Howdy.

Life feels foreign and unreal these days.

The sweet, sticky air carries no trace of the icy winter I met this city in. There are fifty shades of green outside my bedroom window, flowers fall under my feet where snow used to crunch, and I too feel different.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

I was in a meeting the other day when someone brought up Nelson Mandela’s quote:

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

I think about that all the time. You form a special kind of bond with the places where you live. They have witnessed you. They have seen you in the quietest and loudest moments of your life. Colson Whitehead explained it so beautifully when he wrote:

“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 you wince when the single frigid drop fell from the air-conditioner 12 stories up and zapped you. It saw the bewilderment on your face as you stepped out of the stolen matinee, incredulous that there was still daylight after such a long movie. It saw you half-running up the street after you got the keys to your first apartment. It saw all that. Remembers too.”

– Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York

For twenty-one years California witnessed me. And now, there is so much that it is not seeing.

The more life I live here in New York, the more new things I try and experiences I have and people I meet and food I eat and books I read—the more different I feel. It’s like thinking of an old friend and all the things you would have to share with them if you met again, all of the pages of each other’s lives that have been written since you last said goodbye.

Another line came up in that meeting—because yes I managed to find a job where poetry and quotes are shared in staff meetings—from The Wallflower’s song, “One Headlight” that reads: Man, I ain’t changed, but I know I ain’t the same. Now, two things.

One, that happens to the song I listened to all the time when I first got my driver’s license in California, the one I would blast with all the windows down as I drove to school, the beach, football games and bonfires. It was the year before everything changed. The final year of innocence before the world began to spin and I swapped my grunge playlists for Bon Iver. Lunch table gossip for Tim O’Brien books and solitude.

I haven’t listened to that song since. So when I heard that line, the one I knew like the back of my hand long before it held the meaning it does now, it was one of those moments. The kind that make you remember who you were before you started to become who you are now.

Two, it’s the perfect contradiction. We change and we stay the same. You are not who you were, but who you were is invariably a part of who you are. Tongue twisters of the human condition. It was a good meeting.

WHAT I’VE BEEN UP TO

So what meeting you might ask.

I have been working full-time as a teacher for the summer (hence the suspension of Wednesday posts) with a company that focuses on books. I teach various classes ranging from kindergarten through high school, helping foster and develop a love for reading. My family jokes that I haven’t been out of school for a year and I have already managed to find my way back into a classroom, doing the very thing I love and miss the most—talking about books. Everyone I work with is the same kind of nerd that I am, hence the poems and lyrics that come up in staff meetings. It’s been an insanely revelatory experience, but that’s another post.

As for now, I’ve been walking to wine bars and drinking chilled rosé under string lights. Dreaming of going back to school. Strolling the breezy streets of Brooklyn, stopping every now and then when the light falls a certain way on the concrete and I swear it feels just like home. Falling in love with summer storms. Dating. Never dating again. Dating again. Watching Game of Thrones. Completely nerding out over Game of Thrones. Listening to playlists with titles like “Classical Gothic” as I wait for fall. Mastering the art of curry. The usual.

Oh, and reading.

Currently: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara and Hua Hsu’s memoir, Stay True.

Which is really to say, if you see a girl lugging an 800 page novel around New York with a look of resigned desolation in her eyes, it’s just me, emerging from a long train ride with A Little Life. Stay tuned for some book reviews.

Happy Sunday.

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