Day 43: Let's Get Emo

I have been thinking a lot in the last few days why I made the decision to move, seemingly abruptly.
When I was younger, I often fantasized about living elsewhere. When I was school-age, I wanted to go back to New York, or to boarding school, and then applied for early admission to American University (I would have started school just shy of my 17th birthday, and graduated just shy of my 20th) did not get in, thank God). In college, I spent a summer obsessed with transferring to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. When graduation came near, moving to DC was again the dream. After the campaign, in November of 2002, I took the easy and cheap way to do things and returned to NYC. I stopped thinking about leaving. While I felt New York wasn't for me, I accepted it as my fate. My mother lived there and suggested I find a passionate reason to love the city. My passion became my people. Most of my friends of college moved there and were having the time of their lives. Within 6 months, I had a boyfriend who didn't want to leave there and when that ended I quickly had another one. The fates had spoken.

I didn't really start seriously thinking about relocating until a very old friend of mine died very suddenly in July 2011. We were teenage best friends and had lived in the same city, three different ones, for 21 years  (give or take a couple months here and there for summer vacations and when my dad got sick). She moved to New York a couple months after I came home and living here changed us both so dramatically that in the last few years, we grew violently apart despite having once known every inch of each others' minds. Most of our fights were about that, and how having a person who knows you like that tied to you wasn't good for our individual growth. In hindsight, none of that made any sense and that that should be a comfort as you get older.

When she passed away, we had not spoken in about 18 months and I had never met her almost a year old baby.

When news spread through the high school-forged networks of Facebook, my message alert was constantly set off by people wishing to express their shock and sympathy for my "loss", as they had no idea of our estrangement. Some of the notes were creepy and intrusive, but most were heartfelt and comforting. It didn't make sense to go into all that had happened between us, so I accepted their sentiments. I had lost my teenage best friend and that was the relationship they thought of when they thought of us-- and every time someone made a mention about how inseparable we were, I lost it. I still do.

I did not go to the funeral, partially because of a scheduling error but mostly because it wasn't my way to grieve this complicated and important relationship that was the base of my adolescence and young adulthood. Two other very close friends took strong offense to my opting out and exiled themselves from my life, cutting off my last remaining cables to that world. A week later, I came to visit New Orleans for the first time.

I moved here 368 days later.

But you know what isn't depressing, finding perfectly aligned street signs in this town

I have been insanely homesick the last couple of days. Like, "call a friend and complain that I have made a horrible life decision" homesick. This was not abated by my viewing of "Gimme the Loot", the story of teenage best friends on a quest to bomb the Homerun Apple at Shea Stadium ("I ain't calling it after some bank"). It was shot all over the Lower East Side, Queens and the Bronx, and if I was still working there, I would make it required viewing for all my staff.

I still don't feel like I live here, rather I'm on an extended vacation. Sometimes, I actually start thinking about the things I'm going to do when I get "home":

• How early am I going to have to get to Mulhollands for a seat outside for the Knicks vs. Nets season opener?
• What is the plan for Cohort 4A graduation?
• Now that it's cold, do I ride my bike to work more or less?
• Hot Pot? Hot Pot? HOT POT!

But there's no turning back now.  At 31, I'm going through what those friends went through at 22 and what I probably should have done if I had the strength and start-up funds. So I suffer through the culture shock, the insecurity about the state of my romantic, social, and career life, because at some points in your life, starting over is the healthy thing to do.