to do but after awhile it becomes emasculating and they start to act out, but would never say that they can not stand that their wife is in control of their finances, because that would mean defeat in the face of everything that they learned in their women's studies class at Brown, he loved it and he was successful at it. They, as a couple, thrived in it. he would ask me, but no one else that we knew for 5 and 8 and 10 years, could ask such a question out loud. They were too scared because they knew the answer already but hearing it out loud was more than they could bear. "are you guys alright?" i stood there, in front of the building that housed the place that was supposed to define who we were and broke down and told him everything. his answer? "you have to get over the myth of yourselves" in 10 seconds my entire life came into focus. I have never experienced anything so vivid in my, now 33 years, as i did that moment. it was one of the most influential things anyone has every said to me and colors almost every major decision i have ever made since then. i use it now when i am really torn. as i am now. because i am in love with NYC and the way new yorkers move around their landscape. it is not something that people outside can understand, or even notice. We all look like we move too fast and we are ungraceful and uncouth and all of the "un's" that people who do not live in a place like this can come up with. there is this amazing ballet to walking in this city. the way that people cross through and around each other on street corners. you know the new yorkers from the tourists by the smooth movement through the grid/path made by the others crossing you. there is no hesitation from a new yorker. they just move. they know how fast the other people are moving and how fast they have to move in order not to have to touch the people as they pass. The physics of walking. its not magic. its the simple fact that we walk more than other city dwellers do. there is no city in this country with as much everyday pedestrian traffic as NY. We learned it from doing. there is the conversations about the finer points of the subway system and the friendly disputes over what trains run over what tracks and whether the "W" is faster than the "Q" and whether the "L" or the "F" has prettier people on it. (for the record my anwers are the "Q" and the "F", but my "F" has qualifiers) no other city uses mass transit in the way that we do. it is a part of almost everyone's everyday life. so i love nyc with a heart that is bursting to experience the feeling of living somewhere else. somewhere more than 50 miles from where i grew up but petrified of leaving. what am i without NYC? what am i without the unchoreographed plaid created on every corner of every part of this city. what am i with out knowing that in February of 2004, there will be no more "W" train and the "Q" will go back to being orange and will no longer speed me back to park slope like it does every day now for the past 2 (3?) years. i am slain with the idea of not being here because if not here, it doesn't really matter what city i live in. they are all the same as far as i can tell. St Louis, Minneapolis, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco...Atlanta. None of them are NYC and since they are not, they have equal footing. some places have more strong pulls, the most obvious being Atlanta and the second most obvious being Miami (especially since one of my sisters called me on saturday to tell me that in her desperation to get me to move to miami and have babies, she is having another one for me) so i am constantly faced with the idea that i have to get over the myth of me and nyc. and how much of the romance do i lose when i look at it, in its face and say do i NEED to be here. Do i need NYC to breathe? do i need it to thrive? is my snobbery so thick that i can not even conceive of raising children anywhere other than in Park Slope? That i never had thoughts of children anywhere other than some little Montessori school in Cobble Hill. so now i have to separate the myth from the desire and decide. that seems less hard than some other things that i have done, so why is this taking up so much space? .: posted by landry 9:35 AM
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