Sometimes, when I hear the airplanes flying overhead, ushering people towards or away from this city, I am reminded of home. That other home. The one that used to own the word entirely, before it became so multifaceted.

Joan Didion wrote that we keep notebooks as a means of keeping in touch with the people we used to be.

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

[…]

It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.”

I can open one of mine and converse with the nineteen-year-old working at that restaurant in college, measuring her days in brunch shifts and how many guests she could make cry by telling them the wait time for a table.

I can ask her what that world was like and what it meant to her. If I ever forget what the hot air of the kitchen smelled like on a Sunday morning or how certain I was that I would never love anyone more than the quick-witted bartender with the stupid forearm tattoos, she has laid it all out for me in painstaking detail. Every moment, every feeling, all of which turned out to be far more temporary than she would have believed.

Or, I can open another and hear about the woes of fourth grade and how diabolical I found it for a teacher to make anyone read Where the Red Fern Grows, let alone nine-year-olds, who, I must say, with the end of childhood approaching and all, really didn’t need the baggage.

That I went on to read more books, let alone get a degree in them, was really an unlikely fate, come to think of it.

I can spend another hour immersed in the world of a sixteen-year-old in history class, dreaming up very concrete plans to move to New York one day and not take a single thing with her. Doodles of fire escapes and city skylines and art galleries tattoo those pages.

I like her. She knew nothing and everything. She wanted the whole world before she even got a taste. She was just like me.

Lately, more than ever, I am feeling the distance between these past lives and the one I currently inhabit. Time is always disappearing, taking the outgrown versions of ourselves with it. I just joked with my boyfriend that it’s all I ever write about, but it’s also all that is ever always true.

I was essentially one thing, one type of person, for a very long time. My identity consisted of being a writer, wanting to move to New York, and wearing dresses over jeans with a series of questionable hats from the early 2000s. It was a persona that orbited solitude, the state I lived that first part of my life largely suspended within.

Since moving to New York, many of these things have shifted, if not changed entirely into something else. They say that happens.

A quiet shift, something that occurred while I wasn’t looking. I’m less intent on being remarkable now, less interested in the performance of difference. I still write—incessantly—though it feels less like identity and more like instinct—something I do to document and keep in touch with the past. Something I can’t not do.

I’m not always alone off reading anymore. I make soup when it rains. I go for long walks and roast kobocha squash while jazz plays, and I get very excited about all of it. I laugh more than I cry. I even have fun.

All of which, I have come to find out, makes for quite atrocious writing, but much better living.