I’m moving to New York.

I received a text early this morning informing me that my application has been approved for my dream apartment in Brooklyn.

It took six years of dreaming, two years of apartment browsing, a month and a half of actual apartment hunting, several terrible experiences, one mental breakdown, and a hell of a lot of paperwork, but I can finally say that I am actually, really, imminently, moving to New York.

When I realized this, the world spun around me. The sixteen year old girl who used to read Patti Smith and Bill Hayes and dream of the day that she too would move to New York began to cry.

WHEN PIPE DREAMS TRANSPIRE

The girl who wrote this years and years ago in the flickering lamplight of her adolescence:

I am going to be an English major because I cannot imagine myself being anything else. I am going to intern at a magazine in NYC. Then I will, if not there already living there, move to a brownstone apartment in New York. I will read and write all of the time. I will wear funky outfits everyday and walk to work and ride the train while listening to jazz. I am going to work so hard for these things. I think they are my things.

I haven’t read these words in years. I forgot I ever wrote them. So when I stumbled across them today of all days, I got chills. I had a teacher that year who was big on manifesting. She made us write down the very specifics of our dreams, paying close attention to detail so as to inscribe the most potency possible. I suppose that is what I was doing here. I wrote these pipe dreams down and then shut my journal and went to chemistry class, carrying them around like secrets that felt far too sparkly to tell anyone about.

Then today, I find them, and I get chills. Chills because I just finished my English degree. Chills because I am interning at a magazine in New York City. Chills because this morning I I got approved for that brownstone apartment that I wrote down all those years ago. Chills because I am actually going. Chills because I have worked so hard. Chills because at some point, without ever realizing, my wildest pipe dreams merged into the realm of reality. Except, really, they never were pipe dreams to me. They were just how things were going to go. They were pipe dreams to every one I told them about. Unrealistic, cliché fantasies of a naive dreamer who would surely grow out of them.

Surely, I did not. Surely, I only needed to grow into them. They are not so awkward and baggy anymore.

I can barely tell you what that feels like.

SAYING GOODBYE

I am sitting at the coffee shop now, the one I have come to since those early days of dreaming, telling the barista who practically witnessed the whole thing unfold that he won’t be seeing me here every week anymore, punching my dreams into my keyboard for hours on end. He smiled. I smiled. People overheard and also began to smile, volunteering their own love stories of New York. Someone lived in Chelsea and still remembers the electricity that flooded the underground concerts he used to go to in his twenties.

Then I sat down at the table that I wrote most of my essays for high school, college, and now this blog at, and began to tell the ending of what has been a very long, very sweet, love song with California. A song sung by the voices of every person I have been throughout my life. The little girl, the embarrassingly strange tween, the angsty teenager, the nerdy, love-struck college kid, and now, somehow, the twenty-something that each has added up to be.

I look around and see the the apparitions of my own life dancing all around me. Except they aren’t haunting me anymore. They are no longer living, breathing reminders of everything that has ever happened to me. They are still now, resting in peace, idyllically frozen for safekeeping. They are six feet under gravestones that mark the spaces that I am paying my respects to before I go.

APPARITIONS

I start here.

To my left is the concrete structure that I sat on with untied shoe laces and a crumbling pastry at sixteen, telling some boy I loved about god knows what for hours on end as the sun went down. He used to tell me that he would come to New York with me and bring bagels over in the morning as we read the art section of the paper. I would roll my eyes, knowing damn well I wasn’t taking anyone with me.

Just one table over is the seat I sat in a few years later as my then boyfriend asked me to go to Cabo with him and I twirled my hair and looked into the blue of the sky, searching for a feeling that I knew would never come. Then, through the walls of glass, if you squint, you can just make out me, newly licensed, driving alone for the first time to what used to be my favorite place in the world. The place I would come alone to test out the independence that I was just beginning wrap my hands around. Here. Right here.

This was my world. My whole world.

It’s not anymore. It is growing, like a belly pregnant with dreams that I can feel kicking my ribs with violent volition, telling me it’s time enough to go.

!!!

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