A city is a palimpsest.

You know it and I know it.

It is a thing, like any of us, that gets written over, built upon, and reconstructed so that the original is just barely there, but there, behind it all.

Behind it all, I could see her, sitting there with Insomniac City in one hand and a journal splayed open beneath the other. The honey latte in front of her before it all got to be too sweet, too milky.

She’s sixteen and she should be within the walls of her high school, but she’s not. She’s here, and she’s me.

MY OLD WORLD

Between finishing these last weeks of college, writing for a magazine, and running this blog, I don’t really know what day it is. So the other morning when I actually had time to kill before a class, I took full advantage and rendezvoused with the city, like old times.

I parked in the same spot I always used to, rounded the same corner, and stepped inside of the fancy coffee shop that I practically lived at throughout high school. The one I wrote my college essays in. The one I sat reading in with the first boy who ever liked me, each of us with books open in our laps and a chocolate croissant on the table like we knew things.

We pretended to know things. We didn’t really know anything except the shape of each other’s hands and that we had never before met anyone that would read silently across the table from us, alone, but together.

It was the one that I spent Valentine’s Day at in the pouring rain, drinking coffee that was growing stronger and blacker as the years unfolded.

But mostly, it was the place that I tried to reach adulthood a little bit sooner in. I would hang out there with the hipsters and their laptops, making eyes at the barista with the edgy band shirts and black nail polish, trying the whole time to be anything but sixteen. I remember always feeling like an imposter, like an adult-wannabe. Everywhere I went, I loathed the adolescent exterior that made the world see me as naive and girlish when all I wanted to be was smart and serious.

CHANGING PERSPECTIVE

I forgot the pungency of that longing.

It has long since been overtaken by a longing to hold onto time, not wish it away. I forgot how deeply I had wished to be older. And then I stepped back onto that cracked concrete floor and saw the exposed brick, the hue of red that I used like a crayon to color in my dreams of New York that were just beginning to be born. I saw all of this and felt at once very old and very far from the place I was standing right in the middle of.

I realized that suddenly, I didn’t feel the need to prove anything. At some point I became a real adult and stopped feeling like an imposter everywhere I went. To step back inside of that coffee shop for the first time since that enigmatic point felt like visiting the memorial of my adolescence. I could see her, sitting there, dreaming up the life that I am living now.

I felt the need to go, to leave that world just as it was.

A CITY IS A PALIMPSEST

With a cup of coffee a hell of a lot stronger than that honey latte, I walked outside and strolled my old stomping grounds. I ducked in and out of old bookstores and lost count of how many places have since turned into other places. The barber shop now a sushi hotspot. The thrift store now a beauty salon. Doughnut popups and ice cream parlors, brunch venues and pancake bars.

Still standing was the place that I impulsively got my ear cartilage pierced one day in college, staring at framed credentials on the walls while smelling weed on the breath of the piercer as the needle punctured my flesh. A hip coffeeshop popped up right next to that smokey place, the new world leaning in and the old one just barely staking it’s ground. A few more years and it too will probably be gone, swallowed whole by a landscape that will not know me anymore.

COLSON WHITEHEAd’S BIG IDEAS

This erasure of what you knew and the memories that persist despite it reminds me of one of my favorite essays ever, by none other than Colson Whitehead. In his collection The Colossus of New York, lives an essay titled “City Limits”, where he explains what it feels like to watch your city, the one you know and love, get eaten up and digested into a world you barely recognize, a world that barely recognizes you.

He writes:

“Go back to your old haunts in your old neighborhoods and what do you find: they remain and have disappeared…You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer…Damage has been done to your city. You say, ”It happened overnight.” But of course it didn’t.”

“We can never make proper goodbyes. It was your last ride in a Checker cab, and you had no warning. It was the last time you were going to have Lake Tung Ting shrimp in that entirely suspect Chinese restaurant, and you had no idea. If you had known, perhaps you would have stepped behind the counter and shaken everyone’s hand, pulled out the disposable camera and issued posing instructions.

But you had no idea….At some point you were closer to the last time than you were to the first time, and you didn’t even know it. You didn’t know that each time you passed the threshold you were saying goodbye.”

“The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone. It saw you steeling yourself for the job interview, slowly walking home after the late date, tripping over nonexistent impediments on the sidewalk…It saw all that. Remembers too…All our old places are proof that we were here. One day the city we built will be gone, and when it goes, we go.”

“Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without Us.”

-Colson Whitehead, “City Limits”

OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH PLACE

I love these passages because they interrogate the thing, this one thing, that I have noticed stains art and writing across the board—place. We are, eternally and irrevocably, bound like molecules to places. Hometowns, new towns, dream towns, gone towns. I think, perhaps, because they stand as witnesses to our lives. To who we have been. If city blocks and sidewalks could talk.

It’s a relationship, the kind that gets into your bones and never quite find it’s way back out.

Now December, now closer than ever to moving to a new place, I am thinking all the more about that relationship. I am leaving one city for another. I have been seduced by dirty subway cars and street corners that whisper their history in your ear. Walking around those hometown streets the other day, noticing how different the felt, how different I felt, was like saying goodbye. It was coming to terms with that fact those blocks were the first ones I ever loved, but that we’re going to go on without each other now.

I will get on a plane and the piercing studio will turn into a vegan café. I will still have my piercing, but the rest will be gone. I’ll step out of JFK with the only one-way ticket I have ever bought and start a new relationship with a new skyline.

A new playground to skin my knees on.

Love, m.

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