You know you’re a New Yorker when you are away from the City and feel like you’re missing something.

I read this line years ago in Insomniac City, where Bill Hayes crawls through the nuances of what it feels like and what it means to love New York. An ode to broken, dirty, chaotic, and restless things, he says he knew he was in it for life with New York when he left and simply could not wait to get back.

For the six months that I have been living here, I have yet to leave. Why would I? I remember when I first moved here, someone told me that it is important to get away every four months. I hated that idea. That was a stupid idea. I did not want to be apart from the pulse of this place for one moment. But, I think I get it now. He didn’t mean, leave so that you don’t fall out of love with it. He meant, leave so that you realize how deeply in love with it you are.

I left the city for the first time this week. I took the train into Greenwich, Connecticut for a couple of days. Quiet, beautiful, idyllic Greenwich. I have dreamed of Connecticut homes forever, of living in a place with seasons and trees and charm. Sprawling lawns and grand dining room tables for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Monday and Tuesday. Sweating under palm trees as my dad strung Christmas lights between them, I dreamed of the East Coast. I dreamed of a place I had never been, yet one I could not help but feel that I was already connected to. It has always been, and is all the more so now that I am here, the part of this world that I have seen my whole life playing out in. It’s not just this city, it’s this coast.

THE QUIETNESS YOU FORGET

The first thing you notice when you leave the city is the silence.

The pure, unbroken, almost eerie quietness that you simply forget blankets so much of the world. Brooklyn is a song and I have been playing it for six months. Car horns, conversation, laughter. Birds, music, and something ineffable that simply permeates the sound waves wherever you go. It works it’s way into your bones. You become tethered, undeniably and inextricably. So tethered that when you step away from this god forsaken place for two days, you find that your nose misses the hot, metallic scent of the train. You feel, as Hayes wrote, that you are, invariably, missing out on something. Like a child sent to bed before the party is over, you cannot help but feel that life is happening, elsewhere, all of the time, without you.

And that, I realize, is what that guy was talking about who told me to leave every once in a while. Leave, so you can come back. Leave, so you can know how much bigger than you the world is, and how fervently you choose just one, tiny, corner of it, over and over and over again. I choose this city. At least, I choose it with all of the choice that you are given with a thing like that.

Which is really just to say, not much.

SPONTANEOUS PROSE, SPONTANEOUS LIFE

Speaking of saying things.

When I was in college, my professor taught us, or rather commanded us, to write spontaneously.

Anyone who knows anything about writing knows that you have to simply write. You cannot sit in front of the blank screen and watch the little line tap a dance out for you. It is actually how one goes mad.

To get to the heart of what you want to say, you have to exhaust all other options first. You have to bleed your brain out of all of the other stuff, until you arrive at something. Just write. Don’t let you pen leave the paper for ten minutes straight and see what happens. See what kinds of grand secrets and tales you can stain the page with when you are no longer concerned about perfectionism. You will say everything worth saying if you stop worrying about what that everything actually is.

The funny part about it, is that I always resist it. Every time, it is difficult to sit and actually write freely. I forget every time how good it feels and how well it works and how true and real everything that flows out of your fingers feels. Insane. Wild. A bit crazed or dull or dry or uninteresting, maybe. But authentic. Unfiltered. Unmodified. Keep typing. Fill the whole page with one word if you have to. It might lead you to another one. It has cracked you open in a way, made you reveal something of yourself that you otherwise would not have. I think that that is the whole point. That might be the point of anything you do ever. To do it well, but to do it authentically first.

I want my life and everything I do with it to authentically contain the rambling essence of me.

CHERYL STRAYED

I have been thinking a lot lately about one of the first books I loved in high school. Described as a “bible for how to live” by the teacher who handed it to us, Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things remains a part of me. My copy has been read and reread, highlighted, underlined, and dogeared for six years now. There are things within it, each time I revisit it, that meant nothing to me then and everything to me now. This is what I try to tell my students when they inform me that they already read the book I’m teaching. That’s okay. You will get something else out of it the second time. There are lines waiting for you that you will swear were not there the first time around. Rereading is still just reading. A book is a bowl of alphabet soup and the message is always shifting, swirling, daring you to make some kind of convoluted sense out of it.

When I read Strayed’s book now, what strikes me most, is how vividly I remember being sixteen, reading about this woman and her twenties, and feeling so far away from my own. She would describe apartments, waitressing jobs, dating, figuring out whether she wanted to shave under her arms or not. She represented the free-spirited, smart, independent, and funny person that I wanted to become. She was so cool.

It is strange and surreal to then come across that book at twenty-two, the age she was in parts of it, and to realize that at some point, I stopped reading about other people’s twenties, and started living my own. Always without realizing, your visions shift. They remain perpetually just out in front of you. You forget that where you are, the life you are living, was once of those far out visions not too long ago.

REALLY TINY, VERY BEAUTIFUL THINGS

I also just love the title. Tiny Beautiful Things. As in, really tiny, very beautiful things. The small, mundane, perfect moments of life. Eating sushi, crosslegged on the floor. Washing dishes. Seeing how delicately lime green tree leaves dance in the July breeze as you highlight your notes. And sitting on a train, feeling torn between two places, each of which feels like home.

My chest ached for one as it simultaneously yearned for the other. I watched Connecticut turn into New York from the window of a train and felt a profound sense of belonging wash over me. I saw the stupidly gorgeous buildings, the fire escapes, the street art, and felt myself being lit on fire by this world I fell in love with. I am so lucky to love something this much. I walked in a daze through Grand Central Station and smiled as my feet hit the filthy steps, carrying me down into the subway station. Someone was playing music because of course they were. Trains screeched down the tracks. People were sweaty and loud and spatially unaware and I couldn’t have loved anything more. The hot, metallic scent of New York filled my lungs as I careened through the underground, metropolitan tunnels.

I must love you a stupid amount, New York.

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