We walk through the Lower East Side, under string lights and murals and flickering Chinese takeout signs.

Natty wine bars and art galleries and restaurants spill out into the streets. Utensils on plates, the murmur of conversation, the clink of glasses, it all seeps down the sidewalk like a low tide that we wade through.

Life is sloshing right under our feet.

WADING THROUGH THE WORLD

It is very New York to climb down the steep cellar stairs of an old grocery store and step into an underground room of live music. It is very New York to trip and fall down a rabbit hole and find yourself swimming through a life you are still just trying to wrap your hands all the way around. You hope you are never able to. You hope that greasy subway cars and hidden music venues and silly sidewalk restaurant tables are never not this beautiful.

It is moments like those, moments of falling in love with the world, with the honking taxis and loud talkers and glowing street murals, that everything I have ever wanted feels like it is slamming right into my chest. I think of my child self, my adolescent self, and how in awe of this life she would be. I think also of something I remember writing a while back.

In a post from early 2023, I wrote: I’ve been feeling so grateful for this magical time of running through the world by myself. These are the days that I can’t wait to tell someone all about one day. Because don’t get me wrong, I can’t wait to share my life with someone. Ask anyone. But not today. Please not today. I want more time. I need more time. I want to drink it all in.

I remember writing this. I was sitting at a coffee shop in downtown San Diego and my brother had just told me that he was moving in with his girlfriend. I was elated for them while also realizing that their lives were merging indefinitely. It made me realize how quickly that can happen, how suddenly and powerfully, and I wanted to press pause. A born hopeless romantic who dreamed of love incessantly, it was a rare moment of wanting to slow time for a second and fully enjoy my aloneness. It felt like a unique, fleeting, and important time of my life. One that was, despite all cynicism, invariably bound to change.

NOW WHAT

I crossed a street one hot day in July and my life changed. And now? Now I am writing lines that are so sappy I want to gag myself with them but I cannot help it.

I haven’t been posting because it is so insane and cheesy and embarrassing to admit that I am not as immune to the absolute horrors of falling in love as I thought I was. There was no warning, no question, no time to think. I was simply spinning through the world on my own one minute, and bumping right into him the very next. And how do you not write about a thing like that? How do you not read all the cheesy poetry and think, damnit. Damnit because it’s not so cheesy at all anymore and that wasn’t supposed to happen.

Like David Whyte’s poem, “The Truelove”, endorsed by Maria Popova on The Marginalian, where he writes:

"There is a faith in loving fiercely
the one who is rightfully yours,
especially if you have
waited years and especially
if part of you never believed
you could deserve this
loved and beckoning hand
held out to you this way.

...and I think of the story
of the storm and everyone
waking and seeing
the distant
yet familiar figure
far across the water
calling to them

and how we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly
so Biblically
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to love

so that when
we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and everything confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don’t
because finally
after all this struggle
and all these years
you simply don’t want to
any more
you’ve simply had enough
of drowning
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness
however fluid and however
dangerous to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours."

Stepping out of that plane back in frigid February and meeting New York felt like stepping out of that boat. All at once, after all those years, and all of that pain, I simply did not want to hurt anymore. I was tired of drowning, tired of Sylvia Plath and Elliot Smith and every terrible poem I ever etched into some banged up journal when I should have been drinking the sun. And then I came here. I met Brooklyn and Manhattan and really good music and books and art and then I met him. I met him and the world stood still.

The world stood still and all around me spun the images of my own life as it had been before. Hazy images of me and the world, as we were. Of me, sitting on the beach on the coast of California, digging my toes into the sand as sun glistened like diamonds on the surface of the only ocean I ever knew. Of me, reading books under all of those god forsaken palm trees for all of college, dreaming of a world I was doing everything I could to run right to. I was on my way. I was going. It was all happening so quickly, I just didn’t know it yet. I didn’t know any of this yet.

I love that about life. I love that it is a constant looking back at the self you used to be as you laugh at how little you knew and grieve, just for a moment, that you will never know that little ever again. The years fall through your hands like water and your perceptions of the world extrapolate indefinitely. There is no going back.

And thank god.

Thank god because life was so sweet then and I will love that world forever, but it absolutely pales in comparison to the one I know now.

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