Where I Live

My parents will not come to New York.  They won’t stroll with me through Central Park or join me at my favorite brunch place just a couple blocks from the Met.  They will not see me graduate with my MFA in the spring or see the office where I work on 38^th and Madison.  They will have gone six years without ever visiting any of the universities I attended.  They weren’t there when I was in the emergency room in Chicago or after I was raped or when I was sleeping in a bathroom in Paris because I couldn’t afford a room.  And in a way they are right when they say it is my fault.  I was too ambitious to ever truly run away from home so when I went to college, I went to Chicago, and they saw the three hour drive between their life in Wisconsin and me as the equivalent of the Atlantic Ocean that I would eventually intermittently put between us. 

But fault is the wrong word for the responsibility I take for being alone – or at least for being without a family.  Fault is the word I give them.  They gave me reasons.  I don’t think children run away from home because they hate their parents.  I think they run away because they hate what happened to them.  I hate what my parents did to me.  And that’s what I used to think I was running from.  I didn’t realize that time creates its own distance.  Nor did I realize that it is impossible to run from pain itself.  That’s why running became a pattern, a habit, and impulse.  The pain always found me whether I was in Chicago or London or Paris or Istanbul or New York City.  The pain of what had happened was always in me.  I couldn’t truly be anywhere because I didn’t want to be with myself.

In running from pain and from home, I came to feel homeless.  I had given up the only home I had ever had and I seemed incapable of making a new one for myself.  And I was ashamed of this, especially around the holidays, when everyone else around me was making plans to go home and to spend time with their family.  During that time of year, my stomach would be constantly sick with the question of where I would go and with whom and the possibility that I would have nowhere and no one.  I still have this question, this sick feeling in my stomach.  And this year I might have to face being entirely alone during the holidays for the first time.

However, I have realized that I do not need to go home to have one.  Though, I would not call it home.  I would call it the place where I am from.  Sitting at a bar in the East Village one night, I realized that where I am from is always with me.  The hard heat of the cracked, eroding pavement of my small Wisconsin town is in my words and tears alike.  I can experience by memory every season of the Midwest – every smell, every sound, and every quality of light.  And when I’m having trouble with a boyfriend or at work, I don’t walk on eggshells; I walk like a seven year old country girl barefoot on a gravel road: quick but careful, pained but with somewhere to go.  And when life comes at me with its fists raised, I stand and meets its gaze the way I met my mother’s– fire meeting fire – whenever she came at me with her open palm raised and ready to sear my cheek with its force, when her fingers dug into my flesh until I bled and my skin caked like mud beneath her fingernails.  And when I am in love, I put up my love like a good fight because I am from a place where you didn’t have anything unless you fought for it. 

The last place I ran to was New York City.  I had never been to New York, or anywhere else on the East Coast, until I landed at LaGuardia with two suitcases and the address of a graduate student dormitory.  Within days of arriving, I fell in love – though not with New York.  Through this particular turn of events, I found myself ushered into a social world of people who had been given more traditional love, support, and opportunities than I had ever experienced.  These people had families and they came from houses that they called homes and that they returned to for holidays.  And they had each other.  They had friends and inside jokes and shared happy histories – things that I had never stayed anywhere long enough to maintain since extricating myself from the place I was from six years earlier.  Witnessing their lives and feeling the contrast to my own brought all the pain I had been running from to the forefront of my daily life.  I was blindsided and I was blinded by the pain, so much so that there were days when all I could see was how much I hurt.  I couldn’t see that I had a man who loved me, a good education, new friends, and the very real possibility of things finally getting better.  Unfortunately, I had to learn the hard way that not only it is impossible to truly be anywhere until I want to be with myself, but it is also impossible to be with anyone.

However, I did eventually realize that I don’t want to be another example of the Woody Allen, Freudian, Groucho Max joke.  I want to be able to belong to a club that would accept someone like me as a member. 

I have now been in New York for fifteen months, which is the longest I have stayed anywhere in the past six years.  And I intend to remain.  Something began for me in New York.  It has its beginnings in romantic love but it goes beyond that.  In the beginning, I learned the routes of the subway by going to and from dates and I explored the Upper Eastside and the Upper Westside while someone held my hand.  And I can now differentiate the Williamsburg Bridge from the Brooklyn Bridge and the Queens Borough because I remember significant romantic moments that took place in view of each.  And now I have friends that I love and that make me feel like I have a family.  

In love and in New York, I began to learn what I want and what I have.  I want people I love, people I share a happy history and inside jokes with.  I want a favorite brunch place and a place to spend the holidays.  I learned the meaning of one of my favorite Joan Didion lines: You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.  And I learned that I have come from something and I am as proud of it as I am saddened by it.

And I have some things I did not have six years ago.  I have the ability to love and to choose to stop running away. It took me a while but I have finally gotten to a good place and I’m not going anywhere.  For the first time in my life, I have figured out how to live with myself.