Apple

Okay, here is my essay I wrote for my non-fiction creative writing class. It's been workshopped and all that stuff.

It's long..ish...so beware.

Tomorrow, back to my regularly scheduled programming:


Hardscrabble

We had gone around in circles he and I; off and on, on and off. I loved him. I knew that much, even in the off times. He held a mythical place in my love-starved heart for years. He was the last man I had loved, and those are the ones that stick in your head. He was who I thought of right before bed, who I wished was with me on countless New Years’ Eves. So when he came to visit me in Chicago from New York City, where he had moved five years earlier, I was surprised, but not shocked. And when he told me he loved me, had always loved me, I was shocked, but not surprised.

We were in my living room on a mattress I had pulled off the futon frame. We were tired and made a big show of lying down for a minute. Our faces were close together, pulling in the other’s breath. I gazed at his face, his brown eyes, his funny round glasses and his lips that turned up at the corners in a perpetual smile. When I gave in and kissed him, I knew it, I knew I was going to live with him in New York City.

It was very romantic, him coming to get me. It was the story we could tell our children, how he couldn’t stop thinking of me, how I’d stayed in his heart all those years, how he had the courage to fly halfway across the country to demand the heart of the woman he loved. It sang to my ego, I enjoyed being that woman, a woman deserving of all that passion. Whether I loved him fully wasn’t the question at the time, the question was, could I do it? Could I get up and leave everything that I knew? I already knew the answer; I had no other potential prospects, creatively, romantically or professionally. I thought he was what I wanted, and I went for it, giving myself a pat on the back for being so open and a second pat for being the type of woman that inspired a love like that.

I started making long distance calls from the lobby of my office. Most of the time they were gushy love calls, but one time, we got in a fight,
“I don’t know if this is going to work“ he said. I started to cry.
“What do you mean you don’t know if this is going to work? I’m moving to New York in a few weeks and I would prefer to move there with no doubts. I know I don’t have any doubts“ I assured him, “I love you”
A sigh, “I love you too”.
Even then there was a tickle in my brain I didn’t scratch, an inkling that something was wrong. I was speaking the words, playing the part, reassuring my own heart while reassuring his and I convinced myself it was true. I loved him, even in his train engineer overalls and Harry Potter glasses.

I separated from my life in Chicago with endless dinners and going away parties. He came out to fly back to New York with me. I bought a one way ticket, something I’ve never done before. When we were leaving I took the obligatory long last look around my apartment. I was sad, really sad, but I looked at him, and he looked so handsome. And sometimes life was difficult, nothing comes easy right?

On the flight, as we pulled away from the earth, from home, from the only city I’ve ever truly loved before or since, it hit me … hard, “I’m doing the wrong thing”. I sat crying in the seat, my head turned towards the window so he couldn’t see me, watching the lights from the city get farther and farther away. Knowing in my heart this was the city I called home. And not just the friends or the life I left, but the actual city. I loved it. I loved the shape of it, the style of it, the strength of it, and the quiet hecticness of it. I was going to miss it.

When we arrived in New York City, I tried to have an open heart. My mother had grown up in Manhattan, spending her girlhood racing from Broadway intermission to Broadway intermission. She ran the streets with her best friends, getting egg creams and talking about dreamy boys. She loved Manhattan as I had loved Chicago, and I figured that due to my upbringing, New York was in my blood. Once I learned my way around, I was going to be one of those New York Jehovahs, bragging about living in the center of the universe and wondering how other people could live anywhere else. So I re-focused my brain, wiped my tears and stood up straight, ready to fall in love with a man and a city with all the passion I could muster.

When he took me around to show me “his city”, my resolve crumbled quickly. I found New York to be unmanageable from the start. It’s amazing the city runs at all considering its size. But living in New York is a chore, like a second job. Take the subway for example; it stinks, horribly, like burnt rubber and beer. The brakes screech so loud eardrums pop daily. I’m guessing they didn’t know about escalators when they built the subway, because there aren’t any, anywhere. The stations descend layers and layers below the earth. The only way up is to climb, for hours, to the hot, dirty city above, never knowing if it’s smarter to stay down in the beer and rubber, or to emerge from the depths to air that shimmers in the heat and the smell of people and sadness and emotion. One day, on a sitcom-hellish job search, I wore boots with heels. It was a ridiculous thing to do knowing I was going into the city to look for a job. I walked for hours under worlds of concrete, trying to find my way out of the system, then trying to find my way back in.

I guess in Chicago when we learned how to build buildings that shot into the sky, we also learned how to build moving staircases that descended into the earth, how innovative we Midwesterners are; and how silent. Mornings on Chicago trains were so quiet; I could hear my own heart beating. There was always silence, so when it was broken by a rude cell phone talker, the rest of the subway riders would shoot dirty looks, we all wanted the same thing in the city that works, a quiet train ride in the morning.

In New York, the subway was loud all the time, not only the cars themselves but the people. At 7:30 in the morning there were just as many crazy people yelling as there were at midnight, and I wondered, couldn’t the city that never sleeps just take a nap for once?

Since Chicago is a newer city--Chicago was incorporated 150 years after New York--it’s laid out better than Manhattan. Chicago has diagonal streets, easing traffic. It has a grid system, making it simple to find addresses; and it has alleys, beautiful, beautiful alleys. There are no alleys in New York, so the garbage gets put out front on the sidewalk. Sometimes, cat-size rats get into the garbage and it ends up strewn across crowded streets. When it rains, the water can’t go down the sewer because the sewers are stopped up with lost trash. And just for fun sometime, ask a New Yorker how to find a particular address and they’ll give you a mathematical formula that you have to write down just to remember it.

There’s no “alone time” in New York. People are everywhere and around you at all times. There is no such thing as walking down the street by yourself, or going to the movies by yourself. You’re constantly waiting for whatever it is you want, lunch, groceries … peace. There have been more times than not, when I’m riding my bike down Chicago’s neighborhood streets, and I can ride in the middle of the street for blocks, not a car in sight. Riding a bicycle in New York City is a death wish, a dangerous cab and mouse game that takes all the fun out of riding bikes.

I did try to be happy, for him, and for me. I wanted this to work out, we both did. We worked hard to suppress our disappointment with each other. He loved New York, and as much as I was trying to hide it, my agitation was palpable. He would take me to restaurants I didn’t want to go to, and would try to fix my life for me, while I was busy spilling water glasses on fresh table linens.

“I’m just having a hard time, that’s all; moving to a new city is really hard, I’m not sure I realized how difficult this was going to be”.
He would look exasperated at my ability to find frustration in every situation. “I just don’t think you’re trying very hard”.
“I am trying” I would say, “I just need you to recognize how hard this is for me, you already have your whole life here, your friends and your art, I have nothing”, here’s where the water glass would usually get spilled as I struggled not to cry.
“Yes it’s hard okay? Nothing is easy, just change your thinking”.
Yes, okay, I’ll just change my thinking, and I did, I started to think maybe I didn’t love him after all.

I tried to make friends. I figured his friends could be my friends. In Chicago I hung out with comedians, improvisers, people who did bits. Comedy in Chicago is a bunch of young white boys in baseball caps and jeans, nerdy and sweet, the girls raunchy and hilarious, but still very mainstream, very big shouldered. In New York, his friends were “art stars”. They have fake names or fake body parts or both; Rev Jen had elfin ears. Purple Organ had huge dreadlocks and did a show with a penis pump. Faceboy, well he was just bald, but an art star none the less. But it was Jennifer Blowdryer’s name that inspired my friend Dori and me to change our names years later, she was Dori Taxicab, I was Margaret Sidewalk. I felt plain in my regular clothes, my jeans and sneakers, preferring to go by my first and last name. His friends were fine, they were perfectly nice; they didn’t dislike me or like me either way. They just had no interest in me at all.

I tried to make my own friends, auditioning for various improv groups that never accepted me. I went out with work people sometimes, but I sat disconnected, defending my title as world‘s saddest wallflower.

I found a job I liked, but it didn’t help much. I would still walk out of the office every night, furious at the city, at the bazillion people on the train, how they pushed and pulled. Once as I walked to the subway, someone punched me in the arm. Seriously, a stranger punched me in the arm, hard. But when I whipped around, to see what kind of person would punch an unknown, there were a billion faces, each one looking like they could easily punch a stranger.

Eventually my sadness and his confusion became too much for us to handle. He didn’t understand why I couldn’t love the city like he did, and I couldn’t understand how he could love it at all. It wasn’t about the two of us anymore, it was now about the four of us, he and Lady New York and me and my true love, Chicago.

We broke up after six months. One morning I woke up and told him it was over, just like that. It was one of those revelatory moments; I woke up, looked out the window and knew it was finished. I couldn’t stay and he couldn’t go, and we couldn’t stay with each other.

I spent another few months in the city trying to make it work on my own. I redoubled my efforts to meet new friends and new men. I rode my bike out to Coney Island, taking my life in my hands to try to find strength in sandy cigarette butts and lonely old men. But each morning remained a struggle, a struggle to get on the train, a struggle to get to work, a struggle to get lunch and a struggle to get home.

It wasn’t a hard decision to leave when it came right down to it. There were no big going away parties and dinners, just a series of awkward good-byes and people telling me I was scared and that‘s why I was going home. I had tortured myself a lot with that thought, that I should stay because going home seemed like the easy way out; it was going backwards. If I were truly strong and courageous, I would stay, and make it; if I were just self-reliant enough, strong enough, smart enough, resilient enough, I would find my happiness. But I realized that torturing myself to stay wasn’t strength; that forcing myself to live in a city that wore me down wasn’t self-reliance, and that refusing to consider my options wasn’t intelligence. I knew I didn’t want to live in the center of the world, I didn’t want to be famous and I didn’t want to die in a tragic bicycle accident. When I finally decided what I did want, and saw myself clearly for the first time in months, I did the bravest thing I’ve ever done in my whole life … I came home.